I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.

So I called my local school district, because that seemed like the sort of practical thing a reasonably civic-minded adult might do. I had no particular plan beyond basic verification. The woman who answered sounded simultaneously surprised and unsurprised that someone would call about this, if that makes sense. Yes, lunch debt was real, she told me. Yes, it affected children in our district. Yes, it was about $88,000 just for elementary schools, just in my district. And then, almost as an afterthought, she mentioned that Bluffdale Elementary — a school I had no personal connection to — had about $835 in outstanding lunch debt.

$835.

The figure hit me like one of those rare moments of absolute clarity, utterly devoid of irony or ambiguity. Eight hundred and thirty-five dollars was the cost of preventing dozens of children from experiencing that moment of public shame I couldn’t stop imagining. It was less than some monthly car payments. It was approximately what I had spent the previous month on DoorDash and impulse Amazon purchases. The grotesque disproportion between the trivial financial sum and the profound human consequence felt like a cosmic accounting error.

“Can I just… pay that?” I asked, half expecting to be told about some bureaucratic impossibility.

“Um, sure,” she said. “Let me transfer you.”

[…]I called another district. Then another. I started a spreadsheet, which is what middle-class professionals do when faced with systemic problems — we quantify things, as if converting human suffering into Excel cells might render it more manageable. I learned that some elementary schools had thousands in debt. I learned that, contrary to popular belief, most school lunch debt doesn’t come from low-income families — those kids generally qualify for federal free lunch programs. It comes from working families who hover just above the eligibility threshold, or from families who qualify but don’t complete the paperwork for various reasons, ranging from language barriers to pride to bureaucratic overwhelm.

I began to realize that the problem is both smaller and larger than I had initially understood. It’s smaller in that the per-school amounts were often relatively modest. It’s larger in that the entire structure of how we feed children at school is a tangle of federal programs, income thresholds, paperwork requirements, and local policies — all of which seemed designed to maximize shame and minimize actual nutrition.

The Utah Lunch Debt Relief Foundation began not with a mission statement or a business plan, but with a post I shared on social media asking people if they would be willing to chip in, along with the receipt I had been given for Bluffdale Elementary’s debt. Within a week, I’d raised $6,000. Within a month, $10,000. The mechanics were almost embarrassingly simple: I would call a school, verify their lunch debt amount, write a check, drop it off, repeat. People seemed to find the concrete nature of it satisfying — this specific school, these specific kids, this specific problem solved.

One particularly sleepless night, I found myself spiraling into what I’ve come to think of as “the advocacy paradox”: If I succeed completely in paying off all lunch debt, will that remove the urgency required to change the system that creates the debt in the first place? But if I don’t pay it off, actual children — not abstractions, but specific kids with specific names who like specific dinosaurs and struggle with specific math problems — will continue to experience real shame and real hunger tomorrow. The perfect threatens to become the enemy of the good, but the good threatens to become the enemy of the fundamental.

I don’t have clean resolutions to these contradictions. What I do have is a growing conviction that the either/or framing is itself part of the problem. We live in a culture increasingly oriented around false dichotomies — around the artificial polarization of complex issues into two opposed camps. You’re either focused on immediate relief or systemic change. You’re either practical or idealistic. You’re either working within the system or fighting against it.

But what if the truth is that we need all of these approaches simultaneously? What if paying off a specific child’s lunch debt today doesn’t preclude advocating for a complete structural overhaul tomorrow? What if the emotional resonance of specific, concrete actions is precisely what builds the coalition necessary for systemic change?