Observer Infoporn Nitpick

I like reading the Observer Blog but last week it had a piece of infoporn on schooling and costs.

They report 50p is spent on a primary school meal and 60p on a secondary school meal. They also add that 500 million pounds are spent on pupil snacks eaten while travelling between school and home per year. I think we are supposed to be shocked at the contrast in size of amounts even though the units are so ridiculously different - one single child meal versus all snacks of all students for all ages.

If we do some maths on these numbers we get, roughly, the following:
Students are at school for 12 years. I am not going to look up the population age distribution tables but we can have a conservative guess that the school system, which has most of Britan's five to seventeen year old people, has over five million of the population of sixty million.

5,000,000 people eat school meals say 200 days a year.
That's 1,000,000,000 meals a year, or about 500,000,000 pounds.
Funnily enough this is the same number as is spent on snacks.
So people spend the same amount eating snacks on the journeys both to and from school as they do on a single school meal.
This doesn't seem worthy of attention.