Canada is the only G7 country without a national school food program. Advocates say it's time

Morning snack time is underway at St. Roch Catholic School in Toronto, where kids line up in orderly fashion, approaching a bin on the teacher's desk. They grab small bags of Cheerios, juicy oranges and tubes of flavoured yogurt and sit back down at their desks to munch away. 

It's an important ritual for the young students — they say the small, free meal helps them get through their day.

"If you don't get a snack, sometimes you may get hungry or your stomach may hurt. So it's good that you get a snack," said Danna Rinten, a Grade 5 student.

Other students said that a snack helped them keep up with their schoolwork and their activities or gave them nutrients if they had to leave the house without breakfast.

Behind the scenes, volunteers are working hard to organize the mid-morning meal. It's just one of many community-run school food programs in Canada that operate in the absence of a national program — one that advocates say is sorely needed.

"It's heartbreaking when sometimes the kids come in and they say 'Miss Polo, I'm hungry.' Like, 'I don't have a snack for the whole day,'" said Janet Polo, a nutrition co-ordinator at St. Roch who oversees the meal program. 

St. Roch's program has three streams of funding: donations from parents, contributions from the Toronto Catholic District School Board's charity The Angel Foundation and a grant from the President's Choice Children's Charity.

Annually, the Angel Foundation receives $4.3 million from Toronto Public Health, $2.1 million from Ontario's Ministry of Children, Community and Social Services and $2.7 million from fundraising and other donations. They fund about 12 million meals every year, their executive director John Yan told CBC News.

But organizers are finding it's getting harder to stretch that money out, especially in designing a nutritious menu that keeps allergies and other dietary restrictions in mind.

"I have to see [who] gives me the bagel cheaper than the other companies so I can order more," Polo said, noting that not only have prices gone up, the quality of the food has reduced, too.

Canada is the only country in the G7 that doesn't have a national school food program or national standards, according to the Breakfast Club of Canada. That means that while every province has different needs, there isn't an aligned approach to feeding students across the assortment of existing programs.

Researchers say that as high inflation affects food prices, more children need access to these programs — but community groups say they need stable funding from the federal government to keep everyone fed.

According to Statistics Canada, one in four Canadian kids experience what's called "food insecurity" — when a person can't access a quality diet or enough food, or aren't certain that they can. Meanwhile, 33 per cent of food bank users in Canada are children, according to Food Banks Canada.

A study by researchers in Canada, Chile, Australia, the U.K. and Mexico, published last year and based on 2019 data, examined school meal programs in countries around the world — including Canada, which it noted relies on community organizations and local programs to provide free and subsidized meals to kids.