It’s free in our state, so why not?
We live in a pretty rich district too, so the food is actually really good. They’ve got multiple options each day for vegetarians and gluten free, and also a salad bar.
And it’s hot food. Sure you could send a packed lunch, but they don’t allow 1000 kids to microwave their lunches. It would take too long. So if you want hot food, you go through the lunch line.
A lot of kids eat school lunch because it's subsidized, and cheaper than food from home would be.
Or because both parents work and don't have time to pack lunches, and the kids won't do it themselves.
Or because no one in the household knows how to cook (no, really).
Or because it helps them "fit in".
I always packed my own lunch, from middle school onward. Now I send my kids with lunches I pack; if I don't they just won't eat.
Kids are weird.
The lunch arrangements will vary greatly by age/grade level. A high school is more likely to have the canteen style while an elementary school is more likely to have the cafeteria style. In either case, bringing a lunch from home is also reasonably common.
When I was in school, the full price of the cafeteria lunch, with 8 oz milk, was $1.25. That was very affordable, and the federal nutrition guidelines meant it wasn't that unhealthy. Finally the actual food wasn't actually all that unpalatable either.
Breakfast was free for everyone under a federally funded program. But I didn't eat that because you had to show up at 6:30 am to get it.
This is a 1:1 copy repost of a thread from months ago. Will post original if I find it again.
EDIT: https://lemmy.world/post/44664547/22841691
it was deleted
Many United States public schools treat their students more like prisoners.
When I was going to elementary school in Texas, there was a traffic light on the cafeteria wall. If the light was green, we could sit where we liked. If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line. If the light was red, we had to sit in the same order, and also we were not allowed to speak.
The food was terrible. We loved our awful little pizza rectangles because they were the least terrible thing we were served.
Holy shit, someone else that had the traffic light! They made us do alphabetical order seating instead of the order you went through line, which sucked because you couldn’t sit with your friends even if you couldn’t talk.
What?? Why? Like what caused the light to change?
For us it was always being ‘too loud’, like a cafeteria full of children 10 and under is ever going to be that quiet. It’s not like kids were shrieking all the time or anything, they just talked excitedly. There weren’t even classrooms near the cafeteria to be bothered by the noise! The more I think about it the more I want to go kick them in the shins about it
That is weird as fuck. What a stupid rule. Kids are noisy.
But why ? Sounds like totally absurd as a rule
Control. Punishment and guilt are ingrained in our culture. Abuse has been normalized.
Unfortunately, not all kids that go to school can afford to pay for food. In some cases the meal they get at school is the only one they get.
Source: Worked with public schools
Can confirm, while my parents never let my sister and I go without something for dinner, sometimes they didn't eat and often it was sandwiches.
School lunch was both the biggest meal I usually got and the only one my family didn't have to pay for. (my school had subsidized and free lunches depending on financial situation)
And thanks to republicunts in my area, most local schools are prohibited by local laws from offering free lunches now. As a result, the school I went to now has 1 cent lunches since it HAS to be paid for, and they leave a jar of pennies by the register so you can take one and hand it to them. And the MAGAts pat themselves on the back for taking food from literal children.
There's also the meal prep time, which many families, particularly poor ones, can't afford either.
My mom prepped my lunch for the week on Sunday. One pot of white rice, one can of SPAM, sliced and pan fried, and packets of ketchup lifted from restaurants. Lunch was rice, one slice of SPAM and a packet of rice. Prep was quick.
Still, free school lunch like those shown in movies looked luxurious.
Yeah, making lunch can be quick. But I also think its easy to overlook how scarce of a resource time can be when you're struggling to make ends meet. I say this as someone who has been fortunate for most of life; it didn't really occur to me until it was pointed out.
From experience, it was usually gross and either over or undercooked.
But it was enough to fill an empty stomach :/
Except my senior year of highschool in which they only were allowed to offer a single slice of bread with peanut butter on it and a tiny Dixie cup of water. If you had allergies, fuck you, starve.
This is a special case but we learned my partner has AFRID on top of food restrictions. So it can be especially harder for children with special needs to be able to eat
I realize you only made a typo, but for anyone looking for more information the abbreviation is ARFID
Which is why the school lunch should be funded by tax money, like in some sane countries.
And no, just because its funded by tax money, it doesnt have to be some cheap slop, you can make laws and regulations that govern what sort of quality the food has to be. Just like in some sane countries.
Some US states already do this. It's mainly unpopular in red states, though, because their 'protect the children' rhetoric ends when it stops being synonymous with harming women.
Not to overly repeat myself, but as discussed in the book "dying of whiteness", there's a lot of people that would rather their kid go hungry than a black kid get a meal.
Or if like my family they DID make enough money but they used it in addition to starving me at home when being punished for who the hell knows what. So I got a job and paid for that lunch. It was the only meal I would eat many days. Summers were not good.
This has to be reiterated whenever anyone talks about 'American schools.'
US has a Federal system where each state runs its own schools, and each local community has its own school board. Two schools can be ten miles apart and have completely different standards and curriculums.
Also, each school has a different social milieu. In one place, the popular kids might bring in meals cooked by their maids, so eating cafeteria food is a sign of poverty. In another place bringing your own lunch might be a thing only the poor kids do.
Sometimes bringing your own food is due to cross-contamination in cafeteria foods, especially if a kid is allergic to stuff. I was below poverty and still had to bring my own food due to celiac disease.
My kid just started TK and the school is serving such a high poverty area that they give free breakfast and lunch. It's hard to pass up, and isn't the worst quality in the world but still a little more sugar than I'd prefer. Fruit yes, vegetable no, and loads of dairy (which is a thing thanks to US subsidizing farms, this is where that surplus goes. Corn syrup, too though, unfortunately).
It's also kind of a lot of trouble for two working parents to prep a lunch for multiple kids every day. Leftovers are great, but they don't always hold for the few hours they're in a bag. I'm allowed to bring food to them at 11:30am, but I'm working so it's a non starter. My daughter also attends a Japanese Saturday school though and prepping a bento box is required.
My daughter also attends a Japanese Saturday school though and prepping a bento box is required.
Wow, that’s a pretty strict policy. Is it just so they get a consistent cultural experience with meals during school? As opposed to ‘you have to bring lunch but a brown bag is fine’
I mean it's one of those implicit things. We've snuck some leftover pasta in there though, along with a rice ball... hehe
Interestingly, elementary schools here (Japan) provide school lunch, so no bento required unless it is a half day or field trip etc.
It is very nutritious, and rotates through a variety of Japanese and international cuisine. We get a menu each month so we can talk to the kids about it. The children take turns helping to serve lunch in their classroom. You can go back for seconds if there is any left, and you can ask for less of certain things depending on preference.
Kindergarten usually has the option of school lunch or bento (but it depends on on the actual kindergarten). I think JHS may be bento. I’m not at that point yet.
Yeah, that's good to clarify; my girl attends a special school in the US that originally was designed to keep native Japanese kids up to date with language while living in the US because of a father's international work, etc., sometimes not even for a full semester. They've since had you start accepting US born kids too, so long as they're proficient in Japanese.
They're housed within a public school but are ultimately private so they don't have access to facilities like that.
You can bring your own food. Cafeteria food in the US (at least, from my childhood) was notoriously bad. Back in the day they didn't really care about whether or not you could eat it either, if you couldn't you got a cold alternative dish.
Another factor is poverty however. Poorer families are more likely to rely on the cafeteria system. Rich families provide their kids with high quality food.
Movies don't always do a great job of depicting things. I imagine they might skew towards depicting practices that are common in southern California, or where the creative team grew up. If the cafeteria set on the back lot is shaped a certain way, re-dressing it to change to another style might not make sense for your budget.
It's going to vary based on private/public, state, and then local school jurisdiction, wealth of the community, and wealth of the family.
My school experience had a mix of:
Most tables would be a mix of these choices. Some tables might only have kids buying items, or only bringing items from home. In one friend group it might be considered lame to buy lunch, or lame to have something packed by a parent. In some groups and age brackets trading might be prolific, rare, or non-existent.
In my school about half the kids packed their own lunch and the other half would get a lunch from the school. The school lunches were made hot and you had a rotating menu with 3 options and a salad bar each day, they called it hot lunch. Some kids (most of the ones who got hot lunch) received it at a free or reduced price. A little over 2 dollars normally but 75 cents reduced or free like I got mine. Some schools did have a canteen rather than a lunch menu. American culture is not anywhere near as homogeneous as it appears in our media.
I send my kids in with a home lunch because I don't trust the school food. I can do that easily because I'm home all day, I imagine overworked parents don't have the time or the money, they rely on the school to feed their kids.
In my region, and this will vary a lot depending on what state and school district you're in, the median income is below poverty level, so the school offers free breakfast and lunch to every student.
It makes no sense for me to spend time and money preparing lunches for the kids if there's a free hot meal waiting for them.
When/where I grew up, free lunches were available to some students, based on the household income, and my parents packed me a lunch because it was cheaper than paying the daily cost.
The general logic seems to be if the kids are required to be at school all day then the school is required to feed them.
Also more practically, the school meals are the best meals some of these kids get, depending on their home situation.
When I went through school, I did both at various points. Sometimes I'd buy lunch in the cafeteria. Sometimes I'd take a bag lunch.
The cafeteria can do hot food, which you can't bring. But a bag lunch lets you choose options that aren't served in the cafeteria.
I mean, honestly, same subsequent to education, at work. People might bring a lunch, or might eat commercially-prepared food. Not really a universal standard.
Depends on the kid: I never did and mine didn't either. Mostly just because the school lunches were bad.
So, I'm not sure I understand the question - you said your schools have canteen and kids use them.
What reasons do they have?
The cafeteria at our school is free for everyone.
I don't feel like the food I got in the cafeteria as a kid was slop, but there were definitely some dishes that did better when cooked en masse than others, and some that were more or less appealing. Like, pizza, ravioli, burgers, chicken sandwiches or nuggets, they all tended to be pretty consistent and good. The spaghetti tended toward being kind of weak and mushy because I imagine it's tricky to get a proper al dente when you're cooking for hundreds of people. Likewise, the baked chicken wasn't anything to write home about.
Most of where they'd drop the ball was with texture or with things not being spiced as well as they could have been. But again, at scale I'm sure it's tricky.
As others have said, though, the US is nowhere near as homogeneous as you'd assume if you only watch our media. A lot of the complaints about school food being inedible are also significantly overblown because it's something to complain about and bond over.
My kids both go to a Kansas school. One is lactose intolerant, so we often pack his lunch - yogurts and cheeses figure fairly heavily into the meal options. My other kid usually grabs whatever's being served, which includes hot options along with things similar to what you listed.
They have a school-issued card that they scan whenever they get the school lunch, which is linked to an account we top up online. I believe that qualifying families get either reduced pricing or funds for the account. Our kids actually keep assuming everything is free, because they just go through and get to pick so much from this station, so much from that station, etc.
I think there’s some relationship to consuming overproduction of American farms decades ago, isn’t there?
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