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.
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.
It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.
> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.
Define "much".
> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.
> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency
No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence.
Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature)
Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?
Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant):
Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other.
It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt...
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor...
It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt.
So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service.
But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do.
> his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.
All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this. Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived. That salt was held in high esteem by the ancients, is evident from the Salarian Way, so named from the fact that, by agreement, the Sabini carried all their salt by that road. King Ancus Martius gave six hundred modii of salt as a largess to the people, and was the first to establish salt-works.
The rewards of successful warfare, including salt, bestowed on soldiers. That is payment! King Ancus Martius also used salt as payment.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
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.
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.
However blaming salt was quick and easy so that’s what the people with money did.
Historically speaking salt has been such a scarce and valuable resource. I have read accounts how in the balkans people would resort to selling kids to slavery just so the family could have enough salt to survive (sacrificing one kid to save the rest).
When I started reading about how salt was bad for you it never made any sense.
Source: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
For iron, that trade would have mostly been in tools. For salt the only reason is that salt is a vital nutrient and if you can't get enough of it, you die. (Though I think it's worth observing that iron is a vital nutrient too.)
The history actually runs in the other direction - step one was that someone decided that salt was bad, and step two was that a bunch of dietary standards were created to express the revealed truth that salt was bad. The demonization is the beginning of the process and was done for its own sake.
Most people don't know this. It is a common prank to convince people that don't know better to eat the fruit off the tree. As the other poster said, don't do that.
I'm always kind of bemused by the "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect that gave us various food preps and conservation methods.
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.
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)
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.
Your implication is that high salt in meals causes these health problems. It does not. You might as well say high vitamin, high nurrient meal.
Don't conflate the effects of eating ultraprocessed foods with the effects of eating salt just because one often contains the other. What you're doing is complaining about the health effects of water, having observed that soda is mostly water.
If anyone else is reading this and wants to do their own reading about the effects of salt, I can point you to the WHO, the NHS, the FDA, one of many highly cited studies, and wikipedia:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sodium-redu...
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267338249_Global_so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_salt
Though, margalabargala, if you don’t believe in science then I can’t help you :)
Are you aware that you are being a condescending asshole with the way you wrote that comment?
Cheese already contains loads of salt.
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.
If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
- 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?
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.
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...
It's a simple test: would I want that for my lunch? For most of the photos, it's a no.
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
Sad and incredible how much of US politics is summed up with just that one statement.
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.
> [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 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.
Goes the other way around too? Regardless government continuing doing what they were already doing for the past half century seems reasonable. Without any additional evidence that seems like an inherently much more valid argument that attributing it to the Black Panthers. So equating them seems disingenuous...
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."
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.
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.
Storage is a big deal on a sub.
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.
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.
But, the thread pointed out, since high-level mafia officials sent their children to that school, they had no interest in skimping on the lunches. And the lunches were excellent. After a big FBI bust, the mob-affiliated vendor was replaced with a major interstate school lunch vendor, and the quality of the food was rock-bottom.
I've tried to find the thread again, but I can't. If anyone else wants to dedicate an unreasonable amount of time to it, I'm pretty sure I originally found it through a links post on Marginal Revolution.
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.
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.
You don’t want the dude trading away everything for desserts kapooting midway mission because his bowels are in uprising.
Yes, a military study was conducted that found it unproductive to do the impossible…
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...
You understand how moronic it sounds to prepare and serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right? Plus free lunch programs are to deal with malnourishment and to make sure kids get at least one full meal a day.
My elementary school, which was a private school and so wasn't beholden to any government meddling, followed this formula and it worked out great. Every meal was carbs, protein, and sugar, and everything was sweet. It wasn't an apple, it was fruit cocktail in syrup, the pizza had sweetened bread and sauce, vegetables were sweat peas, carrots, and corn. Every student was put on a rotation to clean trays so I got to see first hand what the waste situation was. And it wasn't zero but you didn't see a tray full of food minus pizza coming back.
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.
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
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.
USA is the richest country in the world, people there, even the ones at the bottom of the work ladder, have access to riches that for most of the people on the planet are only dreams. You have no idea what it is to be poor or to live next to actual poverty (even I have no idea, and I live in a country that's poorer, and that when I was younger much poorer than the USA).
94% of adult Americans drive a car. Anyone there can go to a store that sells vegetables and raw meat, buy it, and prepare a proper meal that's cheaper than some deep-fried, frozen processed crap.
Enough with the performative virtue signaling. It's all so tiresome. Nobody in the USA goes hungry unless they really choose too at every single step in their lives.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The 70s-00s were wild!
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 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.
The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.
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.
“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.
But, tariffs, ya know!
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.
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.