Free school meals made more than 1,700 people sick in a single week

A food taster at a senior high school in Lasem, Central Java, noticed on Wednesday that some of the grilled chicken was slimy. Those pieces were set aside. The rest was served. By the afternoon the principal, Juhartutik, was sending students home with diarrhoea and vomiting, 752 of them, along with 25 teachers. The kitchen cooked the chicken at 3am and the students ate it at noon, she said.

Lasem was not the only case that week. The South China Morning Post reports that 950 more people fell ill in three other places over the same seven days, taking the week's total past 1,700. A member of the parliamentary commission that oversees health put the running count at about 50,000 people made ill by the programme, and said the problem is a failure of the system rather than a run of bad kitchens.

President Prabowo Subianto launched the free meals scheme last year to feed tens of millions of children, at a cost of billions of dollars. It has already been through corruption allegations, changes of leadership at the nutrition agency, and earlier waves of mass poisoning. What the Lasem account adds is the plain mechanics of how it fails: food cooked in the middle of the night by a contracted kitchen, moved to a school, and eaten nine hours later in tropical heat, with one person tasting it as the last check. A taster can catch slimy chicken, but not bacteria.

Why it matters

If your child eats these meals, the risk is not spread evenly across the day. It sits in the hours between the kitchen and the classroom, so ask your school what time the food is cooked and when it arrives, because that gap is the part parents can see and complain about. For the government, the count is now high enough that shortening delivery times matters more than opening new kitchens, and each outbreak makes the programme an easier target when the budget is argued over again.