Topic: Fed Up With School Lunch

[Schlotzky5]

http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/

A teacher posts experiences with school lunches. They eat the lunch every day and take a picture of it. Pretty disgusting stuff.

[Quemaqua]

Jeez.  Certainly makes me feel happy about what I'm eating every day.  Quite the interesting blog.

[iPPi]

Ugh that's disgusting.

[Ghandi]

Wow, that is disgusting.

I never once ate school food in 12 years. Seeing that makes me feel blessed that I had a mom that could afford to send me off to school with a packed lunch everyday.

[Xessive]

Man, kinda puts a new perspective on "having food versus starving" arguments. Assuming, of course, that stuff qualifies as food.

[nickclone]

I used to pack my lunch up until the 6th grade, then my parents felt it would be cheaper and easier if I bought it at school. I bought it one time, bit into what I think was a chicken nugget and never bought my lunch again. I would save the $2 a day and buy candy/soda/ice cream etc.

School food is bad, but jail food is worse. Most of the food you get is cold by the time you eat it.

[gpw11]

We had really good food in junior and high school, but I don't think any of the elementary schools here have a cafeteria program in place.  Also, considering the prices in highschool, there was a reason it wasn't shit - it wasn't fucking cheap.

[scottws]

I at school food from like 4th grade on.  Looking back, I'm sure a lot of it was gross but you sort of tempered your expectations.  So there were "good" meals that you really liked.  Like pizza, sliced turkey roll, and burritos.

My high school's food was pretty good.  Much better than grade school.

[Quemaqua]

I never ate school food.  Had a lunch every day, even if I packed it myself.

[gpw11]

I kind of get the point of this, but kind of don't.  Is this shit fully free in the U.S.? Whenever I hear school lunches being criticized, it's always on the basis that you should be able to eat healthy regardless of your income situation (also brought up in regards to to legislating better standards in fast food). Yet, my thing is that when I'm broke as fuck I probably eat healthier....because most of the cheapest meals you can put together and WANT to eat are cheap as fuck.  It's the lazy meals that kill your heart and arteries.

[scottws]

No, school lunches aren't free.  I'm guessing they are heavily subsidized though.

[Schlotzky5]

If you are under a certain income bracket you can get free lunches. That line is pretty low. I think its around the poverty line.

[Ghandi]

My sister teaches third grade and the majority of her kids get free lunch since many of her students come from low-income families. I don't know what the cutoff is but I would assume around $30,000 a year income.

[WindAndConfusion]

The "subsidy" is only about $3 a day or less, which is why the quality of the food is so bad. I think the budgeting also allows schools to use extra money for other purposes, which encourages schools to provide even cheaper, even nastier food.

Personally, what I hated more than the crappy food were all the useless classes that obviously only existed to fulfill some administrative requirement. Examples:
* A Spanish language class taught by an idiotic white woman with a sockpuppet, which was useless for actually LEARNING Spanish but which allowed students to meet University of California requirements. 
* A class on "study skills" which existed only so that the school wouldn't have its budget slashed for not "teaching" sufficiently many hours per week. The class was not only stupid and useless, but the textbook also contained numerous factual errors (its section on the Internet was particularly hilarious).
* The TWO FUCKING YEARS of typing and "office skills" classes that students were required to take before they were allowed to go near an actual, useful computer science class.
* The "health science" class which was at least half-full (half-empty?) of vapid political propaganda and pop psychology. (Fact: I got in fat-indignant-middle-aged-woman-screaming-at-me trouble for writing a fake suicide note on the back of an exam about self-esteem.)

[Quemaqua]

I got in fat-indignant-middle-aged-woman-screaming-at-me trouble for writing a fake suicide note on the back of an exam about self-esteem.

That's possibly the best school stunt I've ever heard.

[WindAndConfusion]

Oh look, another reason public schools are so fucked up.

[Schlotzky5]

Awful. Part of growing up is being slowly exposed to that stuff. I remember looking up dirty words in the dictionary. Its called being a kid.

[WindAndConfusion]

The worst part is that some kids probably got punished for using the dictionary.

[Quemaqua]

He'll never make that mistake again.

[scottws]

The "subsidy" is only about $3 a day or less, which is why the quality of the food is so bad. I think the budgeting also allows schools to use extra money for other purposes, which encourages schools to provide even cheaper, even nastier food.

Personally, what I hated more than the crappy food were all the useless classes that obviously only existed to fulfill some administrative requirement. Examples:
* A Spanish language class taught by an idiotic white woman with a sockpuppet, which was useless for actually LEARNING Spanish but which allowed students to meet University of California requirements. 
* A class on "study skills" which existed only so that the school wouldn't have its budget slashed for not "teaching" sufficiently many hours per week. The class was not only stupid and useless, but the textbook also contained numerous factual errors (its section on the Internet was particularly hilarious).
* The TWO FUCKING YEARS of typing and "office skills" classes that students were required to take before they were allowed to go near an actual, useful computer science class.
* The "health science" class which was at least half-full (half-empty?) of vapid political propaganda and pop psychology. (Fact: I got in fat-indignant-middle-aged-woman-screaming-at-me trouble for writing a fake suicide note on the back of an exam about self-esteem.)

I was a product of private schools, but we send Jennie's son to public school.  The place constantly pisses me off because you can tell they design their entire curriculum around meeting certain benchmarks.  His second-grade teacher let it slip last year that the second-grade curriculum at his school was specifically designed so that the students all pass two state tests they had to take.

I understand the government trying to encourage teacher and administrator accountability at schools, but all it really ends up doing is dumbing-down what the students learn about.  If they really want to do this, they should set much higher standards.

[Schlotzky5]

I just read Freakonomics and theres a great bit about teachers that cheat on state exams. It's much more common than you might think.

3 bucks a day seems like kind of a lot. If youre making your own food in large quantities 3 bucks can go a ways. I think the problem is that the food is all pre-made. In Super-Size Me one of the lunch ladies says her most important tool in the kitchen is a box cutter.

[ren]

3 bucks a day seems like kind of a lot. If youre making your own food in large quantities 3 bucks can go a ways.

Yeah seriously. I spend slightly more than that for an entire day's worth of food and my meals go way further than those tiny, disgusting looking lunches.

[WindAndConfusion]

The National School Lunches Program provides ~$3 a day, just for lunches (plus a bit more for breakfast or afternoon snacks).

Anyway, the cost of ingredients is a small fraction of the cost of a school lunch program. It's not enough just to buy ingredients for ~100-1000 lunches per day; you also need the ability to prepare that much food and then serve it (not to mention the costs of storage and distribution). I can think of very few restaurants that can handle 1000 patrons/day, and most of them have quality problems and operating costs significantly higher than $3/meal.

(Where do you live that you can buy a decent amount of food for $3?* In college, I almost starved myself to death trying to live off $8 of food per day.)

((*Don't say Canada, or we'll fucking bomb you.))

[ren]

I assumed the $3 referred just for food and not everything that goes with it. It was a pretty stupid and flawed assumption now that you've pointed it out.

As for your other question, I budgeted myself to $5 a day for food for a while and stuck to it without too much difficult.

It went like this:

Breakfast: Yoghurt and Muesli mix. I made my own yoghurt which makes it cheaper by a neglible amount but increases the fun.
A days worth of yoghurt comes out to a dollar or so, a $10 pack of muesli can last a couple of weeks.

Lunch: Sandwich or two ($0.35 bun, $0.20ish worth of meat, lots of peppers, spinach, tomato, red onion, cucumber)
That probably ends up being $1-$1.50

Dinner: Usually rice with lentils/beans or some sort of curry.
Rice and lentils are pretty much free. A months worth can be bought from loose change. The curry consists of whatever vegetables are on the discount rack plus spices.

Snacks: random stuff that was on sale that week. This is probably the most expensive part, especially if you snack all day. Stuff like dried fruit or bread with homemade dips is pretty cheap.

And that's a reasonably healthy, decent amount of food for $5.

[Ghandi]

Lunch: Sandwich or two ($0.35 bun, $0.20ish worth of meat, lots of peppers, spinach, tomato, red onion, cucumber)
That probably ends up being $1-$1.50

Is food really cheap up north? That's significantly less than it would be in America.

[gpw11]

No, I don't know where the hell he's buying his food but he probably shouldn't be eating it.

But in all seriousness, his numbers probably aren't far off (save the meat, but I'm sure there's cheap options there as well).  If you're talking about a sandwich, you can spread a single unit of each of those vegtibles across multiple days, and if you're talkinga bout discount rack vegetables (WTF?), it could make sense.

The meat is what scares me.  The cheapest, most processed sandwich meats are usually about $1/100g aka roughly $1/.25 ounces. 

[ren]

I use shaved cooked chicken which was about $1.49ish per 100g. I only use one slice of shaved meat per day though. It's out of habit more than anything, you can't even taste it. My meat costs would be ridiculously low if I actually used a reasonable amount each day.

A green pepper costs about $1, lasts a week. A bag of spinach that lasts a week costs about $3. Cucumbers and tomatoes are about $1 each. You can buy a few lbs of onions for just a few bucks.

And I'd just buy a bag of rolls that are 50% off since they expire the next day and split them with the roommates. They disappear in no time.

The discount rack vegetables are only if you buy something and then cook it immediately. That's not the sandwich stuff that stays in the fridge all week.

[Ghandi]

You can save a ton on meat / poultry if you get it marked down. Half of the stuff that we mark down is still good for a few days (we mark it down the day before the sell-by date) but we have to mark it down. Most places mark stuff down in the morning, so go early to find the good stuff.

[gpw11]

I use shaved cooked chicken which was about $1.49ish per 100g. I only use one slice of shaved meat per day though.

Save the $1.49.  That's a microscopic amount of meat.