Indonesia’s President Prabowo has sacked the head of his free school meals programme following a spate of poisonings that have left children vomiting in classrooms. The news arrives with a familiar whiff of decay—not just of spoiled food, but of administrative incompetence dressed as philanthropy. And yet, British food safety regulators are said to be ‘watching’.
Watching what, precisely? The slow collapse of yet another well-intentioned state scheme? Or perhaps the spectacle of a muscle-bound strongman dispensing with bureaucratic niceties while Western regulators wring their hands over kale quotas?
Let us be frank: the free meals programme was a classic example of Victorian-era noblesse oblige without the noblesse. Indonesian children, like their British counterparts, are being fed by the state not out of generosity but out of a desperate need to manufacture human capital. And when the food poisons the very bodies it was meant to nurture, we see the logical endpoint of a society that has replaced family, community and personal responsibility with the cold machinery of government.
The British regulators, I suspect, are not merely watching Jakarta. They are watching their own reflection in a murky puddle. For every free school meal dished out in London, there is a risk of similar contamination, similar bureaucratic finger-pointing, similar headlines.
The difference is that Indonesia’s president has the spine to fire a minister. Britain’s regulators? They will issue a report.
They will adjust a temperature standard. And they will call it progress. This is the intellectual decadence of our age: the belief that systems, not men, are the solution.
The Fall of Rome began with free bread and circuses. The collapse of the West will begin with free school meals—and the regulators who watch but never act.
