I’m not opposed to the carbs. I think if they’re in a whole food form, the kids are so much better off than if they’re eating processed… Anything.
Not teaching kids to eat whole foods is one of the greatest assaults on public health we’ve done in the last century, from what I can see. They become adults who normalize eating these perfect addictive meals, who allow their own kids access to the same junk, and then they their own kids as well, and so on. Until today when grocery stores are quite literally predominately food that you shouldn’t eat. You just shouldn’t.
Most common diseases in north America are highly correlated with diet. I find that so profound. We’re all eating ourselves to death in some form or another, it seems. To have that start in a public school is a real affront to individual and social well-being.
We teach kids to eat whole foods, we just don't teach them well.
I remember in school we had a lot of programs for nutrition which were basically health-food propaganda. Yes it was the "Food Pyramid" so not ideal, but there was a clear message to eat minimally-processed foods (fruits, vegetables, dairy, grains) and avoid junk. We watched "Supersize Me" and a documentary which explained all these "vegan / whole foods" diets. But kids still eat junk because they're kids and they don't really understand or care, and everyone around them eats junk; and then grow up and continue to eat junk because it's cheaper/easier and they did as kids.
Also, we had fruits and vegetables in every school lunch, as well as salads and wraps as alternatives to the hot meal. But the fruits were often wilted or bruised, and vegetables canned and/or overcooked. If we had good-tasting healthy food, I'm sure more kids would eat it; but the school lunch was school-lunch quality, and bad quality degrades healthy food more than it does junk food.
The problem is, if we want to teach kids how to eat unprocessed food so that they actually listen, we need nuance and funding. To teach them "healthy <> bad tasting", we need to give them access to good-tasting healthy meals, which are hard to cook. Or if we just keep scaring them into eating less junk, we need to change society so that it's more ingrained that junk food is bad outside of school; right now they get mixed messages, where 1 semester of health class says "junk food bad", but few people care anywhere else. But nuance, funding, and affecting culture are things the government is really bad at, especially when it's an issue as "insignificant" as eating healthy.
We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. I'd rather see kids get free pizza and hot dogs for school lunch, than I would a system where it costs $8 per student and only some kids get free lunch, but it's 100% vegan fair trade certified healthy food.
Now if you can pull a boiling frog meme and make the pizza be healthy, haha more power to them!
Many schools, especially newer ones, do not have the facilities to cook real meals.
We should definitely encourage schools to renovate and make use of the kitchens when they have them, encourage kitchen facilities be included in new construction, and maybe even encourage creative solutions when no other options exist.
Quebec hospitals started cooking all their food internally on the same budget.
More and more French municipalities stopped their frozen food subscription to hire a handful of cooks and gardeners with a similar budgets. ( those are minimum wages jobs than can be sourced locally )
To conclude : human have been cooking food in batch for quiet a while. That what I mean when I say « we forgot » : some communal facilities like school don’t even have kitchen anymore.
We didn't forget. It would just be expensive, and Americans simply don't want their hard-earned tax dollars to pay to feed other people's kids, so schools have to resort to cheap solutions. It took radical activism (mostly by the black community and groups like the black panthers) just to get school lunches to begin with, and Republicans/Conservatives have been trying to tear it down ever since.
I get your US context. That’s a handful. Thanks for providing that ( irony : 0% )
I just want to play devils advocate on the cost :
How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.
We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods.
That should be considerably easier.
( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )
A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.
Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
>How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market.
>how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?
We didn't. Child mortality was higher, populations were smaller, life expectancy was lower and malnutrition and starvation were more common.
Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
But again, the problem isn't modern processed food, which can be perfectly healthy, it's an unwillingness to fund school lunches enough to provide more than cheap, empty calories.
> Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
Absolutely.
Post WW2 food production with NPK intrants and machineries changed how we grow food. ( thanks Bayers ! )
But it’s hardly the sole factor and I would not be surprise if it was not the main driver of multiplication.
Medecine & Basic hygiene also went a long way. As well as the great convenience of bottled energy to move things arounds for cheap.
But I think we talk about a bunch of stuff at once here.
For instance I did not mention biologic produce.
Just … cooking food in a large communal kitchens with large kitchen equipment. The kind where you can cook for 50 people at once.
As opposed to : complex industrial process to build a hot pocket or a frozen breakfast burrito.
One is something most people can be trained to do, and the other needs a team of engineers to design, and another team to build the factory and another to run it.
( watching your vox link )
Oh. Ok. Yeah. I find that part relevant
> But the US government also doesn’t subsidize leafy vegetable crops in the same way it supports wheat, soy, and corn, vital ingredients in a lot of junk food.
I think it says it all. Why is the US government meddling with the market?
I live in the Us as well: We don’t pay the real price of food.
Yeah produce are labors intensive. But a lot of crap food has hidden cost that should be factored in. ( but that’s yet another topic :) )
To summarize, I find it hard to smallow that buying a frozen product that flew to you and is the result of a complex industrial process is cheaper than whatever grow with sunlight, a hour of care a day and some water.
I don't get this. Food is ridiculously cheap when buying/cooking bulk. Cooking in bulk for 500+ students is doable but just needs some dedicated effort, dedicated machinery and investment, and some pre processing that you could certainly outsource to your local community. It's amazingly win win in so many ways.
Interesting, most places I've seen are increasing the food restrictions, including in food brought from home. This is probably something you can address with your district if your state doesn't already some healthy school food law.
My local district restricts what a kid can bring in for thier personal snack during classroom snack time. It has specific types of approved food listed. In some cases, they even restrict what brand of food it is.
Kids don't apply for SNAP. If their parents fail them, children should not be blamed. There's no excuse for governments in the USA to not provide free breakfast and lunch to any child, no questions asked. Not doing so is absolutely a problem with every level of government that fails to do so.
Spending millions on the education of strangers only for them not to learn much because they are hungry over a meal worth $1.50 in state funding. Fiscal "conservative" everyone.
As a taxpayer who funds public schools, I find it acceptable to subsidize the food of those who are struggling, but I do not have any desire to subsidize the ruling elite (who, in many cases, intentionally keep working class pay low). They can pay for their own children's food.
On the other hand we've got the phrase "Programs for the poor become poor" for a reason. Having a program that benefits everyone means that we all can support it out of enlightened self-interest.
We can reduce overhead by providing food for everyone and not putting in place a complex government bureaucracy to carefully approve some people but not others, to give lobbyists a chance to advocate for the benefit of their constituents at the expense of everyone else, etc, etc.
Moreover, if free food is only available to low-income students, having to eat that food can become a symbol of poverty, and some students may feel ashamed to receive it. Making it available to all students, without reservation, avoids that.
People say that, but it’s not like they have a flashing light that says “TIMMY IS POOR AND THIS LUNCH IS FREE,” they just punch their code or swipe their card or whatever and it rings up as free.
> I find it acceptable to subsidize the food of those who are struggling, but I do not have any desire to subsidize the food of those who keep my pay low.
Doesn't the means-testing bureaucracy frequently outweigh any potential savings? Food is cheap. Bureaucrats are not.
The rich are going to be paying the majority of the taxes that fund this. Is it unacceptable that their children be allowed to get a small fraction of the food their parents paid for?
By blanket helping everyone no matter the wealth, you end up helping mostly non-wealthy people.
By helping specifically the poor/not wealthy, you end up with a massive bureaucracy trying to decide who is wealthy enough, and add paperwork on top of poorer people to "request" such benefit.
You shouldn't be a sucker. For the ruling elite, it's an insignificant tax rebate. The overhead of a means-testing system to make sure that people who have been taxed for 50 free lunches don't get one is a waste that wouldn't be tolerated, except for the fact that we know the hurdles of bureaucracy will eliminate most of the people who qualify, bringing down costs by leaving children hungry.
edit: The idea that your tax dollars are going to pay for the universal benefit of someone who pays more taxes than you do is mathematically nonsensical. It's purely a gimmick. It's a shell game with no shells other than innumeracy.
If you have kids yes. If you don't then you could still being paying for some rich kid's food. Still I would have no problem with this since the alternative is to means test which is just wasteful bureaucracy. Plus I am perfectly willing to subsidize the one rich kid so the 10 poor ones can eat.
The solution to this problem (Wealthy elites getting free stuff) is to just ensure they're taxed appropriately. I do not care if the children of the wealthy are receiving free lunches as long as they're paying their fair share of taxes. Chances are, even with California's weird tax system, they are paying more than your typical middle class family.
There is no reason not make it universal. A lot of kids will still bring their own lunches. Teens in high school will choose paid lunch options some of time. The program would probably have a similar cost to SNAP.
Hungry kids don't learn well, so feeding them will lead to a modest increase of academic achievement on average. Academic achievement correlates with higher earnings, thereby paying for the program with their future taxes.
This seems to make sense on the surface, but I'm skeptical about the last part. It seems we're in a race to the bottom and "good" jobs are increasingly scarce. It seems there aren't enough good jobs for the population. Basically, the logic you laid out is probably sound for small marginal changes, but I'm skeptical it would scale well due to the competition and limited resources.
It's much simpler to provide public services to everyone and handle economic inequality through taxation.
Means-tested benefits result in bureaucracy that sometimes costs more than the increase in cost from giving the benefit to everyone would be, they create poverty traps, and they screw over people in atypical situations (i.e. a kid whose parents care so little they can't even be bothered to get the paperwork done that proves their low income status).
In theory I agree with you, but in practice I think means testing does more harm than good. Some parents aren't gonna fill out the paperwork and we shouldn't punish kids for that. It also adds overhead to the programs.
And I don't think the ruling elite's kids are eating free lunch at public schools :)
Adding on to this a bit, if the ruling elite's children did eat the same cafeteria good, I think it would be a net boon for society.
Think of how every family in Finland taking home a newborn baby gets a box of starter supplies. The box doubles as a crib, so most babies, regardless of their parents wealth, spend their first days sleeping in the same cardboard box.
IMO it's cool as shit to start everyone off the same way like that. From what I understand it also helps reduce the sort of stigma that can hurt kids taking advantage of free lunch programs
> but I do not have any desire to subsidize the ruling elite (who, in many cases, intentionally keep working class pay low). They can pay for their own children's food.
I would hope they get taxed more under this regime so it's not really you subsidizing it for them.
What if you thought of it as: perhaps at your income level your taxes fund one kid's meals, and at the elite's income level their taxes fund ten kids' meals? IDK how the actual numbers work, but that would be the gist in a progressive tax system.
The rich will pay far more into the program for free lunches that include their kids than their kids will receive back. And it'll probably make the program more efficient, since there won't be a pointless bureaucracy devoted to making sure there's no one getting free lunches who doesn't deserve those low-quality free lunches (the horror).
Sorry, where's the regressive tax policy? If this is being funded by a graduated income tax (like what most states have, or federal income tax), then it's being funded by a progressive tax.
