For 466 million children, a school meal depends on a workforce of about 7.4 million people who prepare, cook and serve it. Much of that work is done by women, yet the people behind the meal often remain outside the way school systems measure and value their workforce.

A global survey cited in a new report by the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems (IPES-Food) found that in one out of every three school meal programmes, the majority of cooks and caterers are unpaid. At least three-quarters of these workers are women.

The finding places school kitchens within a much wider problem in food systems: work associated with feeding and caring for people is frequently treated as low-value labour, even when public services depend on it.

The Workforce Behind the Plate

Preparing a school meal involves much more than cooking. Food has to be procured, prepared in large quantities, cooked safely, portioned and served on time. Kitchens have to be cleaned and supplies managed. The work has to happen every school day.

Yet cooking and catering are among the jobs most closely associated with women’s unpaid responsibilities at home. The IPES-Food report estimates that women undertake 76% of unpaid care work globally. This includes cooking, cleaning, family caregiving and food provisioning. Women spend an average of 4 hours and 25 minutes a day on these activities, compared with 1 hour and 23 minutes for men.

That division follows women into paid employment. The report identifies cooks, cleaners and caterers as care-coded occupations that are overwhelmingly filled by women and systematically underpaid. School food brings this contradiction into a public institution. Work that would be recognised as labour in a factory or office can still be treated as an extension of domestic responsibility when it involves feeding people.

School Meals: Organised Differently

Countries have taken different approaches to the role of food and the people who prepare it. In Japan, shokuiku, or food education, places school caterers within children’s food learning. The role extends beyond preparing lunch and becomes part of how children understand food.

Brazil’s National School Feeding Programme, known as PNAE, incorporates feminist and agroecological principles. The IPES-Food report highlights the programme as an example of efforts to resist outsourcing and the intensification of school food work.

Kenya has focused on strengthening the role of workers and communities. Its School Meals Coalition has mobilised more than $24 million to support worker agency and community leadership. In South Korea, a grassroots coalition of civil society organisations campaigned for universally free and environmentally friendly school meals under public leadership.

The approaches differ, but they share an important feature: the school meal is treated as part of a public system rather than simply as a service that needs to be delivered at the lowest possible cost.

School Food Becomes a Contract

That distinction becomes particularly significant when school meals are outsourced. The IPES-Food report describes school feeding as a potential battleground for privatisation. Where school food jobs become better valued and salaries rise, they can become attractive targets for outsourcing.

The report cites global catering companies including Sodexo, Compass Group and Aramark and says outsourcing of school and university meal management has, in the cases it examines, been associated with job cuts and reductions in wages and benefits. The pressure to reduce the cost of a meal can therefore affect the person preparing it.

Catering unions, workers, parents and community groups have resisted this model in different places. The report points to growing recognition of locally controlled school meal programmes and their potential to keep care work within the public and community sphere.

This also changes what counts as an efficient school meal programme. A cheaper contract may reduce the visible cost of providing food, while shifting the pressure onto wages, job security and working conditions.

India’s Millions of School Meal Workers

India’s PM POSHAN programme provides one of the largest examples of a publicly supported school meal workforce. More than 24 lakh cook-cum-helpers work across the programme, with women making up more than 90% of them. The central government provides an honorarium of ₹1,000 a month for 10 months of the year, while states and Union territories can supplement the amount.

India’s cook-cum-helpers are not unpaid, so they should not be directly counted against the IPES-Food finding that the majority of cooks and caterers are unpaid in one out of three school meal programmes. Their employment arrangement is different: they receive an honorarium and are not regular school employees.

The scale of the workforce, however, shows why the question of how school food labour is valued matters. More than two million people, overwhelmingly women, are needed to prepare meals for children across the country. Their work is essential to the programme, but their employment status places them outside the regular teaching and administrative workforce that usually defines a school.

That gap between importance and recognition is visible across countries. Some systems have tried to build school meals into education, nutrition and community policy. Others have left the people doing the work in low-paid, unpaid or outsourced positions. For the children receiving the meal, the difference may be invisible. For the workers preparing it, it determines whether feeding children is recognised as a job with value, rights and protections.

Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai share the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for discovering how to make a chemical reaction favour one mirror-image molecule over its twin — a problem that had puzzled chemists since the 19th century.

The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences announced on Wednesday that the 2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry will be shared by Henri B. Kagan of Université Paris-Sud in France and Kenso Soai of Tokyo University of Science in Japan, honouring work that explains one of chemistry’s oldest unsolved riddles: why living things are built almost entirely from one version of certain molecules, when chemistry itself has no obvious reason to prefer it.

The Academy cited the pair “for the discovery of non-linear effects and autocatalysis in asymmetric organic synthesis.”

2026 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: The Mystery of Left and Right

The puzzle at the heart of the prize concerns a property chemists call chirality. Many molecules essential to life — amino acids among them — exist in two forms that are mirror images of each other, much like a person’s left and right hands. The two versions contain exactly the same atoms, arranged in exactly the same way, except reversed. Yet biology is overwhelmingly one-handed: proteins in the human body are built almost exclusively from a single mirror-image form of amino acids, a property scientists call homochirality, from the Greek words for “same” and “hand.” Its mirror twin is almost absent from nature.

For most of the history of chemistry, that imbalance was impossible to reproduce in a laboratory. When chemists ran reactions designed to create chiral molecules, they got a near-perfect fifty-fifty mixture of both mirror forms every time — a far cry from the near-total one-sidedness found in living cells. That gap mattered well beyond academic curiosity: in medicine, where a drug’s two mirror-image forms can behave completely differently in the body, only one version typically produces the intended therapeutic effect, while the other can be useless or, in some cases, harmful. Producing a single mirror image cleanly, rather than a mixture, became one of the central technical challenges in modern pharmaceutical chemistry.

Kagan and Soai, working years apart, each supplied a piece of the solution.

In 1986, Kagan discovered a new way of steering asymmetric chemical reactions that allowed chemists to generate a far greater excess of one mirror-image molecule than had previously seemed achievable — a technique that reshaped how chemists thought about controlling chirality in the lab.

Soai built on that foundation from a different angle. In a landmark 1995 paper, he described the first chemical reaction with the theoretical potential to become fully homochiral — one mirror image reinforcing its own production through autocatalysis, a process in which a reaction’s product accelerates further reactions of the same kind. It took him until 2003 to actually demonstrate it: a reaction that produced only one of the two possible mirror-image molecules, with none of the other detectable at all. Outside of biology itself, nobody had managed that before.

“Henri Kagan and Kenso Soai have provided a solution to a chemical mystery that is over a century old: how homochirality can emerge spontaneously. The chemical reactions they have developed are spectacular,” said Heiner Linke, chair of the Nobel Committee for Chemistry, announcing the award.

The Academy said the discoveries have become decisive tools for chemists designing the reactions used to manufacture pharmaceuticals, where isolating a single mirror-image compound, rather than settling for a mixture, can determine whether a drug works safely at all.

Kagan and Soai will share the prize sum, along with the gold medal and diploma traditionally presented at the Nobel ceremony in Stockholm in December.

Standing with teachers means more than celebrating them on World Teachers’ Day. It means giving them the support, professional autonomy and working conditions needed to shape India’s future.

Every year, World Teachers’ Day gives us a chance to speak about teachers. But 5 October 2026 is more than another day of appreciation. This year marks 60 years of the 1966 ILO/UNESCO Recommendation concerning the Status of Teachers, and the theme, set by UNESCO with the ILO, UNICEF and Education International, is “Standing with teachers: 60 years of protecting the profession, advancing its status and shaping our futures.” Respect for teachers cannot remain a ceremonial idea. It must become a continuing social and educational responsibility.

Standing With Teachers in a Changing Education System

India has always given the teacher an important place. From the traditional gurukula system to the modern classroom, the teacher has been more than a person who delivers lessons. A teacher has been a guide, a mentor, a listener and, often, a source of confidence for a young person. The subjects taught in a classroom may be forgotten with time, but the encouragement received from a good teacher can last a lifetime.

The teacher’s role, however, is changing rapidly. Students today live in a world of smartphones, social media, artificial intelligence and unlimited digital information. A student can find an explanation for almost any question within seconds. This does not make the teacher less important. In many ways, it makes the teacher more important.

Information is not the same as knowledge, and knowledge is not the same as wisdom. Students need someone who can help them tell reliable information from misinformation, understand different points of view, ask meaningful questions and develop the confidence to think independently. Technology can provide information, but education also requires human understanding.

This is why the teacher of the future cannot be seen simply as a provider of content. The teacher must increasingly become a mentor and a facilitator of learning. Technology should remain a tool in the teacher’s hands, not a substitute for the teacher. Artificial intelligence can explain a concept, but it cannot fully understand the circumstances, emotions, aspirations and difficulties of every student in a classroom.

The human relationship between teacher and student remains at the heart of education.

India also needs to think seriously about the professional status of teachers. Respect should not be limited to Teachers’ Day speeches, greetings and awards. A profession is respected only when its practitioners receive adequate professional support, opportunities for continuous learning, reasonable working conditions and a meaningful voice in decisions that affect education.

UNESCO’s concept note for this year describes teacher status in three parts: symbolic, meaning how far teaching is valued; professional, meaning autonomy, support and a voice in policy; and material, meaning salaries, workloads and working conditions. It adds that the world needs 50 million more teachers by 2030 to meet the global education goal.

Teachers are expected to do much more than teach. They prepare lessons, assess students, maintain records, attend meetings and activities, communicate with parents and often respond to children’s social and emotional needs. These responsibilities require time, training and institutional support. The quality of education therefore depends not only on curriculum and infrastructure but also on the conditions in which teachers work.

Context matters too. Education in India takes place in very different social and geographical circumstances. A teacher in a major city and a teacher in a remote village face very different challenges, yet both are expected to prepare young people for an increasingly complex future.

Teachers in smaller towns and rural areas often become important links between school and community. They encourage children to continue their studies, guide families, identify students who need extra support and create opportunities where resources are limited. Their contribution deserves greater visibility.

Teachers also have a responsibility to preserve values while preparing students for change. Education should build employability and technological skills, but it should also cultivate honesty, compassion, discipline, respect for others and democratic values. An education system cannot be judged by examination results alone. It must also ask what kind of citizens its classrooms are producing.

World Teachers’ Day should therefore be a day of reflection, not only celebration.

The relationship between education and society is inseparable from the relationship between teachers and society. If we want responsible citizens, we must give teachers the freedom and support to nurture responsibility. If we want innovative young people, teachers must themselves be encouraged to experiment and learn. If we want inclusive classrooms, teachers must be supported in understanding different learning needs.

World Teachers’ Day should therefore be a day of reflection, not only celebration.

India has made significant progress in expanding access to education and embracing digital learning. The next challenge is to ensure that technology, policy and institutional reform strengthen the teacher rather than marginalise them. The teacher should remain at the centre of education even as its tools change.

The world also faces new challenges, including climate change, migration, social inequality and rapid technological transformation. UNESCO’s concept note for this year’s observance points to similar pressures on the profession, among them digital technologies and artificial intelligence, climate change, migration, conflict and displacement. Teachers are among those who must help young people understand and respond to them.

That responsibility cannot rest on teachers alone. Governments, educational institutions, parents, communities and society at large must stand with them.

A teacher may not always see the result of their work. A student may become a scientist, entrepreneur, farmer, civil servant, artist, engineer or teacher many years after leaving the classroom. Somewhere in that journey there may be a lesson, a word of encouragement or a moment of trust that came from a teacher.

That is the quiet power of teaching.

On World Teachers’ Day 2026, the question should not simply be, “How do we thank our teachers?” It should also be, “How do we create an environment in which teachers can do their best work?”

Standing with teachers means respecting their knowledge, listening to their experiences, supporting their professional growth and giving them the conditions they need to teach well.

The future of education will certainly involve new technologies. Classrooms will change and learning methods will evolve. But one thing should remain constant: the importance of a committed teacher who sees a student not merely as a mark or a data point, but as a human being with potential.

If we want to shape a better future, we must invest in those who help shape the people who will live in it.