Korea’s school lunches go viral but workers making them suffer in silence

Students receive school lunches in a South Jeolla Province school in this undated photo. Courtesy of South Jeolla Province

“Best lunch I’ve seen yet!” one user wrote under a TikTok video with 2.8 million views, the comment drawing nearly 1,000 likes. “I would eat this every day for the rest of my life and never complain,” wrote another commenter from Texas over a separate viral TikTok clip with 4.2 million views, garnering hundreds of likes.

“World Top No.1…Korean School Lunch!!!” a third exclaimed under a YouTube video that racked up 7.1 million views.

Jung Ha-won

The clips showcase everyday meals from Korean school cafeterias — widely praised at home and increasingly abroad for being tasty, healthy, generous in portions and entirely free, funded by the government.

On social media, “world’s best school lunch” videos have become a genre of their own. Viewers gush over the quality of food in some countries or lament the state of school food in their own countries.

In this genre, Korea is often held up as a gold standard, with countless videos on social media showing a mouthwatering selection of elaborately prepared food. One viral clip featured a school lunch of deep-fried prawns with tartar sauce, egg fried rice, beef noodle soup, mango-strawberry salad, pickled radish, kimchi and chocolate ice cream for dessert, drawing envious comments like "Why can’t we have this in America?”

But behind the glossy trays lies a harsher reality: The workers who cook these lunches — mostly women in their 40s and 50s — endure grueling, precarious conditions for little more than minimum wage, often at the cost of their health and, in some cases, their lives.

These women are the invisible backbone of Korea’s acclaimed school meal program, yet their contributions are rarely acknowledged or compensated properly, and their struggles remain largely hidden from public view at home and abroad.

Their plight also reflects a broader reality in Korea, where middle-aged women face limited job prospects and often take on essential yet underpaid and undervalued work, like caregiving or kitchen jobs. Many are dismissed as “ajumma” — a term for middle-aged women, at times used derisively — seen as merely supplementing their husbands’ incomes, and therefore deemed undeserving of proper pay and labor protections.

Preparing the elaborate school lunches featured in viral social media videos is grueling labor — endless peeling, chopping and other painstaking work. An average school kitchen worker shoulders workloads two or even three times heavier than those in corporate canteens. Many suffer from musculoskeletal disorders like arthritis, hand deformities and chronic pain. Workplace injuries occur at nearly six times the national average, ranging from slips, burns and heat exhaustion to long-term illnesses.

The most devastating are respiratory diseases. Years of exposure to toxic, cancer-causing cooking oil fumes, with little to no protection, has left thousands with damaged lungs. Examinations of 42,077 school kitchen workers across Korea found that about a third had lung problems, including cancer.

So far, around 170 workers have been officially recognized as having lung cancer from kitchen smoke exposure. But rights groups say the true figure is far higher, as many are excluded due to the strict criteria for industrial injury claims. In the past three years alone, at least 14 workers have died of lung cancer.

“The world-class free school meals South Koreans enjoy today … came at the cost of kitchen workers’ deformed hands, burn-scarred skin and the cancer cells growing in their lungs,” said Park Mi-Hyang, a school kitchen worker and labor rights activist, during a parliamentary forum.

Yet many workers have suffered in silence because they are contract workers with little job protection or support. A strong social expectation that school meals are sacrosanct and must never be disrupted makes collective actions like strikes extremely difficult.

A few walkouts in the past were met with a storm of media outrage for “starving our children,” while the dire working conditions behind the protests received relatively little attention.

Despite years of demands by workers, education authorities have failed to install proper ventilation — a crucial safeguard against lung diseases — in the overwhelming majority of school kitchens. With more than 97 percent of kitchens lacking safe ventilation, workers continue to face daily exposure to toxic fumes with almost no protection.

This must change. The workers are increasingly speaking out and need public support. In a recent protest, women wearing the pink aprons of school kitchen staff carried nameplates of deceased colleagues and demanded stronger laws ensuring workplace safety, fair pay and a reasonable workload.

“For years I’ve endured bone-crushing workload and the toxic smoke … trying to cook meals good enough for my own children, too. Meanwhile, my body was breaking apart,” said one protester diagnosed with work-related lung cancer.

Koreans take great pride in their school lunches. It is time to also recognize — and protect — the women whose bodies and lives make them possible.

Jung Ha-won is a journalist and the author of "Flowers of Fire: The Inside Story of South Korea’s Feminist Movement and What It Means for Women’s Rights Worldwide.”