Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch.
These lunch ladies are the ones fighting to be allowed to do the same things for the children in their communities in the USA. But getting ham strung by the whims of federal politics and the crippling fear that someone somewhere might be given something for free they could have paid for themselves.
More power to the Lunch Ladies.
Animats
The view from the other side: NeverSeconds.[1]
Each day in 2012-2014, a middle school girl in Scotland took a picture of her school lunch and wrote a review on her blog, including number of hairs and insects. The headmaster of the school told her to stop taking pictures of her lunches. So she published a note, "Goodbye". That got some small publicity. Then the local town council backed up the headmaster. More publicity. Politicians became involved. National press coverage. Coverage in Wired.
"Time to fire the dinner ladies" article in a Scottish tabloid.
Worldwide press coverage. BBC interviews. Girl wins "Public Campaigner of the Year award". Headmaster in trouble.
The comparison school lunch from Finland looks lovely. It's a shame that many school lunches are meals that we wouldn't pick for ourselves.
It's a simple test: would I want that for my lunch? For most of the photos, it's a no.
dpark
So this is interesting but I would hardly call it “the other side”. This isn’t a battle between lunch ladies and students.
Even here the girl was not asking for them to stop serving the food. Rather she said they should serve more and also improve it.
> She added: “I'd like them to serve more, and maybe let some people have seconds if they want to ... and not serve stuff that's a wee bit disgusting.”
I think this girl has a better understanding of lunch time dynamics than you. It's almost an objective, base point that any food is better than no food, which is why she would advocate for serving more and also improving it. A huge emphasis on improving it.
jancsika
Wikipedia: "number of hairs"
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
theoreticalmal
Cmon dude
ryandrake
"Someone somewhere might be given something they don't need."
Sad and incredible how much of US politics is summed up with just that one statement.
babyshake
The rhetoric you see in some places about how social assistance is used on hair weaves says something about the underlying reasons for much of this concern.
krapp
Remember the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s and the government wanted to undermine the political and propaganda power the Black Panthers had gained through that and other social programs. So the government created its own, then Reagan underfunded it.
opo
No, that is not true. The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946. That has since been updated several times: the Child Nutrition Act in 1966, the Child Care Food Program in 1975, etc.
Where do these weird conspiracy theories come from?
zem
even sadder, it's often not "don't need" but "don't deserve"
roenxi
If the political process gives unnecessarily, then it has also taken something from someone unnecessarily. So while it is a very accurate description of politics it doesn't really surface why that is at the root. The whole question being debated is what is necessary. That is what people are arguing over - are the wealth transfers actually required.
Eg, "oh no, the billionaires might get enormous handouts that they don't need!" is a rallying cry that should get people moving. If the option is there they will take it. If the idea that there doesn't need to be an accounting of why takes hold that is exactly where the US Congress will take it. And, in fairness, that mindset did take hold and the handouts to the wealthy is what then happened.
rkomorn
> Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch.
Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias.
My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food.
IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) were just higher and harder to meet. I don't think that was the case.
dpark
The quality of food is probably extremely variable across schools even in the same general region. I’ve seen some pictures of really appealing lunches plucked from European schools. But how many different schools are there in Europe?
bittercynic
Absolutely. I work at a school where the food is OK, but just, and the school across the street has very good food. One of our students used to sneak into the other school in the mornings for breakfast. He made the mistake of bringing the food back to our school where people asked questions, and pretty soon the other school knew he wasn't their student and banned him.
Something seems really off to me about different kids within a couple hundred feet of each other getting drastically different quality of food.
rkomorn
I'm guessing a bigger consideration is whether what appears online is subject to selection bias (especially when the context is "look how much better the food in European schools is").
Maybe it's also changed a lot. My anecdata is admittedly not recent since I am also "not recent."
em500
In the Netherlands no elementary schools have any cafeteria, kitchen or lunch area at all. Kids bring their own lunchbox, with usually some sandwiches, fruit and water, and eat inside the classroom.
morningsam
Same in Germany, and not just for elementary schools but also secondary schools. At least that's how it was decades ago when I was a student, maybe it's different now.
watwut
My relatives live in Germany and in all schools their kids were in school gave out lunches. They were not packing own luch and did not considered sandwitch as a proper lunch.
rkomorn
Is a sandwitch made with Salemi?
(Sorry.)
expedition32
In the Netherlands we eat bread for lunch. Many Southern Europeans have been brought to tears when they were invited "for lunch".
The classic cheese sandwich and a glass of milk.
So remember it can always get worse.
rkomorn
Cheese sandwich and a glass of milk sounds genuinely better than extremely overcooked, watery pasta with watery slices of pork.
If you solely looked at my schools' menus on paper (or arguably even in pictures), sure, it would've seemed good.
Side note: I lived in the Netherlands (but went to school in Belgium, so I have zero experience with school meals) as a young kid. I do remember chocolate sprinkles on toast being a thing, though!
Coffeewine
Pertaining to that observation, I really liked this section:
> In 2022, California became the first of a half dozen or so states to offer free school meals to all students, regardless of family income. Dillard supports free meals for all students with an emphatic, “Yes, yes, yes!” Food should not be based on income, she says: “It should be part of the school day. Your transportation is of no charge to students. School books are no charge to students. School lunch should be of no charge to students. … It’s just the right thing to do.”
On one hand, that seems like an excellent argument to use for free school lunches. On the other hand, it feels like school busses are like libraries, accidents of history out of step with the modern world. If this became a rallying cry there'd probably be a strong pushback to start charging kids to be taken to school.
michaelrpeskin
We did "free" lunch for all here a couple of years ago. The idea is great, execution is terrible. You can't get a la carte free, only the full "FDA approved" lunch is free. So if you forget a drink, or just want to add a snack to your own packed lunch, you go get the whole thing and throw everything else away.
The elementary school tried adding the "share table" where you can put anything you don't want so that someone else could pick it up, but that was shut down because they could assure the feds that everyone was getting a "balanced" lunch.
My highschooler tells me of all the kids going through line multiple times to get pizza on pizza day and then throwing the rest away because they don't want that.
Of course we had a second tax that was approved this year because the free lunches were more expensive than they had planned. Wonder why.
64756salad638
If you wouldn’t mind sharing, what school district was this?
I’m curious to research and learn more! What accounts for the budget overrun? Are there stats on how many free meals were taken per student (especially if this was broken down on a per-day basis, this could back up the “pizza” explanation)?
Spivak
I mean this is the nanny state at its best. Getting in the way of progress because you refuse to meet people, in this case kids, where they actually are. The challenge should be minimizing the amount of waste—cook literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then try to nudge toward healthier options while keeping your waste % low. Let them take any subset of the lunch as they please, prune dishes kids either don't take or leave behind until you have a menu.
Mind boggling how getting the kids actually fed is lower on the priority list than making sure they eat the "right" things.
somerandomqaguy
Not exactly easy. The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety. I can't imagine developing it for far more numerous school children is going to be any easier.
Agreed, though the term makes for a funny metaphor in this case— a good nanny would likely take the same approach you describe here: meeting the kids where they're at and trying to encourage them to eat better along the way instead of making food just for it to be thrown away.
watwut
I find this attitude super weird. Adults are responsible for what kids eat and problem of kids taking multiple lunches can be solved by allowing them to go only once.
What is weird is that American kids seems to be taught to refuse "healthy" food. Somehow the problem of kids refusing fruits and real food is something that happens only once in a while with few kids elsewhere, but is apparently epidemic in america.
> literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then
Feeding kids sugar and hen nudging them to eat slightly less sugar while still providing inherently unhealthy meals seems suboptimal. Them cleaning their plates is not an inherently a good thing. Rather the opposite.
> making sure they eat the "right" things.
Certainly better than feeding them the wrong things? though.
It's not like starvation or malnourishment is the main issue when a significant proportion of children are overweight. Them eating crap is...
As an American if I paid the same taxes but the half that's spent on building -b2 bombers- fine, substitute for "devices used to kill people I'll never meet in countries I'll never see," instead went to giving kids so much food they threw half of it away, I would be ecstatic with this change in the distribution of my taxes.
simmonmt
They stopped building B2 bombers 25 years ago.
mylies43
And now we build B21s
jimbokun
Today, libraries are more amazing and more necessary than ever.
With online services constantly changing what is or isn't available, having a library with physical media, books, and even their own services for borrowing audio books and other online media, can be a real asset when trying to watch a specific movie or TV show or listen to a particular song the streamers decided to stop offering, or moved to a different service you're not subscribed to, etc.
HeinzStuckeIt
For getting media made inaccessible, you could just do what all those many countries around the world without good public libraries do: pirate it. Talk to anyone serious about cinema as an art form in Eastern Europe or the developing world, and Bittorrent was their school, not a library or a paid streaming platform.
In any event, I agree that public libraries are good, but it is easy to see that momentum in the USA for sustaining them has slowed: on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
nathan_compton
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
Don't get where you are coming from. I'm american and everywhere I've ever gone into a library its been great. Everyone I know with kids (including myself) visits the library all the time, often daily, at least weekly.
pxc
The university I went to did start restricting hours (requiring student IDs for more of them than it used to) during my time there, apparently to try to divert some homeless people away at night.
But I've never actually been to a library that didn't feel safe, clean, and comfortable when I was there, including that one. I certainly never saw any signs of drug use, or anyone browsing pornography.
pxc
I also want to add that being homeless isn't the same thing as being disorderly, frightening, unfriendly, or smelly.
Over the years, I've had friends who were homeless (depending on the person, before or during the times that I've known them). Sometimes they have a lot of difficulty getting bank accounts, jobs, or apartments in part because of documentation issues or bureaucratic tasks that they need internet access to solve. Libraries are a lifeline that helps homeless people rebuild stable lives.
Libraries should be sanctuaries and feel safe for everyone, including the most precarious people in society.
mikkupikku
You should stop believing that you can learn what America is like by reading about it online or in the media. Homeless scum making libraries unusable is extremely rare in America, if in fact it ever happens at all. I regularly visit libraries everywhere I go and only a few times did I ever see anything even like that and it was limited to one or two street people wandering around in the lobby or hidden off in some corner. Even in Seattle where the number of street junkies sprawled out on sidewalks was far too high for my standards of decency, the public library downtown was absolutely pristine. You might sometimes see a bum in the ground floor going for the toilets, but that's it. They otherwise avoid the library, it has nothing for them. Porn? They have phones I guess, I've never once seen a computer room overflowing with street coomers. I'm not saying it never happened somewhere at some time, but it's not a regular thing.
Also, I don't just visit big flagship libraries in big cities. Libraries in metro suburb areas and also libraries in small rural working class towns are places I've been to many times without seeming anything like what you've described. All across America, libraries are clean and designed to be safe and inviting places for families of all ages.
Of course what I've written is just a other online account which you shouldn't blindly believe. You shouldn't have beliefs one way or the other about American libraries unless you've actually visited American libraries yourself. If you aren't even American, then the status of American libraries shouldn't be something you pretend to be informed about. It shouldn't even be something you pretend to have an opinion about. It's like my opinion on Luxemburg supermarkets; I have none! I've never been in one and they're far from my life so I can't just walk into one. I have no opinion on them, have no reason to pretend to have an opinion, have no reason to believe I can form meaningful opinions about them by reading about them online. Somehow people can't manage this when it comes to America.
i80and
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
I think this says far more about your specific forum bubbles than anything else, to be honest.
At worst I see a perception that libraries are for children.
HeinzStuckeIt
If you do a DDG search site:news.ycombinator.com "libraries" "homeless", you find some such discussions from this very site. But as I said, you can also find this across the internet when forums are dominated by Americans and it’s certainly not limited to obscure and dodgy venues.
I suppose it is the big-city Americans who are complaining about the social problems. But it’s also common to see from small-town Americans that opening hours at their local library have been slashed, which also speaks to declining support for them.
JumpCrisscross
> school busses are like libraries
I’m reading a book from my county library right now.
They also have a library of things, which means I can borrow e.g. a sewing machine or laminator, as well as an area where we can use a laser cutter, 3D printer and soon, a micro mill, all for free. (You bring your own materials.)
Whenever I’m in there it’s packed with adults and students. They also have a terrific lecture series, the most recent of which was by a local homebuilder describing new bioconcretes she’s been using.
HeyLaughingBoy
It seems odd to me that anyone would need an argument in favor of free school lunch. School is mandatory between certain ages and it's free. Let's just make meals free as well.
And I'm not sure how school buses are out of step with "the modern world." What are you proposing? Uber or something?
For the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we sure seem to spend a lot of time discussing why we shouldn't spend money on social causes.
carlosjobim
The argument would be that parents have an obligation to feed their children. That's the least you could expect of them.
HeyLaughingBoy
Awesome. And as for the ones who are not able to for some reason that you apparently can't comprehend, what do you propose?
carlosjobim
What happens in reality in those cases?
supportengineer
In California where I live there's no school buses. You're on your own to get to school, fortunately there are so many neighborhood schools that almost everyone can walk.
I love that my tax dollars are being used to feed kids at school.
devonbleak
As someone who lives near a school I can say school buses are very much a necessity and they are getting modernized. I see an electric one consistently going through the neighborhood. And I much prefer them to hundreds more cars or pedestrians going through the neighborhood (people drive like maniacs through the residential streets here).
tstrimple
Imagine the conservative backlash to the concept of libraries if they hadn’t grown up with them. The panic and hysteria they would generate over the idea that people could access books without paying for them! Communism! You’re making authors into slaves!
ryandrake
Or, some goofball centrist would say "Good idea, but why shouldn't we charge people and make them profitable?? Government should be run like a business!"
thunky
> These lunch ladies are the ones
> getting ham strung
Nice.
no_wizard
Truly American affliction, a crippling fear that the government does something for its citizens that doesn’t have any strings attached
AstroNutt
Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years.
She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too.
She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Michell Obama implemented,
"Let's Move".
They wasted lots and lots of food because the kids wouldn't eat it. She specifically mentioned the whole wheat Mac and cheese with no salt.
I've tasted the food the kids eat there and it's really good, compared to the nasty stuff I had to eat at my schools.
It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in young developing brains and bodies. These are the kids that will be taking care of us all one day.
AuryGlenz
I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
hexbin010
I'd have eaten way more salad as a kid if my mum didn't treat salt as if it were the devil itself. There is nothing enticing about raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate.
A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
tenthirtyam
> raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate
Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.
We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
hexbin010
What made you go without salt? Have you seen any major health benefits?
We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.
Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
trollbridge
Low-salt was a fad for a while in defining what “healthy food” is, much like low fat, low saturated fat, and high-carb were for quite a while, and “plant based” still largely is.
mschuster91
> It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
"Low salt" was a fad in the 2010's, it cropped up everywhere. It's not particularly her fault for going with the mainstream of the time.
m463
low-salt was a sign of poverty in roman times...
"The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt."
Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
chongli
Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt
Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland.
They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
thaumasiotes
> They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary.
Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
Are those the same chefs that say everything needs to be bathed in butter and then deepfried with copious amount of oil?
jandrewrogers
An enormous amount of traditional food from around the world has a lot of salt in it. Salt is not a modern invention.
For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
buu700
High salt intake is only an issue on a high-carb diet or with inadequate hydration. Otherwise, consuming adequate salt/electrolytes can actually be a bit of a chore. Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
The best chefs in the world generally don’t make healthy food, they make food that tastes good. High end restaurants usually use a lot of salt and butter.
forgotoldacc
Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.
dyauspitr
It’s hard. Salt is kind of magical. My night time snack is some vegetable, air fried with some salt, olive oil and some lemon. It’s not too much salt but I would have a hard time eating it without the salt.
almosthere
What most people don't get is that if you're salting food during the cooking phase it requires a crap ton.
If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
khannn
It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find it.
Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
jader201
> Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
- Good
- Low salt
- Cheap
Pick two.
(For the most part. There are exceptions, but not many, especially when it comes to school lunch food.)
xhkkffbf
If people develop a taste for it as kids, they have trouble dialing it back later when they do have hypertensive issues.
bell-cot
> It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in ...
True. OTOH,
- You could expand that "Nutrition plays such a huge role..." logic into saying that schools should also provide broad medical coverage for the students, and clothing, and de facto parenting, and ... In practice - meals are a limited remit, it's relatively obvious if it's being done poorly, kids eating together is socialization (obviously part of a school's job), and "hungry children" pushes enough emotional buttons that subsidized school lunches are relatively well accepted.
Though I've seen quite a few stories about modern-day public school teachers being quietly expected to serve (suffer) as "whatever it takes" unpaid social workers / therapists / family counselors for their students - basically because "somebody needs to", and teachers are convenient victims for social pressures and non-classroom problems.
- There is far too little connection between "money goes to schools" and "schools are competently managed". Modern education attracts way too many well-intended ignorant ideologues (Mrs. Obama was merely one of an endless host), "consultants", "experts", grifters, and worse.
Vs. interest in competent oversight of schools seems nearly non-existent. When was the last time you saw detailed local press coverage of how well a school board was managing the students-and-teachers basics of education?
Baeocystin
I used to get the poor kid's meal when I was very young. They made us stand as a group aside in a line and let all the other kids get their full-sized meals first, then would give us our half-sized shitty sandwich after everyone else walked passed and stared at us.
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.
gausswho
Whoa that is very different than my experience decades ago. Whether your lunch was free, discounted, or full price, that happened at the cashier. Everyone waited in the same line. Your experience is way too early to introduce kids to how bad capitalism. Let them dream!
ryandrake
Implementation of free and reduced-cost lunches varies considerably across the US states. In many places, it's discreet and private, but also in many places, the process is deliberately designed to 1. call attention to and shame people, and 2. make it difficult to use and easy to be denied.
And yes, you can probably easily guess which kinds of places focus on the cruelty, and which kinds of places focus on the helping.
zamadatix
It reminds me of a similar discussion here around overdue lunch fees, graduation, and how ridiculously small the amount ends up being for an entire school at the end of the year (I think the article was about the person just walking in and paying it all).
ilamont
Growing up near Boston, my public elementary school built in the 1920s didn't have a proper kitchen or even a cafeteria because kids at one time always brought meals from home and ate at their desks. Indeed, we did too, bringing metal lunchboxes or brown bags, until the mid-1970s.
At that point, something changed and we all ate together in a repurposed room in the basement, eating the same unhealthy and unappetizing meals that were heated from frozen tinfoil platters in a towering steamer that a few harried lunch ladies managed.
One particularly gross option was the "pizza burger," literally a rectangular cheese pizza with a tired looking hamburger patty on top. There were no fresh vegetables. Everything hot came out of a can or freezer. We did get apples, but they were mealy Red Delicious or Macs that most kids threw away.
Around the same time, we began to get free milk in the mornings. I know this because we would hang out at the loading dock in the morning and beg the delivery driver for small boxes of chocolate milk. There might have been some sort of breakfast item too, like a pastry or small box of cereal.
If I were to hazard a guess at what was happening, someone correctly determined that many kids weren't eating healthy food or had unequal access to food. Subsidies were granted for providing free healthy meals, and children were forbidden from bringing meals from home.
The problem was the school and the staff didn't know how to provide such meals, and the city had a mix of schools ranging between 10 and 70 years old, mostly with limited kitchen and cafeteria facilities. I believe they took the easiest way out - put it out for bid, and chose the cheapest and easiest option to implement: little red cartons of milk in the morning, frozen and canned food for lunch or maybe a sandwich, and a checkmark on a government compliance form.
My kids attended the same school system starting in the 2000s. They had gotten rid of elementary school lunches for everyone. My spouse who comes from another country insisted on better quality lunches, which we would heat up and place in a thermos or bento box-type thing. Families who needed help with lunch were still provided with them I believe through SNAP or a similar program.
em500
Elementary schools without any kitchen or cafeteria, kids bringing meals (bagged sandwiches) from home and eating at their desks, is still the standard in probably 95%+ of the elementary schools in the Netherlands in 2025.
It's not clear to me if there is any problem to be solved here.
slfnflctd
The problem to be solved in the US is that a disturbing percentage of school-aged children's parents are too poor, too busy or too incompetent to pack a lunch for their kids.
In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.
wtcactus
Alternate theory: their parents are too lazy to actually prepare proper food for them.
Healthy food actually costs less than pre processed crap. But it does take a lot more time and effort to prepare.
thinkingtoilet
And here we are, back to the poor people are lazy argument. That didn't take long.
Regardless of whatever hypothesis you want to use, the point is the kids don’t have food.
Loudergood
Time isn't free.
DrewADesign
The school I attended as a child not too far from Boston was rather unusual in that they chose to get the government-issue ingredients (government cheese, powdered eggs, etc) and pay cooks to cook scratch meals with it rather than using their funding to pay a food service company for heat-and-serve things like the hockey puck pizzas. Place was a redneck hellhole aside from that but the lunches were actually pretty nice. There were some garbage of course... like when the brownies went stale, they'd just douse them in cheap chocolate syrup. Fresh baked hot rolls every day, though. Glad I didn't go to high school there.
brians
And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.
paradox460
When I was a kid in Los Alamos (relevant later), my school didn't have a de facto school lunch program. So we brought our own lunches. Eventually I learned of a local lady that would come in and make hot lunches, and told my parents about her. She was a local librarian, and charged something like $2 a day. Switched to her for lunch, and got a nice steady diet of things like baked potatoes, chili, lasagna, all homemade, all delicious.
A year after I discovered her, some bright soul in the school board decided to piggyback on the LANL concessions contact, and we started getting Aramark provided lunch. She was told by school she couldn't provide the homemade lunches. The quality of food dropped immediately, with the nadir being Lunchable cheese and crackers on Wednesday (the short day). So back to bag lunch, sandwiches and thermoses full of soup
bellboy_tech
School Bus drivers should be one of the highest paying jobs. Start there.
Everything is so upside down. The children's caregivers, teachers, etc. should be the best people society can produce. From there greatness will be incubated.
thaumasiotes
Well, if we had much better school bus drivers than we have now, what benefits would we realize from the change?
komali2
We'd have more since it was a higher paying job. Man districts lack enough drivers resulting in longer routes, which takes time away from the kids to have a life outside school.
Also we'd have happier kids and drivers which is great. The driver is part of the social worker aspect of a school, breaking up post school fights or noticing if a kid gets out to walk into a dangerously degraded housing situation. Would be nice to have very well paid, well trained people doing that job.
AuryGlenz
Why?
My mom drove school bus. It allowed her to work a part time job and stay at home with us kids when we were young. The drivers seemed split between people like her and older people that probably already had the right license, and it was a nice part time job for them too.
I don’t disagree we should have better teachers by paying them more to widen the potential pool but that would need to go hand in hand with actually being able to fire poor performers.
zamadatix
It varies by region, but a lot of areas have a difficult shortage which results in really long routes or troubles when a bus breaks down/several drivers are out. Different states/areas also have different laws on when that means bus service just isn't available. There is, of course, a floor for the requirements of a driver, which drives these to get worse when salary (and therefore job interest) is lower.
Half a lifetime ago now, my bus route in high school took 1.5-2 hours to get me ~4 miles from the school after some route consolidations (I got stuck on the end of the combined route where they were about to return to the bus depot - depending on the year that meant either getting up really early or getting home really late). If the weather was good I could just bike it, but that certainly wasn't always the case in Michigan.
watersb
I didn't consciously notice the source URL, yet I thought "This would be a great article for The Bitter Southerner".
I strongly suspect I actually read the source location. Whatever.
The point is that "The Bitter Southerner" is a fantastic magazine. They sell subscriptions.
Just looking through past Hacker News submissions is worth your time.
bluedino
It was a while ago but all of our lunch ladies were laid off and "eligible for re-hire" with SodexoMAGIC when they took over the cafeteria contracts for our district.
cpursley
Having a school lunch in a "poor" former eastern block country as a guest was really eye opening. It was actually good, fresh made borscht, veg dishes that tasted good (wasn't steamed)! Like, I would order and enjoy it at a restaurant level no-bad. Who knew that was even possible? From what I can tell, a non-crappy school lunch is the norm all over Europe. Why can't America have that?
bgnn
Unfortunately it's far from the norm in Europe.
In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.
cpursley
fwiw, bread and cheese in the Netherlands kicks the crap out of what is often called "cheese" in the US. However, the situation has at least improved over the past decade if your budget allows it.
renewiltord
The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction.
The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.
sharts
The labor costs more because other assets cost more — namely, housing, food, clothing.
renewiltord
Indeed. And wet roads cause rain.
klooney
You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.
jplrssn
"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.
mrguyorama
And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it
The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.
onecommentman
Embarrassed by the HN comments here. Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get. Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. Such commenters should be forced to prepare and serve lunches for hundreds of hungry children while also being forced to listen to screaming political rants through taped-on headphones. The lower middle class, my native land, gets too little applause for their contributions.
giraffe_lady
My whole family was working poor at best and I was (at best) most of my life too. I've always liked this Barbara Ehrenreich quote about the dynamic.
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
UncleSlacky
> The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society.
> Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic.
The sentence "Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get" is itself an attempt to score poltical points for a poltical faction. As is calling them "heroes".
Specifically, this is a leftist poltical argument associated with the Democratic party in the united states, suggesting that it is good for the government to be in charge of running civic institutions that are legally obligated to serve all citizens in exactly the same way, in order to dissuade people from spending their money on services they prefer which might be better than those poorer people can afford; and also that the government employees who do the frontline labor at these institutions are laudable and morally superior people. There are ideological associations here with official Soviet propaganda lauding the worker in the abstract.
Someone who didn't like their public school experience or the way the lunch lady there did their job might resonably grow up to take political stances that reject the idea that low-status government workers are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get.
mythrwy
When I was in elementary school in the early 1970s I went to a very rural school in a remote community in the Western USA that had 2 rooms, 3 grades for each room. The whole school might have had 40 or 50 kids tops. The building was built in the 1800s and even had the bell at the top.
Anyway it was the best lunch program ever. Everything was made from scratch and there was an old lady soup Nazi that ran the kitchen.
One of the things that made it really special is the older kids did all the work under the supervision of old battle axe soup nazi. You would have assigned days to work the cafeteria and wash dishes etc. And let me tell you, that lady made sure things were done to food safety standards and this was before corporeal punishment and grabbing a kid by the ear was prohibited.
Working the cafeteria was actually one of the most educational things I got from that school. I learned how to really wash dishes properly and fast and that lesson has served me well over the years.
mauvehaus
Just want to note that The Bitter Southerner ran two seasons of an absolutely outstanding podcast that sadly went defunct in 2020. Truly it's one of the best podcasts I've listened to, and I'm bummed that they quit making it.
mensetmanusman
This is a fun walkthrough of the lunches in school every 10 years since 1900.
So Trump literally took food away from children. Those funds are already allocated, and were being spent on locally produced food.
But, tariffs, ya know!
jandrewrogers
It varies so widely across the US.
I went to school in several States, and it ran the gamut from unhealthy corporate slop (e.g. multiple schools in California) to delicious food prepared daily from fresh ingredients by local grannies (Nebraska).
The latter was amazing and wasn't even generic American food, it reflected the predominant ethnicity of the people that lived in that locale (because grannies doing home-cooking). This was decades ago and the area has hollowed out, so I don't know if it is still a thing there.
constantcrying
The modern bourgeois obsession with valorizing the easiest unskilled jobs, done by people with zero abilities and ambition, is so bizarre.
No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well rewarded.
I don't fault people for doing jobs like this, it obviously pays and you can go home and do something else after it. But praising them for it seems utterly ridiculous.
seec
It's the leftist typical obsession of appearing virtuous and "empathic" by constantly praising those who are lower than them and end up in the lower strata of society. Of course even those people are not really duped and they generally hate them while still keeping appearance. It always seems very clownish to me.
I have worked in restaurant kitchens (more on the higher end) and know very well that it can be hard work. But this is not at all the kind of work the "lunch ladies" are doing. In fact they have easy, predictable schedule, with a captive "clientele", low standard and very little skill or innovation involved.
The people who end up there are just too bad to do anything else and in my experience they tend to be quite despicable actually.
In elementary school I had two extremely unpleasant lunch ladies who were vile and unsanitary. The "cooking" was just opening some canned or frozen food and reheating it. As anecdata, when they were serving ready-made "crepes", they would throw it in your plate from the cart that was rolling in the middle ailes, because that was less effort. If you were at the end of the table which was quite long (3-4 meters) you had better watch out for the reception if you wanted to actually be able to eat the damned thing.
Out of the 4 schools I frequented after, there was only one that had decent food and it was at dinner because it was a boarding school with a low headcount and the cook (a young friendly man) had more time to actually make some palatable things.
My experience is that most of the women working in those kitchen were very low effort people and often display some kind of low key evil in how they behave towards students.
The food is bad because even if you were to give them the raw ingredients and tooling they would just make a mess of it. They are definitely not praise worthy.
UncleMeat
I work at Google. One of the top things people ask me about working there is the lunches. There is a glowing video on youtube about the cafeteria staff and the process of serving healthy, tasty, and varied food to thousand and thousands of people every day. These jobs are recognized as skilled and valuable.
Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision.
For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.
constantcrying
I do not work at Google. The cantina workers at my company are lazy, provide poor food and try to gouge me on price, by debating how many scoops of some particular food I have put on my plate and whether the scoop was a "normal" scoop or too much.
If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.
lighttower
This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.
mc32
A big sarcastic thank you to G Dubbya for taking us down that road to perdition..
cpursley
American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.
jsmo
What about the dinner ladies of the UK?
suchoudh
Almost all schools in Indore, MadhyaPradesh, India have breakfast and lunch provided by school.
The food is really well cooked and nutritious. Most other cities in India the bf and tiffin needs to be given by parents which makes mornings very busy.
Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch.
These lunch ladies are the ones fighting to be allowed to do the same things for the children in their communities in the USA. But getting ham strung by the whims of federal politics and the crippling fear that someone somewhere might be given something for free they could have paid for themselves.
More power to the Lunch Ladies.
Each day in 2012-2014, a middle school girl in Scotland took a picture of her school lunch and wrote a review on her blog, including number of hairs and insects. The headmaster of the school told her to stop taking pictures of her lunches. So she published a note, "Goodbye". That got some small publicity. Then the local town council backed up the headmaster. More publicity. Politicians became involved. National press coverage. Coverage in Wired. "Time to fire the dinner ladies" article in a Scottish tabloid. Worldwide press coverage. BBC interviews. Girl wins "Public Campaigner of the Year award". Headmaster in trouble.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds
It's a simple test: would I want that for my lunch? For most of the photos, it's a no.
Even here the girl was not asking for them to stop serving the food. Rather she said they should serve more and also improve it.
> She added: “I'd like them to serve more, and maybe let some people have seconds if they want to ... and not serve stuff that's a wee bit disgusting.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.teleg...
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
Sad and incredible how much of US politics is summed up with just that one statement.
Eg, "oh no, the billionaires might get enormous handouts that they don't need!" is a rallying cry that should get people moving. If the option is there they will take it. If the idea that there doesn't need to be an accounting of why takes hold that is exactly where the US Congress will take it. And, in fairness, that mindset did take hold and the handouts to the wealthy is what then happened.
Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias.
My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food.
IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) were just higher and harder to meet. I don't think that was the case.
Something seems really off to me about different kids within a couple hundred feet of each other getting drastically different quality of food.
Maybe it's also changed a lot. My anecdata is admittedly not recent since I am also "not recent."
(Sorry.)
The classic cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. So remember it can always get worse.
If you solely looked at my schools' menus on paper (or arguably even in pictures), sure, it would've seemed good.
Side note: I lived in the Netherlands (but went to school in Belgium, so I have zero experience with school meals) as a young kid. I do remember chocolate sprinkles on toast being a thing, though!
> In 2022, California became the first of a half dozen or so states to offer free school meals to all students, regardless of family income. Dillard supports free meals for all students with an emphatic, “Yes, yes, yes!” Food should not be based on income, she says: “It should be part of the school day. Your transportation is of no charge to students. School books are no charge to students. School lunch should be of no charge to students. … It’s just the right thing to do.”
On one hand, that seems like an excellent argument to use for free school lunches. On the other hand, it feels like school busses are like libraries, accidents of history out of step with the modern world. If this became a rallying cry there'd probably be a strong pushback to start charging kids to be taken to school.
The elementary school tried adding the "share table" where you can put anything you don't want so that someone else could pick it up, but that was shut down because they could assure the feds that everyone was getting a "balanced" lunch.
My highschooler tells me of all the kids going through line multiple times to get pizza on pizza day and then throwing the rest away because they don't want that.
Of course we had a second tax that was approved this year because the free lunches were more expensive than they had planned. Wonder why.
I’m curious to research and learn more! What accounts for the budget overrun? Are there stats on how many free meals were taken per student (especially if this was broken down on a per-day basis, this could back up the “pizza” explanation)?
Mind boggling how getting the kids actually fed is lower on the priority list than making sure they eat the "right" things.
What is weird is that American kids seems to be taught to refuse "healthy" food. Somehow the problem of kids refusing fruits and real food is something that happens only once in a while with few kids elsewhere, but is apparently epidemic in america.
Feeding kids sugar and hen nudging them to eat slightly less sugar while still providing inherently unhealthy meals seems suboptimal. Them cleaning their plates is not an inherently a good thing. Rather the opposite.
> making sure they eat the "right" things.
Certainly better than feeding them the wrong things? though.
It's not like starvation or malnourishment is the main issue when a significant proportion of children are overweight. Them eating crap is...
With online services constantly changing what is or isn't available, having a library with physical media, books, and even their own services for borrowing audio books and other online media, can be a real asset when trying to watch a specific movie or TV show or listen to a particular song the streamers decided to stop offering, or moved to a different service you're not subscribed to, etc.
In any event, I agree that public libraries are good, but it is easy to see that momentum in the USA for sustaining them has slowed: on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
Don't get where you are coming from. I'm american and everywhere I've ever gone into a library its been great. Everyone I know with kids (including myself) visits the library all the time, often daily, at least weekly.
But I've never actually been to a library that didn't feel safe, clean, and comfortable when I was there, including that one. I certainly never saw any signs of drug use, or anyone browsing pornography.
Over the years, I've had friends who were homeless (depending on the person, before or during the times that I've known them). Sometimes they have a lot of difficulty getting bank accounts, jobs, or apartments in part because of documentation issues or bureaucratic tasks that they need internet access to solve. Libraries are a lifeline that helps homeless people rebuild stable lives.
Libraries should be sanctuaries and feel safe for everyone, including the most precarious people in society.
Also, I don't just visit big flagship libraries in big cities. Libraries in metro suburb areas and also libraries in small rural working class towns are places I've been to many times without seeming anything like what you've described. All across America, libraries are clean and designed to be safe and inviting places for families of all ages.
Of course what I've written is just a other online account which you shouldn't blindly believe. You shouldn't have beliefs one way or the other about American libraries unless you've actually visited American libraries yourself. If you aren't even American, then the status of American libraries shouldn't be something you pretend to be informed about. It shouldn't even be something you pretend to have an opinion about. It's like my opinion on Luxemburg supermarkets; I have none! I've never been in one and they're far from my life so I can't just walk into one. I have no opinion on them, have no reason to pretend to have an opinion, have no reason to believe I can form meaningful opinions about them by reading about them online. Somehow people can't manage this when it comes to America.
I think this says far more about your specific forum bubbles than anything else, to be honest.
At worst I see a perception that libraries are for children.
I suppose it is the big-city Americans who are complaining about the social problems. But it’s also common to see from small-town Americans that opening hours at their local library have been slashed, which also speaks to declining support for them.
I’m reading a book from my county library right now.
They also have a library of things, which means I can borrow e.g. a sewing machine or laminator, as well as an area where we can use a laser cutter, 3D printer and soon, a micro mill, all for free. (You bring your own materials.)
Whenever I’m in there it’s packed with adults and students. They also have a terrific lecture series, the most recent of which was by a local homebuilder describing new bioconcretes she’s been using.
And I'm not sure how school buses are out of step with "the modern world." What are you proposing? Uber or something?
For the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we sure seem to spend a lot of time discussing why we shouldn't spend money on social causes.
I love that my tax dollars are being used to feed kids at school.
Nice.
She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too.
She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Michell Obama implemented, "Let's Move". They wasted lots and lots of food because the kids wouldn't eat it. She specifically mentioned the whole wheat Mac and cheese with no salt.
I've tasted the food the kids eat there and it's really good, compared to the nasty stuff I had to eat at my schools.
It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in young developing brains and bodies. These are the kids that will be taking care of us all one day.
A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.
We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.
Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
"Low salt" was a fad in the 2010's, it cropped up everywhere. It's not particularly her fault for going with the mainstream of the time.
"The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt
Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland.
They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.)
That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.
If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
- Good
- Low salt
- Cheap
Pick two.
(For the most part. There are exceptions, but not many, especially when it comes to school lunch food.)
True. OTOH,
- You could expand that "Nutrition plays such a huge role..." logic into saying that schools should also provide broad medical coverage for the students, and clothing, and de facto parenting, and ... In practice - meals are a limited remit, it's relatively obvious if it's being done poorly, kids eating together is socialization (obviously part of a school's job), and "hungry children" pushes enough emotional buttons that subsidized school lunches are relatively well accepted.
Though I've seen quite a few stories about modern-day public school teachers being quietly expected to serve (suffer) as "whatever it takes" unpaid social workers / therapists / family counselors for their students - basically because "somebody needs to", and teachers are convenient victims for social pressures and non-classroom problems.
- There is far too little connection between "money goes to schools" and "schools are competently managed". Modern education attracts way too many well-intended ignorant ideologues (Mrs. Obama was merely one of an endless host), "consultants", "experts", grifters, and worse.
Vs. interest in competent oversight of schools seems nearly non-existent. When was the last time you saw detailed local press coverage of how well a school board was managing the students-and-teachers basics of education?
Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty.
That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.
And yes, you can probably easily guess which kinds of places focus on the cruelty, and which kinds of places focus on the helping.
At that point, something changed and we all ate together in a repurposed room in the basement, eating the same unhealthy and unappetizing meals that were heated from frozen tinfoil platters in a towering steamer that a few harried lunch ladies managed.
One particularly gross option was the "pizza burger," literally a rectangular cheese pizza with a tired looking hamburger patty on top. There were no fresh vegetables. Everything hot came out of a can or freezer. We did get apples, but they were mealy Red Delicious or Macs that most kids threw away.
Around the same time, we began to get free milk in the mornings. I know this because we would hang out at the loading dock in the morning and beg the delivery driver for small boxes of chocolate milk. There might have been some sort of breakfast item too, like a pastry or small box of cereal.
If I were to hazard a guess at what was happening, someone correctly determined that many kids weren't eating healthy food or had unequal access to food. Subsidies were granted for providing free healthy meals, and children were forbidden from bringing meals from home.
The problem was the school and the staff didn't know how to provide such meals, and the city had a mix of schools ranging between 10 and 70 years old, mostly with limited kitchen and cafeteria facilities. I believe they took the easiest way out - put it out for bid, and chose the cheapest and easiest option to implement: little red cartons of milk in the morning, frozen and canned food for lunch or maybe a sandwich, and a checkmark on a government compliance form.
My kids attended the same school system starting in the 2000s. They had gotten rid of elementary school lunches for everyone. My spouse who comes from another country insisted on better quality lunches, which we would heat up and place in a thermos or bento box-type thing. Families who needed help with lunch were still provided with them I believe through SNAP or a similar program.
It's not clear to me if there is any problem to be solved here.
In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.
Healthy food actually costs less than pre processed crap. But it does take a lot more time and effort to prepare.
A year after I discovered her, some bright soul in the school board decided to piggyback on the LANL concessions contact, and we started getting Aramark provided lunch. She was told by school she couldn't provide the homemade lunches. The quality of food dropped immediately, with the nadir being Lunchable cheese and crackers on Wednesday (the short day). So back to bag lunch, sandwiches and thermoses full of soup
Everything is so upside down. The children's caregivers, teachers, etc. should be the best people society can produce. From there greatness will be incubated.
Also we'd have happier kids and drivers which is great. The driver is part of the social worker aspect of a school, breaking up post school fights or noticing if a kid gets out to walk into a dangerously degraded housing situation. Would be nice to have very well paid, well trained people doing that job.
My mom drove school bus. It allowed her to work a part time job and stay at home with us kids when we were young. The drivers seemed split between people like her and older people that probably already had the right license, and it was a nice part time job for them too.
I don’t disagree we should have better teachers by paying them more to widen the potential pool but that would need to go hand in hand with actually being able to fire poor performers.
Half a lifetime ago now, my bus route in high school took 1.5-2 hours to get me ~4 miles from the school after some route consolidations (I got stuck on the end of the combined route where they were about to return to the bus depot - depending on the year that meant either getting up really early or getting home really late). If the weather was good I could just bike it, but that certainly wasn't always the case in Michigan.
I strongly suspect I actually read the source location. Whatever.
The point is that "The Bitter Southerner" is a fantastic magazine. They sell subscriptions.
This is where I grew up but it's a different planet for my kids. "Let Everybody Sing" https://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing
Just looking through past Hacker News submissions is worth your time.
In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.
The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.
The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.
“When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
Hence the title of this book:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr...
The sentence "Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get" is itself an attempt to score poltical points for a poltical faction. As is calling them "heroes".
Specifically, this is a leftist poltical argument associated with the Democratic party in the united states, suggesting that it is good for the government to be in charge of running civic institutions that are legally obligated to serve all citizens in exactly the same way, in order to dissuade people from spending their money on services they prefer which might be better than those poorer people can afford; and also that the government employees who do the frontline labor at these institutions are laudable and morally superior people. There are ideological associations here with official Soviet propaganda lauding the worker in the abstract.
Someone who didn't like their public school experience or the way the lunch lady there did their job might resonably grow up to take political stances that reject the idea that low-status government workers are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get.
Anyway it was the best lunch program ever. Everything was made from scratch and there was an old lady soup Nazi that ran the kitchen.
One of the things that made it really special is the older kids did all the work under the supervision of old battle axe soup nazi. You would have assigned days to work the cafeteria and wash dishes etc. And let me tell you, that lady made sure things were done to food safety standards and this was before corporeal punishment and grabbing a kid by the ear was prohibited.
Working the cafeteria was actually one of the most educational things I got from that school. I learned how to really wash dishes properly and fast and that lesson has served me well over the years.
The 70s-00s were wild!
https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw
But, tariffs, ya know!
I went to school in several States, and it ran the gamut from unhealthy corporate slop (e.g. multiple schools in California) to delicious food prepared daily from fresh ingredients by local grannies (Nebraska).
The latter was amazing and wasn't even generic American food, it reflected the predominant ethnicity of the people that lived in that locale (because grannies doing home-cooking). This was decades ago and the area has hollowed out, so I don't know if it is still a thing there.
No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well rewarded.
I don't fault people for doing jobs like this, it obviously pays and you can go home and do something else after it. But praising them for it seems utterly ridiculous.
I have worked in restaurant kitchens (more on the higher end) and know very well that it can be hard work. But this is not at all the kind of work the "lunch ladies" are doing. In fact they have easy, predictable schedule, with a captive "clientele", low standard and very little skill or innovation involved. The people who end up there are just too bad to do anything else and in my experience they tend to be quite despicable actually.
In elementary school I had two extremely unpleasant lunch ladies who were vile and unsanitary. The "cooking" was just opening some canned or frozen food and reheating it. As anecdata, when they were serving ready-made "crepes", they would throw it in your plate from the cart that was rolling in the middle ailes, because that was less effort. If you were at the end of the table which was quite long (3-4 meters) you had better watch out for the reception if you wanted to actually be able to eat the damned thing.
Out of the 4 schools I frequented after, there was only one that had decent food and it was at dinner because it was a boarding school with a low headcount and the cook (a young friendly man) had more time to actually make some palatable things.
My experience is that most of the women working in those kitchen were very low effort people and often display some kind of low key evil in how they behave towards students. The food is bad because even if you were to give them the raw ingredients and tooling they would just make a mess of it. They are definitely not praise worthy.
Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision.
For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.
If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.
The food is really well cooked and nutritious. Most other cities in India the bf and tiffin needs to be given by parents which makes mornings very busy.