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.
At my high school you had several bad options for standard lunch. Also had a separate line where everything was better and you could buy as much as you wanted but it all costed way more. They had a doughnut and candy section.
I wonder why many children had weight problems. /s
To add insult to injury, America, despite making up only 4% of the world’s population, produces 15-20% of the world’s grains, milk and egg, and the largest agricultural exporter in the world, not to mention its near total control of the global food supply chain through multinational agricultural conglomerates.
They have the food. They’re just not feeding you.
They have so much food they waste like 40% of it. The policy doesn't even save money. It is there deliberately to enforce scarcity.
I went to school in a "better" western country and we didn't even get free lunches or have a cafeteria
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Most kids ate lunchables if they could afford it (crackers with cheese and some small meat disk, basically three savory Oreos) which recently suffered a massive lawsuit for containing massive amounts of lead
CW: deli meat, dairy
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Otherwise some schools basically served french fries, which were too expensive
Someone can tell the Chinese XHS users that many schools are so much worse. At my school, the hungry kids went hungry while the "rich" kids got McDonalds delivered by their parents.
If your parents couldn't pack a lunch for you they could pay a significant amount of money and you'd get cheese and crackers during recess but no lunch.
Lunchables were 242 calories and were like $3 each. I remember being exhausted and hungry all the time.
which recently suffered a massive lawsuit for containing massive amounts of lead
When I last went to school they were serving pizza that looked like diseased flesh, dry overcooked burgers, and heavily processed deep fried garbage.
One of the three high schools I went to had a ChikFilA in the cafeteria. It was the one that all the upper middle class kids went to. The inner city one had vending machines, and the one that serviced the poor black neighborhood had neither.
Now tell this Chinese person American children also need to pay to be fed this garbage to really blow their mind
Israel is the other country to say no but it's not surprising; they recognize that Palestinian children are still considered children by the international community (I don't even know if I'm joking; I've seen a UNICEF short where a human rights worker was saying he's advocated for child safety during wartime this entire time and that this is the first time in his life he's advocating that children are children and should not be targeted).
Amerikkka and an American forward operating base disguised as a soverign state in west asia/middle east being the only against truly is not surprising.
: “Yeah but, look at how rough n’ tough we are compared to the rest of the decadent world!”Mark my words, climate change will go to shit and plunge the world into chaos and as that becomes more abundantly clear the American elite will market us to embrace the apocalypse because “us Americans love a good challenge!”
My alarm snooze ends in one minute 27 seconds and then the working week begins again. God help us all.
Is there always so little of it? How is this considered food.😭
Well you see, school meals are decadence and we need to toughen up the next generation.
i nominate the school board president, Joseph Como Jr., for the Liugi treatment
Depends on where you live. Poor states with little support probably get lunches like this.
I've always thought that these can't be real. I know in the UK the school food is terrible, a lot like this I think, but to think that this is all the kids get breaks my heart. How is this sustinence?
Chilling to think how the austerity people are dismantling systems like this where I live. We still have free school food and it's still mostly very good and balanced food that you take yourself from a lunchline, as much as you need to be full. It's basic everyday real food, a protein, potatoes/rice/pasta and always a salad and for most schools there is also a vegan option. I used to substitute teach and the food was either very good or at least ok in every school I ever worked in.
Every kid deserves better.
The sun chips probably cost extra in the above pic. Going to school in the aughts it looked like this where I lived, decent school district.
Just fyi, this isn't even close to an exaggeration. Seems like a high-end representation of school lunches in America from my experience in school
I know in the UK the school food is terrible,
When i was at school in the UK in the 90s, our lunch was almost always a spring roll with chips, followed by sponge pudding with custard. No protein, no vegetables.
My family was poor, my dad didn't work and then abandoned our family. The current cut off point is £7400 a year - if your family earns more than that you don't qualify for free school meals. I don't know what the cut off point was at the time, but my mother made just slightly over it. So I didn't qualify for free school meals, and my mother couldn't afford to pay for my lunches. So for a while I went without. This was especially bad because I often didn't get fed at home either. Eventually I found a way to eat at school, I started getting in the lunch queue and acting like my mother had paid for me to eat (parents had to pay for the whole term in advance). The dinner ladies didn't question it, and for the rest of the time I ate at school for free.
The food as I mentioned was very non-nutritious but at least it was something. Not much later in life I got thyroid cancer, and recently a study came out suggesting that thyroid cancer can be caused by long term selenium deficiency. Guess what foods are low in selenium - spring rolls, chips and sponge cake. Now I strongly suspect my cancer and all the problems that came from it and have ruined my life, were caused by the fact that nobody bothered to ensure I was fed a nutritious diet (or even enough calories - I was so thin at school that it hurt to sit on the chairs as my bum bones dug into the chairs, I had to fold my blazer up and sit on that to make it more tolerable) as a child.
Western culture is just so deeply hostile to children. Even though they have no choice in going to school to become the wage slaves of the future, they are still treated so bad and not even fed properly.
One third of children in poverty are denied free school meals, and teachers are going hungry too: https://www.msn.com/en-gb/money/other/we-don-t-have-to-starve-kids/ar-BB1nBwnU
When I was in high school and I got a hot dinner it was chips or rice, curry or gravy, pie, sausage roll, or pasty. It wasn’t healthy but it was cheap. Can’t remember the options in infants or juniours. Basically what you’ve said.
It's always some kind of pastry-encased thing with carbs. They think they're saving money by feeding kids this, but the long term health complications kids suffer cancel any savings out.
Yup, I’m not sure if Jamie Oliver achieved anything, I’m not even saying he’s a good guy, but what he set out to do was no bad thing.
Kids are so addicted to junk food that iirc they were getting their parents to bring them mcdonalds so they didn't have to eat his food.
Adding that I am not calling this food "junk", but am definitely calling it as not enough and not good enough for a growing human. How do chips keep anyone feeling full?
I remember in high school after PE class we would all pile our plates up as full as you can get them and you would still be hungry again in the afternoon.
This is the one thing I am kind of proud of homecountry-wise. It's not gourmet or anything special, but it's wholesome real food. Picture is a pretty average version of it:
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Every school has a weekly menu and most school lunch food are staple foods that people also eat as adults and make at home. Everyone has their school food favourites and favourite things to hate, many of the foods have remained the same through the decades, but many have also been removed from the menus, because nobody would eat them today. The humble spinach pancake with lingonberry jam is a favourite across generations.
Since the 90s more and more schools have closed their own kitchens and fired the cooks that we still had when I was a kid, my highschool cook made such good roast potatoes from leftover boiled potatoes that the foodline always got a bit rowdy because there was never enough for everyone (they were a bonus treat on top of the normal menu). These days the kitchens are moving more and more towards centralized kitchens and the food has gotten a lot worse as a result, far fewer kids actually eat it today even though it is free. But it's still made to certain standards and it has to have enough protein and energy for proper sustinance.
During school closures from covid school lunch was also still given out weekly in daily portions because for poor families it is a huge deal.
I feel like this and the right to roam laws are the two things the national bourge dares not touch, althought they periodically do try. But if this was changed, I am sure conditions would worsen a lot faster.
Ah, the humble finnish school lunch. Despite my endless supply of criticism of this bullshit nightmare country, I gotta say that the finnish school lunch system is an absolute banger. Soup days were my favourite, because they'd serve regular soft bread instead of näkkileipä (crispbread? idk). Now as an adult I of course understand that näkkileipä fucking rules, but as a kid I hated it.
Pretty sad that schools and daycares don't have their own kitchens any more. No idea what school lunches are like these days, but I can imagine it's indeed a lot worse. Better than nothing though, I hope.
I loved in a very, very well off suburb in California when I was a kid. This is what the average lunch was, and we had to buy this we didn't get free meals, probably because my friends and I didn't make the cut off. These are the exact items I remember getting lol. A lot of the time we would go to the Thai restaurant across the street and buy a cup of rice for $1 and put sweet and sour sauce on it, or go buy a slice of pizza next door. This was in highschool
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That's a snack.
Like this is sort of the amount that you would get in the afternoon here if you have a long day. A sandwich or something with maybe a yogurt and some juice or something.
It was all so disgusting, too. Everything was sitting under warming lamps that I swear were just regular light bulbs. The fries were like, cold, wet and dry all at the same time. And the tortilla in the burrito was super dried out and it probably had that yoga mat fake meat filler in it but we liked those best. But yeah, that's why we would often just go across the street and get rice instead of all that, it was at least hot and fresh from the rice cooker. It was kinda crazy, there would be a line of 15-20 kids outside of that restaurant waiting to get a fucking cup of white rice with nothing else on it because it was tastier than our school food. Recounting this is really making me understand just how insane it was to be fed this way.
Were those sausages in gravy in your photo? And were those normal Dill pickles or something else? I would've devoured that as a kid if I had a choice between yours and mine
God dammit that is dark! And they do look like the saddest fries anyone has ever seen.
Answering your question they are small sausages in gravy yeah, very popular with taters here, kids especially love this dish. These days there is also a vegan version of this. And that is dill pickles. Could also be pickled beets or such in a dish like this one. But this is definitely a local school lunch favourite.
We also do the fish fingers and chicken nuggets sometimes, but the salad buffet and a side of mashed potato or rice and a gravy of some sort will also be there with it. Fish finger gravy is typically a spinach gravy and its so good.
You also get that dry cracker bread every day in school, except on soup and porridge days there is usually soft bread and some veggies, cheese or ham to put on it, because the soup or porridge alone isn't considered filling enough. And milk every day, these days also a plant milk option. The milk historically was the dairy industry lobbying in schools, everyone had to drink all this milk for healthy bones and teeth. We had hilarious dairy propaganda posters in our school cafeteria.
Finland. Afaik only Finland and Sweden have free school food today, but this might be a Western brainworm take. I've no idea about AES countries for example.
School lunch is currently written into law and the law has been in place since 1948. It started from a law where the kids took part in picking the food with their teacher for a five year period outside the school hours to gather food for this, some schools had gardens and stuff too. This produce was then used to make collective meals. After the five year start period it has been fully free and paid for by the municipalities and the state.
When I was in school we would still go out to pick berries with our teacher that were then used in the school kitchen to make the lingonberry and bluberry jams for the winter. Everyone had to pick a small cup of them so it was nothing like the original giving away of labor time outside school hours.
I've not yet found a recount of the history of the school lunch from a leftist pov, but I can bet this is a result of the deep struggle here that began from the strikes in 1905. After the war our fash had lost and were probably more eager to give out things like this to the proles.
The schooling system and its role in nation building and homogenization of the proletariat here is a complex one where consessions and control are sometimes hard to tell apart, especially since today everything in history is stated in a way where they say things like "in 1948 Finland wrote a law that ensures school lunch for everyone" and none of how we got there and who was this for gets adressed.
I was guessing Sweden (the lingonberry jam and right to roam). I was close!
I started reading the Under the North Star series by Vaino Linna, about the struggles of Finnish history. I've read book 1 so far and plan to read the sequels. I was an au pair in Finland too, many years ago. I loved it and would have loved to stay there but health issues combined with the fact that the nordic countries aren't that easy to move to, made it impossible. I would definitely like to learn more about Finnish history. I keep intending to watch The Unknown Soldier too.
Oh that is very cool.
You should definitely watch The Unknown Soldier. It is one of the rare war movies that doesn't glorify war. The writer was a leftist and his sentiment about the war is a lot clearer in the original book, but later prints and the movie too are pretty heavily bourgeoisie-washed. Other great leftist authors are people like Lauri Viita, but pretty sure he was never translated. On marxist.org there are also amazing writings by commies from here that are all also in Finnish, but they can tell you the leftist history of this country, the war and how we ended up where we now are.
OT: I will add that the right to roam law in Finland is very different from the Swedish one and the Finnish one is the most expansive. It originates from the time where the various peoples living here had no concept of landownership and people would just take up a spot in the forest and live their life there (slash&burn farming) and when you moved on from a spot, it was again free for anyone to live in. As a result all sorts of foraging and sleeping in the wild is allowed and nobody can announce anything as private property even if they own it. In Sweden it was more like "you can spend a night in the lords lands and eat one handfull of nuts from the tree, but then you need to move on".
Chilling to think how the austerity people are dismantling systems like this where I live
The people making everyone poor convinced people to blame the parents for being poor.
I remember primary school food in the 90s in the uk, it was definitely not the healthiest but it was more substantial than this. Shout out to my homies turkey twizzlers and potato smilies 😆
New York is considered one of the better states educationally and this is what we got. For most of my high school career I paid double to get double lunch, which got me called out repeatedly by the gym teacher for being unhealthy.
How would your gym teacher know what your lunch order is? (I just didn't eat at school, so I don't know how it works. Also different country)
There’s probably a single British pound of food there. How is anywhere in the supposedly developed world this poor?
Most advanced country
Hot take: I feel like this gets thrown out to absolve the American public, the idea being the US is only advanced cuz we have so many mega-rich while the rest of the country lives is squalor.
While this is kinda true, I also think the reason the richest and most powerful country has so much broke and tacky shit is a cultural one. Americans culture sells everyone on simultaneously being a "rugged individualist frontiersman" and also a consumerist piggy. So good infrastructure is state tyranny, but also slop is an expression of our capitalist wealth. The American middle class loves that everything is shitty and tacky because it makes them feel like feudal Barrons as they drive their F150s to Buffalo Wild Wings.
yeah there’s zero shot we’re the most advanced.
maybe we have the most advanced propaganda machine, the most advanced spying apparatus, and the most advanced military, but for your average person living in this country they don’t even have a fucking bus route in their town, let alone a train, LET ALONE a bullet train that can get them anywhere in a reasonable amount of time. all of the roads are broken, they barely even install street lights anywhere anymore besides right outside of middle class neighborhoods. the airports are all shit.
everything here is old or its shitty or its fucked or its all 3.
we’re “the most advanced” in that all the world’s parasitic rich pieces of shit live here because we’re such a fucked up shit hole that they get to lord over us all and live like gods while the rest of us slave away for scraps while damn near every elected official is at the age that they should just fucking die already but even they wont do us that favor and instead they control our lives to the degree that we arent even allowed to look at a god damn brain rot app anymore. but here you go here’s some propaganda on facebook and instagram because thats the good kind of propaganda
dammit now im heated. fuck amerikkka. death to amerikkka.
parasitic rich pieces of shit live here because we're such a fucked up shit hole that thet get to lore over us like gods while the rest of us slave away for scraps
That's exactly what "most advanced" means lol. The US is probably the best place for the 1% of the 1% of the 1% to live because they can do whatever they want and get whatever they want so long as they have the cash.
Just look at all the private jets used for frivolous reasons, like the Kardashians or Starbucks CEO using them to commute up and down California or the west coast. Like they're not even flying to Dallas, let alone New York or Miami. Even the EU is talking about banning private flights or imposing harsher taxes. Banning any kind of carbon emissions is completely off the table in the US. Taylor Swift fans would rather watch the world burn than inconvenience their queen.
Everyone loved Bosco stick day at my school those things slapped
Most advanced country.... Hahahahahaha!
It’s only advanced when your bank account is fat enough. The rest has to fight to even get the slop, while
and his companions are trying their hardest to make their manic visions reality.I gotta tell you, I once got the opportunity to go to Japan where there was an intersection of advanced technology and my money stretching very far. Hopping on the train to anywhere for $2, going through a convenience store, buying anything your heart desires (sushi, a sando, chips, dessert, nuts, tea, water, fried chicken, fried potatoes, salad - whatever) while spending maybe $4 on it, going to a park, and enjoying nature was really nice. I don't think I'm coping when I say that a mansion, waitstaff, and a golf course could ever compare. When you have to go out into public in your palanquin and it's all a gray blob of industry and its refuse there's no way you could think it's superior to waiting 5 minutes in line to ride a ferris wheel because it's not prohibitively expensive. People were very nice to me in Japan as well.
This isn't to say that there's not a particular charm to places outside the anglosphere where the infrastructure isn't what I would call advanced where people were also incredibly kind. But I was thinking about the intersection of technology superior to America and having a more equitable society (even if it's not an enviable situation).
tangential pontification
Being rich must be like going to Family Mart for me except you're talking about real estate. Like yeah, this house for a family of 4 is nice - I'd probably make some money off of it, but I don't want to have a meeting with my real estate manager to update the portfolio. But even if you're not there, going into a mall in America and just grabbing what looks nice would be a power trip. For my last meal I tried to run up the bill on conveyor belt sushi and ended up spending less than $40. It was fucking weird. If you ran up a bill in a mall and you felt the same way about $2,000 that's probably what it's like.
Woah, I didn’t expect such a thorough answer (well I didn’t expect any tbh), but that’s one of the things I love about this community.
People out of nowhere just posting really detailed and/or obscure facts or just sharing their unique experiences from all over the world. Really gives me insight into things that I probably would’ve never gotten elsewhere.
Because you and I have much more in common than we have differences, comrade. That thought you expressed is something I've chewed on in my own head for a long time. I've been screaming into the void about how people abroad have services that are better for less for over a year. And frankly I just don't see a fat bank account being worth stripping the copper from the walls in society - I'd rather an honest living in a good place.
I was more or less in shitposting-mode when I wrote that
But your response really made me think, because I’m very poor (for someone living in the EU), like I don’t even have an income or ever had a job because of health issues. So I’m not even among those that are fighting for the slop, I’m just in the background watching the carnage. Yet because I live in a country that has somewhat of a safety-net, I’m mostly at peace with my situation. Of course I desire some things that others have, but I’m still fine with a modest life.
I keep seeing other comrades talking about the issues in their lives, and even though they objectively have a better life than me, I still get the feeling that they are worse off, because they have to constantly fight to survive, to not end up homeless or to run out of meds. If everything is going as planned, you can have a really nice time in places like the US but if something bad happens, you’re screwed. No solidarity, no cushion, no nothing. Everything has been stripped away by the greed of a few.
So I definitely prefer living in a country that maybe doesn’t have all the potential luxuries that Amerikkka has to offer, but instead has services that aren’t optimized for profit but made to help people. I don’t want to be stuck in a bottomless, golden cage where I constantly have to cling to the bars to not fall off and it makes me sad that the achievements of the labour movement from the last century are being eroded bit by bit in so many countries.
If basic needs aren’t being satisfied then how can we even think about implementing all those nice extras that you mentioned in your previous comment? Of course you could argue that technological advancements could make things better or that politicians could hand out a couple of treats, but then I would respond that as long as the whole system is set up to exploit everything, all those niceties always have either a catch or just a thin veneer. In the end profit comes before humans and their quality of life.
So fuck billionaires and their cronies! Leave my buses and trains alone!
In my head I was trying to form some pontification about how the treats are nice if they're not exploitative. And I think what we're ultimately doing a dance around socialism being the key and that a better world is possible. I once heard, and I think I was a high schooler in philosophy class, that a just society could place you in any position in that society and you'd be able to go "yeah my conditions are X,Y, and Z but it feels fair." Like if you were put into society as a slave you'd be like "this is bullshit!" or if you were the poor child In Omelas you'd be like "wtf you guys!!" so they wouldn't be just societies. If you were infirm in one way or another but you weren't homeless or made to do manual labor it seems just to be like "this isn't ideal, but I get it." Cause we're not exactly trying to iron the waves out of the ocean, just responding to our material conditions together. It would sure feel good to know, even if I were the laborer, like 999 times out of 1000, my work can trace its origin and motivation towards the good of the society in which I'm living instead of some bullshit like OEMing cheap plastic products marketed towards people who have mobile gambling app winnings to spend. Or, all too commonly, being a warm body for some suit to show how they manage X amount of people to some board of directors. Because I sure as shit would rather contribute to and be part of a society who takes care of everyone instead of all coming together to decide that 19 or 20 people get infinite purchasing power and full discretion over how we create and spend our surplus labor value. And, circling back, I know this because even being in places that are not good, but obviously less shitty, was rejuvenating.
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.
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.
We had pizza and chicken burgers and stuff when I went to school
In the 80's my middle school started bringing in Pizza Hut once a week (or month, can't remember tbh). It was all downhill from there.
Our Middle School was literally sponsored by Domino's Pizza
