In my country, there’s no US style cafeteria (instead it’s a canteen where it’s up to the student if they want to buy anything) some bring their own lunches (home or leftovers) to school, so why do American kids rely on cafeteria food instead of bringing their own?
I mean, is cafeteria food across American schools that bad? It depends on where one resides or if they attend a public or private school. In my case I went to a private (Catholic) high school and the food there is actually good (& cheap when converted to USD).
If you’re curious about the history, public school lunches were federally funded and made free under FDR during WWII to combat malnourishment, especially for high schoolers who were getting drafted after turning 18.
It was so successful that the US continued the policy even after the war ended, and hence cafeterias became the default since they include a large kitchen that’s capable of producing high quality food at large quantities.
That is until Reagen, among a crap ton of other things, nuked lots of the socialist policies which included free school lunches.
Schools continued to produce lunch, but you had to pay.
40+ years of insane decline later, and public schools are so under funded that they can’t even afford to produce lunch in their cafeterias anymore. American consumerism shoved its way in, so now everything is prepackaged garbage made as cheaply as possible from the same conglomerates that make unhealthy trash that’s often banned by other countries due to health risks.
The final killing blow was when Michelle Obama failed to tackle this core issue in her student health campaign, and they forced public schools to ban essentially flavor as a concept (anything “high” in salt, spice, oil/fats, calories, etc).
Everything was switched over to “healthy” options which literally just meant low fat/zero calorie slop or sugar slop.
If you want a real kicker, the chocolate milk they served at my HS had 28g of sugar per serving lol. But don’t worry because the vending machines now only have baked potato chips and diet soda.
Charter and private schools aren’t really affected by this since they have alternative funding sources.
I swear to God, every comment I read about life in the US boils down to ‘slight adjustment made to orphan-crushing machine’.
Yes. And it constantly comes back to Reagan.
Reagan understood that Jesus loves corporations, not children.
Wait until you find out about school lunch debt and schools preventing 3rd parties from paying it off.
Or my personal favorite, when my son was getting a full lunch packed every day and also getting a school lunch on credit and when his mother and I said “uh, the kid has a lunch and we do not want him getting school lunch on top of his packed lunch because DUH” they straight up said they will not disallow him from getting a school lunch on top of it because he must be hungry.
Except plot twist! He admitted he was only getting the school lunch for the treat and the chocolate milk and throwing the rest away. Kid got cookies or a brownie or something sweet in every packed lunch, and ate them every day, ate his whole packed lunch, as he didn’t even like 90% of the food on the school menu.
Mentioned that to the school and was told that they couldn’t control what he does or does not eat. “But you can control him not racking up debt that we have to pay that we didn’t expect, can’t you?!”
NO.
And that’s how my wife and I together paid roughly $200 over the course of his first grade year for lunches that he largely threw out.