[icebraining]

In Portugal, school lunches are subsidized (it's currently $1.6 per meal), but poor families pay only 50%, or zero if their income is low enough. So it sounds similar to the US.

On the other hand, there's no lunch bill, as kids have to purchase the lunch tickets upfront. I'm actually not sure what happens if the kid says he has no money; I'm pretty sure my classmates would be too embarrassed to do so. The few times one of them didn't have money, we either knew beforehand (and pooled money ourselves) or the kid just went hungry.