On April 17th, a retired teacher who worked at a preschool in Ulsan revealed the issue of unsafe meals to the internet community. According to the discloser, children’s meals were cooked in a place like a warehouse, and cooking utensils were full of dirt. This is not the very first example that preschools have encountered food safety issues. According to a government survey conducted in 2020, 935 out of 44,000 preschools violated meal-related hygiene rules. Among 15,953 nurseries with more than 50 children, 26 nurseries used food past its expiration date, and 72 nurseries violated obligations to store preserved food1). Despite so many preschool meal safety issues, there are three reasons why they have not been eradicated.

First, the punishment for preschool meal insecurity violations is weak. From 2011 to 2016, a preschool in Bucheon brought spoiled fruits and vegetables, cut out only the rotten parts, and provided them to the children. The preschool also provided discolored rice to children in 2012. These were caught in 2016 as preschool chefs disclosed them, but the punishment was only to pay 700,000 won each to the victimized child and 400,000 won to the parents. To solve the problem of light punishment, the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety revised the Enforcement Decree of the Food Sanitation Act. According to the revision, from 2021, if the preschool does not store preserved food properly, a fine of 3 million won will be imposed on the first detection, which as previously 500,000 won. However, there is still controversy over the severity of the punishment. Yoon Seok-Chan (Prof. of Law School, Pusan National University) said, "Simply imposing a fine on preschool meal safety violation is too light a punishment because it is fully predictable that a person can be injured by food poisoning. Regarding the preschool food safety problem, the enhanced administrative punishment of suspension or cancellation of business and the criminal punishment of fines for owners should also be considered. Especially, infants are socially vulnerable, and if a meal accident occurs at a preschool, serious damage such as group food poisoning can occur. Therefore, a more severe punishment should be used to curb preschool food safety accidents."

Second, the supervision of administrative agencies on the preschool meal safety is insufficient. According to a teacher who revealed the Ulsan preschool meal safety issue on April 17th, she reported the reuse of kimchi in preschool to the Ulsan district office, but no on-site confirmation was made. In addition, on April 1st, a preschool in Sejong was caught by an internal complaint that it kept moldy citron syrup. The head of the preschool explained that he did not feed citron syrup to the children, but the employees testified that they had fed citron syrup to the children about twice a month, for more than three years. Although it is necessary to find out the exact facts due to the conflicting claims, no further investigation was made due to the lack of CCTV verification authority. Ryu Ho-Kyung (Center Director, Center for Children’s Foodservice Management) said, “Preschools with less than 50 children have a system for managing the whole issue of child care, but do not have a system that deals with meal safety as a core. Although the Center for Children’s Foodservice Management can improve the safety level of meals, it is difficult to impose compulsion because it does not have administrative power.”

The third cause is the difficulty in managing preschool food safety due to a lack of nutritionists and nutrition teachers. On January 30th, the revised School Meal Act was implemented to set the standards for the placement of nutrition teachers, which as excluded from the existing School Meal Service Act. Under the revised School Meal Act, more than one nutrition teacher must be assigned to preschools with more than 200 students. However, according to statistics from the Ministry of Education, less than 200 kindergartens out of 900 kindergartens nationwide have more than 200 children. In the case of kindergartens with less than 200 children, the original plan to jointly place one nutritionist in two kindergartens has been maintained. Joint nutritionists are in charge of several preschools at the same time. They work in different preschools on different days of the week, making it difficult to check food safety carefully. In addition, it is hard to reflect the characteristics and needs of each preschool in school meals. Since the revision of the School Meal Service Act has not solved the problem of nutritionist shortages, other measures are needed.

Ryu said, "Infants are more dangerous to problematic food than adults because they have less immunity and lack the ability to judge that there is a problem. It is necessary to improve the safety of preschool meals by systematic management and having one nutritionist in one institution. Additionally, it is important that preschool officials be aware of how important the meal safety of preschool meals is.”