SEOUL: For some migrant-background students in South Korea, lunchtime can be one of the hardest parts of the school day.
A study published Wednesday (July 8) found that school cafeterias are still struggling to accommodate students with different religious and cultural dietary practices, with Middle Eastern students’ experiences with halal meals exposing gaps in language support, cultural understanding and meal guidelines.
“I couldn’t speak Korean well, so I just ate only the rice,” a Yemeni middle school student in Incheon told researchers.
“I told them I didn’t want to eat it, but they kept telling me to. So I just said I had an allergy,” the student said.
The student follows a halal diet for religious reasons, but had difficulty explaining in Korean what foods were not allowed.
The study, published in the Journal of Multicultural Society by Sookmyung Women’s University’s Asia Research Institute, says South Korean school meals need to catch up with the country’s increasingly diverse student population.
It is based on in-depth interviews conducted between July and August 2025 with five migrant-background students from the Middle East attending elementary, middle and high schools in Incheon, as well as four school dietitians.
Some students said language barriers made it hard to explain their dietary rules to teachers and classmates. As a result, they avoided school meals, ate only rice and kimchi or skipped lunch.
For some, the difficulty was not only about food, but also about feeling embarrassed or isolated when they had to refuse certain dishes or explain why they could not eat them.
School dietitians also faced difficulties in trying to accommodate students’ dietary needs, according to the study.
Some said they had prepared alternative meals, but faced passive responses from education offices or schools, or were instructed to stop. Providing separate meals also added burdens related to hygiene management, workload and coordination with kitchen staff.
The study also found that some Korean students reacted negatively to alternative meals, viewing them as a form of “reverse discrimination.”
But researchers said there were also cases in which schools and students built mutual trust through continued provision of alternative meals, menu adjustments and active communication.
The researchers suggested that school meals should be managed from the perspective of “mutual cultural adaptation,” rather than requiring only migrant-background students to adjust to the existing system.
They said education offices and schools need standard meal guidelines that reflect different dietary practices, including religious and cultural restrictions.
They also called for expanding “integrated menus” that include foods from diverse regions, rather than offering alternative meals only for minority students.
The researchers further recommended building regular communication channels between schools and families through multilingual notices, multicultural school meal meetings and pilot meal programs. They also said schools should share clear principles on when and how alternative meals are provided. - The Korea Herald/ANN
