Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Frankly, I've never heard of pizza crunchers or sun chips, but I can only assume that's where the bulk of the "junk" is, because green beans and applesauce don't strike me as something most people would call junk. Sun chips are apparently presented as a healthier alternative to potato chips, but obviously emphasis on the "er"; "pizza crunchers" appear to be, well, aged organic milk and seasoned tomato purée enclosed in breaded whole wheat — presumably highly processed.
I've never been in Seppoland's school system, so all I really know about school lunches there is through cultural osmosis and YouTube videos. Seppolandic school lunches do strike me as a bit of a conflicting topic, though: on the one hand it is supremely important to give kids proper nutrition, and the forces of capital as always are prioritizing their own profit over the life and health of common people; on the other hand, there's a lot of never-unlearned fatphobia in pretty much any public discussion of nutrition, and for anyone who isn't a nutritionist, our conceptions of what is and isn't "healthy food" tends to come from what we've been taught to associate with health by its surface appearance, which isn't always what is healthy in fact.
Which is to say you could make something with the exact same nutritional value as four pizza crunchers and a bag of sun chips, but if you make it look all gourmet and fancy, I'd reckon a lot of people would suddenly stop calling it "junk" or "slop" and tell you to watch your intake.
Just thinking out loud...
It's not just about the nutritional value. If you put this all in a blender and served it as a smoothie it would be nutritionally complete too. Still slop, though.
So you're saying it's a matter of presentation?
School green-beans literally made me despise (like have an actual gag reflex towards) green beans until my mid-twenties when my parents got into gardening and I was presented with fresh, roasted green-beans. It's more than just presentation, the vegetables they make taste astoundingly bad.
And the applesauce they serve is usually some sugar or high-fructose corn syrup infused fruit mush.
School/canned green beans are just salt flavored slightly gelatinous paste. Actively disgusting and nothing compared to the
snap of fresh green beans.
It's a matter of how it looks, smells, and tastes. There's more to food than its technical nutritional requirements. Otherwise we'd just have Soylent.