Food for thought The Akshaya Patra Foundation, a nongovernmental organization, provides more than 1 million meals a day to poor schoolchildren in India. The foundation knows that performance in school is more than just inherited smarts; children need good nutrition to achieve their intellectual potential. Beneficiaries of the program know this, too. One man reported that, before the program started in his boyhood, he would sometimes faint from hunger at school and barely passed his courses. But once his nutrition improved, “My attention span went up. My concentration went up.” He graduated, then graduated from college, and is now a software engineer (Vedantam, 2012).