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.
Feels so bizarre to me that these kinds of scratch-prepared meals would be served in schools. Everything in ours comes from a plastic bag. No wonder a lot of Americans have such an unhealthy diet, we are literally conditioned from birth to eat that crap. I am very lucky that once I discovered vegetables as a young adult I started to eat EVERYTHING and now I generally have a decent diet (when I have the energy to cook anyway).
The dairy lobbying was definitely a huge thing here, too, but the actually advertising has died down a bit. Commercials pre-2000's were so fucking weird lol
One of the weirdest cultural differences for me when I had a partner in the US was the way he talked about his mom "cooking homemade food" and it turned out to be precooked stuff like chips and nuggets on paper plates. On the other hand it was endlessly odd to him the way we would peel our own boiled potatoes for every meal and how I made food from base ingredients. Like he would get a pancake mix and I would get milk, flour and eggs and mix it.
We genuinely don't have those types of premade things even today and ready meals are very different to the stuff in the US. It too is mostly basic everyday food here, just made on a large scale. Basically the same fish soup is made at home, eaten at school and sold as a ready meal.
The grocery store in the US was also a truly wild experience for me. The produce section was so small compared to the shelves and shelves of somehow premade stuff. It's very different and I suppose it is reflected on the school lunch too.