Government-sponsored school lunch programs have garnered attention from activists and policymakers for their potential to promote public health, sustainable diets, and food sovereignty. However, across country contexts, these programs often fall far short of their transformative potential. It is vital, then, to identify policies and organizing strategies that enable school lunch programs to be redesigned at the national scale. In this article, we use document analysis of historical newspapers and government data to examine the motivating factors and underlying conditions that allowed South Korea’s universal free, eco-friendly (UFEF) school lunch program to become a tool for advancing social justice and ecological goals at the national scale. We analyze the socio-historical evolution and current status of the Korean school lunch program, combining the multi-level perspective with insights from environmental sociology and critical food studies, in order to shed light on the factors that enabled the program to become an innovative niche and articulate the opportunities and challenges it now faces. We identify the state-sponsored creation of what we call “precautionary infrastructure” as a key anchoring mechanism between the school food niche and agri-food regime. Precautionary infrastructure includes new supply chains, certification standards, and sourcing policies that provide a stable market for eco-friendly farms and small-scale producers, while minimizing the environmental health risks of school lunch by delivering organic and pesticide-free ingredients to on-site kitchens that serve free lunches to all students. This analysis offers insight into how public school-lunch programs can become protected niches that help drive sustainability transitions within agri-food systems.

中文翻译：

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农业食品系统的可持续性转变：来自韩国普遍免费、环保的学校午餐计划的见解

政府资助的学校午餐计划因其在促进公共卫生、可持续饮食和食物主权方面的潜力而引起了活动家和政策制定者的关注。然而，在不同国家的背景下，这些项目往往远未达到其变革潜力。因此，确定能够在全国范围内重新设计学校午餐计划的政策和组织策略至关重要。在本文中，我们使用历史报纸和政府数据的文件分析来研究促使韩国普遍免费、环保 (UFEF) 学校午餐计划成为促进社会正义和生态目标的工具的动机和潜在条件。全国规模。我们分析了韩国学校午餐计划的社会历史演变和现状，将多层次视角与环境社会学和批判性食品研究的见解相结合，以阐明使该计划成为创新利基的因素，并阐明其现在面临的机遇和挑战。我们将国家资助的“预防性基础设施”确定为学校食品利基和农业食品制度之间的关键锚定机制。预防性基础设施包括新的供应链、认证标准和采购政策，为环保农场和小规模生产者提供稳定的市场，同时通过向现场提供有机和无农药成分来最大限度地减少学校午餐的环境健康风险为所有学生提供免费午餐的厨房。