I'm easily pleased. I'm a simple woman.

But I haven't been this excited in a long while, almost to the point where I wanted to use capital letters.

Tasmania is thinking about trialling school lunches. Praise be.

If there's one move the Australian government could make to change the world it would be this - fund sit-down, hot, communal lunches in every school. (That and put dedicated PE teachers into every primary school, but that's a plea for another column, and another career move.)

Julie Dunbabin is the head of Tasmania's School Canteens Association and has just returned from a Churchill Fellowship trip, looking at the lunchtime habits of schools around the world. She visited schools in Europe, the United States and Asia, where all students were served a fresh, sit-down lunch. She came back talking about kids pouring water for each other at the table, about schools forming connections with local producers, about communities recognising the importance of food and sharing a meal.

In my short time as education reporter here at The Canberra Times I was quite invested in the plight of the school canteen. I served my time as canteen manager at my children's primary school, making the run out to some supplier in Mitchell for red frogs and chicken nuggets, when all I wanted to do was coerce the fabulous communities we had at the school to provide food we could sell at lunch.

There were families from all sorts of backgrounds, Croatian, Italian, Chinese. All I wanted to do was list some cevape with ajvar, lasagna and fried rice on the menu. Food we had cooked ourselves in the humble kitchen on the premises.

But no.

When my children moved on from their little neighbourhood primary school, albeit to a school where there was a little more money involved, I was horrified to hear that some of their classmates ate from the school canteen every day. Given, there were plenty of options at said school canteen, it wasn't all about pies and sausage rolls, but here I was slaving over a school lunchbox every morning to a) save some money and b) show my children I loved them by making them a white bread, ham and cheese sandwich.

In 2005, when my eldest was just about to start school, I fell in love with the television show Jamie Oliver's School Dinners, a four-part documentary that followed our favourite naked chef as he tried to turn around the concept of school dinners at a typical British school.

The whole thing was a terrible failure. The kids knew nothing better than chicken nuggets, Oliver was constrained by red tape and budgets and schools (quite sensibly) that were more concerned about teaching children to read and write and add up in the few short hours they had their students.

Over the years, I have been horrified by the stories I've heard from my teacher friends.

One of them involved school lunches. This friend told me about a student she had who for five days a week would bring in a six-pack of chocolate Yogo. That tub of moosh, if that's the right word, that's a cross between yogurt and mousse, but is basically nothing but a liquidy, sugary tub of nothing with no nutritional value.

With all due respect, she was telling me about a refugee family that was trying to assimilate; they thought Yogo was a popular Australian food, but it was starting to affect speech, because the child's diet had restricted chewing (it's a thing). This friend was a teacher with decades of experience. She was torn. How do you tell families that they are not feeding their children properly?

School lunches would solve so many problems. In the midst of school holidays it's easy to forget how much packing a lunch box (every day for the past 13 years) can drain you, but really think about the problems that school-supplied lunches could solve.

I'll come back to this once school is up again. Until then put away your white bread sandwich and serve me some cevape.