The Free-Fruit Trial Judged by Wastage, Not Grocery Bills
Jersey ended a trial that let children in primary schools take free fruit. The education minister's reason was measured at the lunch tray: not enough children were eating the fruit, and it was leading to a lot of wastage.
A Jersey politician's objection uses a different ledger. She said cost-of-living pressures were not considered by the government when it chose to end the trial — meaning the scheme's effect on a family's weekly shop never made it into the case for scrapping it.
The two arguments aren't really in conflict. They're answered by different measurements, which is usually how these fights start.
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Uneaten fruit is visible in a bin. A slightly smaller grocery bill is not. That asymmetry can decide which kind of scheme survives a review — the one with the countable waste stream, or the one quietly keeping money in parents' pockets.
Binned fruit is also evidence the scheme wasn't working. Food thrown away feeds nobody, and a free banana no child eats doesn't do much for the household budget either. Wastage is a real failure, not just a convenient metric.
Which is why the earlier question matters more than the later one: was this an anti-wastage trial, a nutrition trial, or a household-budget trial? One side counts fruit eaten; the other counts money saved. They were grading different exams.