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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water.
I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes.
Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
> It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here.
My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
What you're saying doesn't contradict the argument that the goal was do outdo the black panther lunch programs.
Certainly I'd like to read more about the idea before I buy into it, but it does make a lot of sense - schools in black neighborhoods are chronically underfunded and the black panthers were first and foremost a direct action and mutual aid group, and furthermore the USA government viewed them as a huge threat to government authority and did many things to attempt to undermine the black panthers... Including outright assassination.
> [Original, emphasis added]: 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
> [Response, emphasis added]: 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
Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?
Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.
> 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
> 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
How does the existence of a food program in the 1890s, or 1946, automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation of the food programs into 2025 is due to the efforts of the black panthers? Similarly, one could attribute gun control laws in California to the black panthers focus on arming black neighborhoods, rather than some kind of liberal anti-gun attitude.
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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
If you want a successful lunch program (and rations if you have a to-go bag) look no further than the US Navy's sub program.
Given the environment and danger (and having a bunch of humans in close proximity, deep under the ocean, with nowhere to go, hangry, is not going to inspire unit cohesion) they get really, really good food. Which is probably not a bad thing to give people tooling around with enough firepower to take out a few dozen cities.
Whenever I watch a video about American military nutrition, the only takeaway I have is "are these people incompetent?"
Sailors in the USA navy get fat after their first deployment, common knowledge. Why? Because half the time their food is frozen chicken nuggets, frozen tater tots, etc, chucked into the oven, served bulk at mess.
2025's most well funded army, that's the best they came up with? Why not just freeze non deep fried chicken breast? Why not use lentils for carbs? Why not fast-freeze dry vegetables?
In any case I don't see the relevance for schools. Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
>Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
Who's going to pay for all of that? Not the American taxpayer, who would consider it theft and waste, and not the poor kids who actually need school lunches, and probably not their parents.
You'll wind up with a Macdonald's kiosk in every school cafeteria, and vending machines full of Monster energy drinks.
> 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.
Why? That's not even a real concept. If you want everyone to like everything they have, you can't do that without letting them trade away the stuff they hate.
>The CMNR reviewed many of these studies when they were initially completed and noticed that underconsumption of the ration appeared to be a consistent problem. Typically, soldiers did not consume sufficient calories to meet energy expenditure and consequently lost body weight. The energy deficit has been in the range of 700 to 1,000 kcal/d and thus raises concern about the influence of such a deficit on physical and cognitive performance, particularly over a period of extended use. Anecdotal reports from Operation Desert Storm, for example, indicated that some units may have used MREs as their sole source of food for 50 to 60 days—far longer than the original intent when the MRE was initially field tested.
>
>There have been successive modifications of the MRE since 1981. These modifications in type of food items, diversity of meals, packaging, and food quality have produced small improvements in total consumption but have not significantly reduced the energy deficit that occurs when MREs are consumed. This problem continues in spite of positive hedonic ratings of the MRE ration items in laboratory and field tests. The suboptimal intake of operational rations thus remains a major issue that needs to be evaluated.
Or to summarize it; soldiers weren't eating the full MRE's in Desert Storm, and it a widespread problem. Soldiers that weren't meeting their caloric intake requirements were suffering cognitive issues while in combat operations. Bit of an issue when you've got two groups of people trying to kill each other and not their own side.
So they figured the best option to get the soldiers to eat their rations was to keep improving and updating until soldiers were more inclined to eat the whole damn thing. I don't know if they've succeeded per say but they have been updating the menus pretty consistently since the 90's. I think only the beef stew and a few other meal items have stayed consistent over the last 30 years of MRE's.
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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!"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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 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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
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.
I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water.
I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes.
Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
> the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
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.
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
> It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here.
My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
Look at the graph of life expectancy vs. average sodium intake by country, and you may be surprised.
Read this and you may be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
That's exactly what I'm implying.
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.
Indeed.
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.
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.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds
Hah, this is great to read even now. It’s nice that these little bits of the internet are still up 11 years later for me to enjoy.
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.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.teleg...
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.
The blog in question, right when posting seemed to pick up: https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/
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.
Wikipedia: "number of hairs"
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
"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.
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.
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.
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.
What you're saying doesn't contradict the argument that the goal was do outdo the black panther lunch programs.
Certainly I'd like to read more about the idea before I buy into it, but it does make a lot of sense - schools in black neighborhoods are chronically underfunded and the black panthers were first and foremost a direct action and mutual aid group, and furthermore the USA government viewed them as a huge threat to government authority and did many things to attempt to undermine the black panthers... Including outright assassination.
> [Original, emphasis added]: 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
> [Response, emphasis added]: 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
Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?
Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.
> 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
> 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
How does the existence of a food program in the 1890s, or 1946, automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation of the food programs into 2025 is due to the efforts of the black panthers? Similarly, one could attribute gun control laws in California to the black panthers focus on arming black neighborhoods, rather than some kind of liberal anti-gun attitude.
even sadder, it's often not "don't need" but "don't deserve"
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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
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.
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)?
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.
They stopped building B2 bombers 25 years ago.
And now we build B21s
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.
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.
faint sound of fading laughter from a US SSBN
If you want a successful lunch program (and rations if you have a to-go bag) look no further than the US Navy's sub program.
Given the environment and danger (and having a bunch of humans in close proximity, deep under the ocean, with nowhere to go, hangry, is not going to inspire unit cohesion) they get really, really good food. Which is probably not a bad thing to give people tooling around with enough firepower to take out a few dozen cities.
Whenever I watch a video about American military nutrition, the only takeaway I have is "are these people incompetent?"
Sailors in the USA navy get fat after their first deployment, common knowledge. Why? Because half the time their food is frozen chicken nuggets, frozen tater tots, etc, chucked into the oven, served bulk at mess.
2025's most well funded army, that's the best they came up with? Why not just freeze non deep fried chicken breast? Why not use lentils for carbs? Why not fast-freeze dry vegetables?
In any case I don't see the relevance for schools. Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
>Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
Who's going to pay for all of that? Not the American taxpayer, who would consider it theft and waste, and not the poor kids who actually need school lunches, and probably not their parents.
You'll wind up with a Macdonald's kiosk in every school cafeteria, and vending machines full of Monster energy drinks.
> 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.
Why? That's not even a real concept. If you want everyone to like everything they have, you can't do that without letting them trade away the stuff they hate.
From the horse's mouth?
>The CMNR reviewed many of these studies when they were initially completed and noticed that underconsumption of the ration appeared to be a consistent problem. Typically, soldiers did not consume sufficient calories to meet energy expenditure and consequently lost body weight. The energy deficit has been in the range of 700 to 1,000 kcal/d and thus raises concern about the influence of such a deficit on physical and cognitive performance, particularly over a period of extended use. Anecdotal reports from Operation Desert Storm, for example, indicated that some units may have used MREs as their sole source of food for 50 to 60 days—far longer than the original intent when the MRE was initially field tested. > >There have been successive modifications of the MRE since 1981. These modifications in type of food items, diversity of meals, packaging, and food quality have produced small improvements in total consumption but have not significantly reduced the energy deficit that occurs when MREs are consumed. This problem continues in spite of positive hedonic ratings of the MRE ration items in laboratory and field tests. The suboptimal intake of operational rations thus remains a major issue that needs to be evaluated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25121269/
Or to summarize it; soldiers weren't eating the full MRE's in Desert Storm, and it a widespread problem. Soldiers that weren't meeting their caloric intake requirements were suffering cognitive issues while in combat operations. Bit of an issue when you've got two groups of people trying to kill each other and not their own side.
So they figured the best option to get the soldiers to eat their rations was to keep improving and updating until soldiers were more inclined to eat the whole damn thing. I don't know if they've succeeded per say but they have been updating the menus pretty consistently since the 90's. I think only the beef stew and a few other meal items have stayed consistent over the last 30 years of MRE's.
> Why?
You don’t want the dude trading away everything for desserts kapooting midway mission because his bowels are in uprising.
So what? If you think that problem exists in the first place, you still have no choice but to address it by doing something that is possible to do.
> address it by doing something that is possible
Yes, a military study was conducted that found it unproductive to do the impossible…
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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).
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!
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!"
> These lunch ladies are the ones > getting ham strung
Nice.
Truly American affliction, a crippling fear that the government does something for its citizens that doesn’t have any strings attached
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Well, if we had much better school bus drivers than we have now, what benefits would we realize from the change?
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.
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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M this lady's laugh
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?
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.
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.
You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.
"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.”
This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.
A big sarcastic thank you to G Dubbya for taking us down that road to perdition..
American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.
What about the dinner ladies of the UK?