Racism or religion doesn't really explain this? Or maybe it does but I'm missing the connection.

In Australia 90% of kids brought a sandwich to eat, from home. Some kids were given some money to order lunch from a cafeteria occasionally, but no one did that every day. We probably got to do that 5 or 6 times in 10 years.

If you didn't have money it was not possible to borrow or accrue a debt.

We don't let kids go hungry either, but there are other machanisms to resolve that.