What does a society owe its children? That surely is one of the great dividing lines in politics. I believe that society and Government hold a shared responsibility over the lives and well-being of children, while to others, such a notion will be an affront. Indeed, some politicians, wealthy politicians, who've had all the luck in the world, seem to think that children should be punished for their parents' poverty, that the really nice things are too good for them, and that while some children can grow up in homes with food aplenty and golden wallpaper, the rest can make do with gristle or crumbs from the rich man's table.

If there's one lasting image from the free school meals debacle in England last year, it's those photographs, shared on social media, of the inadequate meal parcels: the halved vegetables wrapped in cling film, because those children apparently didn't merit full vegetables, which makes you ponder the effort it would have taken to cut and separate out those bits of vegetables, the time invested in taking away and denying those children the whole portion. The casual cruelty of that banal act and lack of care or concern. Pasta and tuna taken out of tins and bagged up in those measly bags to make sure the rest of the family couldn't possibly benefit from those meals. It was as if the whole exercise was meant to strip away every vestige of dignity from the recipients. Those photographs shamed our hearts because they betrayed something deep set in our society, that we are brought up collectively to accept poverty, so long as it happens over there. And that if people are poor, they somehow deserve it. And it took a footballer, Marcus Rashford, a man who is an English hero, Llywydd, to shame the Tory Government into changing their policy. 

Now, I don't deny for a moment that the situation is better in Wales, but it is still not enough, and I would be failing in my job if I didn't point that out. Llywydd, I've raised questions recently about the mental health impact of childhood hunger, the hidden harm created in a child's psyche, the associations of guilt and shame that get built around food because of poverty, because chronic hunger isn't just about empty bellies; it's about malnourished self-esteem, underfed aspirations and starved potential. It's about not being able to afford the slice of pizza that your friends have, being embarrassed about your lunch, going to queue on the other side of the hall away from your classmates with the other free school meal children, maybe missing out on lunch altogether because you don't want to face the jibes. As the children's food inquiry makes clear, hunger is a social harm. It causes distress, isolation; it can trigger depression, hopelessness and stress for both parents and children. It affects school attendance and attainment.

The free school meal allowance in Wales isn't enough. The children's commissioner's charter for change looked at this, and her office found that children getting £2.05 a day didn't have enough money for a break-time snack as well as a lunch-time meal. The slice of pizza I mentioned, in one school that costs £1.95, leaving only 10p for a snack at break time or a drink. It wasn't enough for either. Another child said, and I quote, 'All I could afford was one sandwich or a fruit and drink, never a meal.' A third child told them they just had to starve until lunch time while everyone else could buy what they wanted. Just had to starve.

Food should neither be seen as a lifeline nor a luxury. It should be the baseline, the fundamental, the shared and the communal. Until we introduce universal free school meals, that stigma will continue. You'll have the two dinner queues in the canteen. You'll have the haves and the have nots. We'll have some children who will grow up associating food with embarrassment and shame, and we'll have a society that still thinks it's acceptable to send children bags of broken up vegetables in the place where compassion should be.