And THAT is the truth. The decline in the food served has been going on a long time while we weren't paying attention. When you see American school lunches compared to other countries we should be ashamed. But we do lip service to our children and finger pointing pretty well. Who was it that tried to call ketchup a vegetable again?
Lol. I forgot about that!
yeah I was served tasteless, oily, packaged stuff in the 1980s. So I think you may be off a bit...
Ok, I will bite.....why?
Yes, parents have personal responsibility. HOWEVER, if a parent doesn't take responsibility, the one that get punished is the child. It is not their fault. Everyone deserves to eat, especially a child. A child should not be punished for the 'sins' of the parents. Do you think a child deserves to starve if they have irresponsible parents?
There is also the liability of having a kitchen in the school. Most commercial kitchens use gas-fired stoves and ovens, there commercial dishwashers that create huge amounts of steam, etc. The injury liability and the insurance necessary to protect schools and towns/cities from lawsuits is prohibitive. It's also a large part of why dedicated home ec and shop classrooms were removed.
Although I don’t think my kids ever ate in the HS cafeteria, that’s always been how it works here, here is your lunch money, spend it on lunch, or make your own lunch and keep the money. My 22 year old is doing clinicals at a hospital this summer, she has yet to see the cafeteria, pack her lunches every night (big on salads with grilled chicken and lots of cut up veggies). So many containers! Mt husband always brings lunch.
Most of our schools do not have facilities to cook food, we have vendors. I think our newest school was built in the 1950’s.
Agreed it's not the child's fault, and I never want a child to go hungry. However, I would rather have systems in place that promote parents taking their personal responsibility more seriously. Feeding all children for free regardless of need of that service will create more dependency on the government for society to function. I believe society is best when government is more hands off and just sets the guardrails.
Yes, it was awful quality and unhealthy when I was a kid and it was the same when my (now adult) kids were in school too. One particular lunch my oldest and her friends would joke about was "Italian Dunkers"-- it was breadsticks to dip in tomato sauce, but when the school would run out of breadsticks they would just use hot dog buns. So that was the entree-- a plain stale hot dog bun. No protein, no vegetable other than the sauce. How could that possibly be a healthy meal for a teenager?
Do you really think that making children literally starve is an effective method of teaching their parents personal responsibility?
No meat on Fridays was the norm in public school because Catholics were not allowed to eat meat on Fridays. I remember a line of angry moms outside the Principal's on Friday when the menu listed hamburgers as the menu for that day. It was wrong. The actual menu was meatless or fish.
Well, the free lunches are a profit center for the Sacramento City Unified School district. Like $1 million a year in profit in a district with 40,000 students. Somehow they have found a way to produce the lunches that meet the requirements for less than the federal reimbursement.
Currently, my kids have a pretty amazing lunch program. They get food from local restaurants - so "real pizza" on Fridays, chicken cutlet on a roll from the deli, real meatballs and pasta type stuff. Ok, maybe it's Italian heavy!
There are definitely duds, but you can't win them all! It's also a school where there are volunteers and people making the lunches except for the times there are restaurant deliveries. Only catch is that there is 1 choice and that's it.
Interesting because lent does not mean Catholics must eat fish. Only that they should not eat meat. We eat lots of Mac and cheese, pizza, eggs, veggies….you get the idea.
