The Real Problem with Lunch | Hacker News Reader

The Real Problem with Lunch

nytimes.com

139 pointswallflower115 comments

This entire debate over the quality of school lunch is myopic. School lunch food isn't the problem, American food culture is the Problem. I'd bet, (I have no data for this - I'm just a windbag of opinions) that in most communities (countries --> neighborhoods, whatever scope you want), school lunches will generally reflect the status quo of food quality in the community. Because if they didn't, parents would flip out.

Status quo meals in Norway and France are pretty decent, I suspect. I've spent some time living in France and that certainly seemed to be the case. Status quo meals in the US? Terrible. The average American eats poorly - incredibly poorly - and it shows; in our health, waistlines, and, of course, in our school lunches.

So the real challenge is to move the needle on American food culture. School lunches can and should be one vector for effecting that change, but we need to recognize and tackle the bigger picture. As others have mentioned, proper regulations on marketing to children is a must.

They're both the problem. It's like saying there is no problem with guns, because guns don't kill; people do. You are right that there is indeed problems with American food culture, but that does not mean schools should automatically inherit those problems. In fact if we're gonna make things better it's always easier to start with children for they're considered the most precious.

In europe people expect that schools have proper food for their children, even if they cant provide it themself. Or better said especially then.

Not all school models include eating, but those who do usually have a very high standard.

I cook maybe 3 meals a week from stuff I find online. Maybe curry or stews or whatever sounds good that day. Otherwise it's pasta or sandwiches or something quick.

My mom calls me a 'foodie' as if it's a pretty major differentiation. When I visit, I do the cooking. Cooking food (especially good tasting and healthy food) is relatively atypical among others that I know as well.

UK, Further Education College, 16, 17, 18 year olds...

Salad bar is getting popular at lunchtime although the potato salad and coleslaw get heavily used, low dressing alternatives less so.

I'm trying to get the students interested in porridge when they come in the morning instead of bacon and sausage sandwiches. We shall see!

Beans and chips is cheap so popular early evening (some students might get a 9 or 10 hour day depending on timetable and extra lessons they decide to take).

I went to a traditional English boarding school from the age of about 11 to 17.

When I was 16 they switched the dining hall from the full-on Harry Potter long tables and served food (served by students) to a cafeteria style. At the same time they changed catering managers and the new one wanted to improve food quality and get the pupils eating better.

What he did was really simple: he added a self-serve salad bar with as many refills as you liked.

What ended up happening was hulking great rugby players would collect their hot food, and then go to the salad bar and add vast piles of salad. Then they would frequently go back for more. I forget whether there were salad dressings or not. He may not even have reduced the portion sizes for the cooked food --- active children of that age use vast amounts of energy.

So the end result was that without any kind of pressure or active encouragement, he managed to get complete generations of children to train themselves to like salad.

My sixth form had beans and chips. Also, beans and sausage roll.

For me at the time it was the only viable lunch option due to cost.

There are probably various factors making this impossible, but I would expect that spending £5 per head on a decent lunch would return more than spending £5 on tuition. I could make up for large class sizes by sitting in the library or using the internet to study - a better lunch would have meant taking a weekend job (which I had anyway, but the proceeds went to savings...)

I agree with your basic point that beans and chips cost £1.50 and a warm meal with (say) chicken/starch/vegetables costs around £2.50. Some rebalancing of the subsidy would be a good idea.

'Tuition' costs (i.e. everything except the canteen subsidy) are a tad hard to fine tune in Colleges. And remember someone has to put the stuff on the Internet - in the UK its quite often teachers in there spare time or as part of a project.

Ours was more like 70p vs. £3, but the general point stands I agree.

WRT 'stuff on the internet' - I wasn't thinking necessarily exam revision material; more Wikipedia, the C++ reference, etcetera. Project Gutenberg for an English student, etc.

I've always considered the examinations as a starting point - probably an artifact of living in a near winner-takes-all society.

I live in a town with an excellent, healthy food culture. The school lunches are terrible. The result is most everyone packs lunch for their kids. Eventually I hope to figure out why there hasn't been a movement to improve the lunches, but so far no one's really talking about it.

I spent years living in France, and my daughter went to kindergarten and grade one there.

The lunches were insane. A 3 year-old can expect a five course meal every day. Prepared fresh on-site. Different every day of the month.

The school district would mail a calendar of lunches to the parents every month. I still have some.

The parents care about the food their children eat. They're willing to pay a little more for good food at school. As a computer programmer, I earned an above average salary, and paid small amounts every semester for better food. IIRC, it was about $200. And definitely way below $1K.

My daughter loved her lunches, and I was happy to not have to make something with the French parents would then laugh at. ;)

The French attitude is "we live to eat". They say every other country "eats to live". That definitely shows in the different attitude towards the school lunches.

> The French attitude is "we live to eat". They say every other country "eats to live".

Japan also lives to eat and their public school lunches are very healthy and nutritious. The children often also partake in the preparation of the meals in part, so they get that learning as well.

That actually seems like a great idea. Not enough kids know how to cook and I feel this is a reason a lot of the younger generation eats out rather than at home. Having a class rotation where every day of the month (or week, depending how big the school is) a different before-lunch class will instead go to the cafeteria and prep meals would be awesome. Students would get to learn and the school may be able to cut costs by hiring less lunch attendants. Of course kids would have to wash their hands and be trusted not to taint the food, but that goes for current lunch attendants as well.

Colleges have a hit or miss on this. A lot of liberal arts colleges still seem to have student employment opportunities in the dinning hall.

In my large public university? Sodexo and poorly paid off site employees for 100% of staff.

Another failure of unmodelled externalities in capitalism, I think. If a kid's lunch costs $5 to involve them in the preparation process on site vs. $2.50 for a minimum cost contractor preparation... which is the better deal?

I have literally seen elementary school children in Japan slicing vegetables with a normal kitchen knife. All the kids learn knife skills. It's amazing, but I suspect not something that would be easy to export, culturally.

When I taught English to high school students in Japan, I had a couple of courses where we took over the kitchens and the students had to figure out how to cook meals with English recipes. I was very impressed with most of them. Certainly every student had basic cooking skills and could be trusted with every aspect of kitchen safety (and I was in a low level school).

One of the downsides to the Japanese school lunch approach is that it puts a burden on teachers. They are "on duty" during lunch time on a rotating basis. Japanese teachers get very little down time and extras like this are just expected of them.

Lunch is taken very seriously at the schools. In high school, lunch is not provided. A local bakery comes by to offer a variety of baked goods at a reasonable price, but you can't really trust that there will be decent food left by the time you get there (it is always a mad rush to be first in line at lunch time). Parents are expected to make a packed lunch. The teachers will often look at the students' lunches and if they are not good enough, the parents will be called in. In extreme cases I have seen teachers teaching parents how to cook nutritious packed lunches.

Again, it's a good policy which I think would be impossible to export. Imagine being called up by your kid's teacher and having to go in and be lectured because you failed to make a good enough lunch. I've actually seen parents in tears during their reprimand. Also imagine teachers staying late (unpaid) so that they can teach parents how to make lunch... In many ways, Japan is an amazing place...

U.S. school teachers are routinely on duty during lunch periods, as crowd control, so I'm not sure that's really a difference.

U.S. school lunches are absolutely woeful. Just check out the #thanksmichelleobama pictures on twitter for a general overview[1]. I think there's got to be some big kick-backs given by the packaged food distributors, because there is no way that frozen pizza and McRib sandwiches are cheaper than cooking actual food.

[1] https://twitter.com/hashtag/thanksmichelleobama

Bread is the cheapest food. Dairy is heavily subsidized in USA. Pizza is famous because it is the cheapest cooked meal known to cow-owning humanity. McRib literally exists only during times of pork market collapse. This stuff is absolutely cheaper than cooking with vegetables.

True, but how is it cheaper to purchase packaged pizza versus a bag of flour, a can of sauce, a block of government surplus cheese, and the minimum-wage cafeteria workers that you've already got hired? Making pizza is not exactly a high-skill task.

At his childcare place here in Australia, my 2-3 yo gets involved in meal prep in the facility's kitchen. They have 5 meals a day with a great rotating menu. He'll often eat better than we do.

We involve him in almost all cooking we do at home too.

It's amazing, but I suspect not something that would be easy to export, culturally.

I think this would be especially awkward with the prevalent safety culture of the US. ("How dare you put our kids in danger by giving them knives!")

Having experinced this (and also student participation in cleaning the school)... You can't do that in America because jobs would be lost. Then there would be complaints about insourcing, or child exploitation.

I think Chinese are even worse: they not only "live to eat", but also talk, think, write almost only about food. Especially true in Sichuan: there food is the only conversation topic available. In Beijing it is possible to talk also about other things, like politics.

And Italy, and most of the mediterranean countries. And possibly, also some other countries in Asia or South America.

> The French attitude is "we live to eat"

I guess you've never been to Italy ;)

I believe the Italian version would be "we live to eat like pigs", ;D

yeah, kinda :D I should warn you, don't ever accept an invitation to a family dinner from me, if you're not ready ;)

Oh I've already made that mistake once (spent a week over new years with an Italian friend's family in southern Italy)

Can't say I have anything to regret.. the few extra kg's are just a tribute :D

Looking at random "menu cantine" on Google, getting hungry already. For instance: http://dumezil-lyc.spip.ac-rouen.fr/IMG/pdf/menu_du_14_au_18...

On Tuesday, chicken curry (with white wine sauce). Wednesday, salmon with potato gratin. And lots of vegetables.

I can tell you some US cafeterias are not quite up to speed yet.

"Eat to live, don't live to eat," is a Poor Richard quote recommending frugality over gluttony. I guess any proverb can be turned around as required.

"Death induces the sensual person to say: Let us eat and drink, because tomorrow we shall die – but this is sensuality’s cowardly lust for life, that contemptible order of things where one lives in order to eat and drink instead of eating and drinking in order to live." -Kierkegaard

I would caution against extrapolating from your experience. You must have been living in a good district with a decent school (and if you've been in France for any period of time you'll know that fighting for the right school is almost the most important thing in parents' lives and can even decide elections). Crucially, as there are much fewer private schools in France than say the UK or the US, the elite will instead make public superschools and then use connections and districts to put their kids in them (and get the taxpayer to foot the bill), the most famous being Henri IV and Louis le Grand in Paris, but this system applies to all regions (AFAIK).

Anecdotal evidence: my "college" or middle school equivalent (which I won't name and shame) in Grenoble had a much less interesting canteen. For example, the fries (served with every meal) were undercooked, sometimes still frozen inside, and we occasionally found worms. The queue for food could be as long as 45 minutes, forcing everybody to gulp down their food as fast as they could so as not to be late to the next class. The food was always deep fried meat or equivalents. A decent part of the student population was quite fat, although not to US or UK levels of obesity.

France is like the US. You have areas like Manhattan or Santa Monica, and you have areas like North Virginia or Ohio, all with their own history, local funding, civil servants providing wildly differing levels of service. Paris is almost another country (and its residents definitely see "provinciaux" as foreigners), maybe even more so than with London and the UK.

For a deep dive down the other end, I recommend the movie "Journee de la Jupe" which gives you a taste of the ZEP schools (arguably the worst in France), it's a bit more realistic than "Banlieue 13".

> my "college" or middle school equivalent (which I won't name and shame) in Grenoble

Uh... OK.

My experience was at Ecole Rue Millet, next to Place Vaucanson :)

Sometimes you don't even have to pay more. When we lived in France, we paid less than 3.50€ per day for my daughter's 5-course lunch. A few years earlier in a much smaller town, we had a teacher tell us that if we couldn't pack a 'real' lunch (not PBJs, even though my daughter loved them then), she would bring an appropriate lunch for my daughter herself.

At a school we visited in Paris, they publish the lunch menu along with recommendations for a dinner menu at home, to be sure their food didn't clash I guess.

Now, back in the US, she complains that all they have at school is cardboard pizza, and that isn't a meal. Clearly she learned to appreciate eating a complete meal.

As a Norwegian, my first (and so far only) trip to the US was in the (northern hemisphere) autumn of '99, for an Allaire developers conference in Boston.

My first impressions when landing at New Ark airport was one of being flabbergasted by how utterly fat so many people were. In 20 minutes I very likely saw more grossly fat people than I had seen in the previous year in Norway. For me it really was the most bizarre thing.

Now in my early 40s, my memories are vague on this matter, but I'm pretty sure Coca Cola and the likes were completely banned from my school canteens. There just wasn't that much junk food to be had either. I mean in general ... as for the schools, forget about it. Pizza would be a very special occasion.

Whatever the US were doing, it was doing it completely wrong.

The rest of the world is catching up.

http://www.thelocal.no/20150506/norways-men-soon-to-be-among...

Most developed countries are about 20-40 years behind the US in obesity rates--if you look at overweight and obesity rates (and rate of change) in the US from the 60s, 70s, and 80s, they match pretty well with the same data from many other developed countries from the 2000s.

US obesity and overweight rates have mostly stabilized and will hopefully decline, so maybe the same will happen elsewhere (maybe sooner?).

Other countries are catching up in overweight and obesity but there's rarely data on BMI levels above that. Anecdotally it does seem like the US has much higher rates of super obese people at 50+ BMI. The mobility scooter using, as wide as 2.5 normal people kind. There's a stark difference visiting from here in Australia despite our similar overweight rates.

I don't know if it's because your food is so much cheaper that people who have eating problems/don't care about their health and appearance can afford to crazy, or if it's cultural, but there's a class of super fats waddling around in the US that you really don't see in other countries.

At least in part it's cultural. We work much longer hours with much less vacation days than pretty much the rest of the first world (http://abcnews.go.com/US/story?id=93364), often sitting in front of a computer all day, then go home too mentally exhausted to make good decisions about eating or exercise, driving in cars to go everywhere because everything is more spread out and very few cities are set up to make walking or biking feasible, so some people get very little exercise at all during the day, all while being served (and thus eating) larger portions of food at restaurants than most other countries.

I'm not saying we shouldn't exhibit greater willpower, but we're animals, and animals tend to be lazy when given the opportunity. If US cities (especially small cities and suburbs) were designed more to facilitate walking I think we'd be healthier overall.

I know in college I was in much better shape and I had to walk at least two miles a day to get to and from all of my classes (we had a large campus and a giant quad separating the buildings), and I often worked out at the gym since it was literally a two minute walk from my dorm.

That class of mobility scooter using super obese people you're talking about starting popping up about 20 years ago and really became noticeable about 10 years ago [1]. If the rest of the world is several decades years behind the US, then you wouldn't expect to see very many people in this class for another 20 years or so.

[1] Though it isn't really that common. It's just that super obese people are very noticeable, so it feels like their are more people in this category than there really are.

We don't do school lunches here in Australia. My parents packed me lunch every day for 10 years, and I'll do the same for my kids.

It's really no big deal.

It can be for some kids. I see no reason a child should have to eat less healthy than any other at a public school.

I'm a reasonably good cook (definitely "above average", but nothing spectacular). I would much prefer my kids' meals to be prepared by someone whose job it is to cook than me, for the simple reason that I doubt I'd have much time to prepare whole meals every evening. For me, it would be worth the price.

Furthermore, both you and parent are assuming that you have the capability to prepare meals for your children.

In the US, at least, a majority of public school students are eligible for free or reduced price lunch assistance ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/majority-of-u... ). Which means they likely don't have a sustainable "home preparation" alternative option.

As someone with a mom who taught kindergarten for 30 years, it's not uncommon for school meals to be the only reliable meals in a child's life in certain areas. (Hence offering breakfast)

Which makes it even more sad. If your best meal is school slop, you have no chance.

> If your best meal is school slop...

shrug It's my understanding that many school kitchens and many commercial kitchens get their ingredients from Sysco Corporation. I know that I saw the Sysco refrigerator semi truck parked outside my rural elementary/middle/high school's lunch room at least once a month. I've seen those same trucks offloading similar looking goods to many of the restaurants near my place in SF.

Like others say elsewhere in the subthreads, the thing that matters most in regards to food quality is the professionalism of the kitchen staff. A knowledgeable cook that cares to do a good job can make a substantially better meal out of the same ingredients than can be made by a clueless and/or indifferent cook.

From the last half of my middle school education through the first half of my high school education, I had rather good lunchroom food. Through the latter half of high school, the lunchroom food was merely acceptable. What was the difference? The head lunchlady retired and was replaced with someone who DNGAF.

That's exactly what I meant, namely that for some kids, home preparation isn't an option. Maybe I could have changed the wording :)

Probably not for you, but if you were a single parent with two jobs trying to get two kids to the bus each morning, packing a lunch would be a lot more difficult.* Especially to make a lunch healthy.

* to be clear, I am not that person. Just saying.

Why would anyone need two jobs? shouldn't one pay a living wage?

Maybe the problems run deeper

Definitely deeper. The U.S. worker has seen 35 years of wage stagnation. Economic growth is fairly restricted to those with college degrees. And those aren't free.

As a slight counterpoint to this, I was born and raised in small villages in Normandy. I had good food in elementary school and high school. A bit on the oily side but still freshly prepared, relatively healthy and actually better and less oily than food I later had as an exchange student in the US.

In middle school though, I had truly awful food. More than once the yogurts we were served were past the expiry date and we had a few cases of food poisoning. As a kid, I disliked the food so much that I usually just skipped lunch (I would go to the cafeteria because I had to and would just eat the bread and maybe the yogurts if they weren't expired), not good for growth...

The problem of preparing fresh food for students is that it relies on having a Chef who is good at his job and organized enough to manage the food stocks and expiry dates.

Also as an additional nitpicking, according to the article:

> Contrast all this with France, where vending machines are banned on campus

This is recent (2005 apparently) and that certainly was not the case when I was a kid, we had vending machines both in middle school and high school. Additionally to this, in high school, we had a bakery selling fresh warm pain au chocolat at 10am (not healthy but certainly delicious)

This sounds misleading. They mention the French version is a high-end school for high-income parents. But this isn't how the public school system works in the US, right? Wouldn't it be more fair to compare to a high-end private school in the US, where I'm sure the lunch budget ends up at more than "a dollar + change for student"?

All French public schools have an in-school cafeteria where food is prepared fresh every day.

High income parents get billed for this, or they can supply lunch themselves. Low income parents didn't pay.

that's common in many European countries, especially southern countries. What they call lunch in France, in Italy we call it "a snack" ;)

I've done a Texas HS cafeteria, a French public HS , and a French private HS

The private HS had the best food, but the meal was about $8 a day, and I lived close by, so I would often eat at home. I could make comparably healthy foods at home for $4 or so I think

The french public highschool was about $4.50. People complained about the food , but I had a little appetizer, main plate, and dessert. And it was usually all "real food". The kind you could eat forever and be fine. Main plate was usually some meat/fish + a little veggies.

In Texas I had a lot of mashed potatoes and chicken nuggets. I have no clue how my body didn't completely fall apart . but hey, it was $2.

BTW French Uni also had a cafeteria . for about $5 I could have a lunch similar to HS (if a bit more on the greasy side). A lifesaver for a college student too lazy to buy proper food.

There are important details (hard to get a lot of good fresh fish in the middle of Nevada), but the school meal thing really is another example of how the US really isn't as rich as it likes to portray itself.

I think this is a huge marketing problem, stemming from the ability for large companies to market directly to children, and I don't think it's a coincidence that the U.S. is one of the few industrialized nations (if not the only, I couldn't find another in a quick search) that has ZERO regulation in terms of what and how companies can advertise to children (outside of bans on cigarettes and alcohol of course.) Kids are extremely easy to manipulate with ads because they don't have the experience and the awareness to understand the differences between the shows they're watching and the ads they're consuming.

I remember watching a ton of sugary cereal commercials as a kid. I'm pretty sure Kellogs was banned from advertising cereals that did not meet some minimum health requirement in 2007. [1]

With that said, it's ultimately the parent's responsibility to make sure the kid is eating healthy foods. I was recently at an amusement park cafeteria and I saw lines out the door of parents and their children holding huge green refillable cups, waiting for their turn at the Coke fountain drink machines. Many of the kids were clearly overweight. It struck me as terribly sad and unfair that the kids did not know any better than to enjoy sugary drinks, but that the parents knew exactly what they were feeding their children and just didn't care.

[1] http://www.cbsnews.com/news/kellogg-wont-market-sugary-cerea...

Don't be so sure the parents are aware of the problem: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2015/0...

My experience in California was light years from my experience in France. The bulk of school lunches provided by the parents were low-grade junk food. Sugar, snacks, and empty calories. The kids with vegetables and a balanced diet were in the minority.

I saw an article while I was in California about a high school of last resort for juvenile delinquents. The reporter visiting it was shocked that the school was quiet, and the kids were well behaved. The reason (according to the principal) was largely diet.

The school had a cafeteria with organic food (some subsidization). About 1-2 months after a new kid entered the school, the behavor problems went away.

I can't find the link now, but I did find some related ones:

"Dietary management of juvenile delinquency", http://www.feingold.org/Research/PDFstudies/Feingold-delinq7...

"Nutritional influences on aggressive behavior", http://orthomolecular.org/library/articles/webach.shtml

The issue is that kids that grew up without a healthy approach to food become the very parents that perpetuate the behaviour; they just don't know any better because they haven't been exposed to good eating habits, either at home, on the tv or at school.

It's a social thing. The parents are clearly responsible for educating their kids, but as a society we shouldn't think it's OK to advertise and serve dangerous crap to kids and just assume that this doesn't affect behaviour (the very purpose of advertisement is that it affect people's behaviour, I always found it strange that we then blame them for being influenced). You have to start very early to educate kids senses to appreciate flavours more subtle than fat, salt and sugar.

When Jamie Oliver attempted to change the horrendous 'meals' served to kids in the UK, he hit this very issue: lots of kids preferred to eat their crisps and junk food rather than the balanced, healthy and tasty meals prepared for them by a top chef (meals that didn't cost more than the crap they were usually served).

Contrast that to the meals served in schools in France: they are balanced, varied, there is always some choice. You will always find a choice of starter, main course, cheese/yoghurt and dessert. These kids find it normal to eat their vegetables. Parents wouldn't have it otherwise.

In France at home, most people actually cook. Everyone orders pizza once in a while, but the vast majority of meals are actually cooked from fresh. It's not a money thing: you can get cheap produces. It's a cultural thing: cooking is fun, it's a skill people pass down the generations, it's time well spent, it's something to be proud of, it's a part of normal life.

In the USA we believe that once you turn 18 you are an adult and responsible for yourself, and have no right to blame your upbringing (parents, and schools, and doctors) for any of your mental, health, and economic deficiencies.

And that's the problem with USA.

The problem is that obesity increases risk for all sorts of conditions: heart disease, arthritis, type-2 diabetes and all the problems that that brings on (neuropathy, retinal degeneration, kidney failure), nevermind the stigma from being too fat. And so on.

It's easy to say that it's the parents' fault that their children are overweight, but everyone else gets to deal with the fallout. With childhood obesity rates approaching 30 % in places, the extra burden on the medical system is staggering. Horace was very much to the point when he said it's your problem when the neighbour's apartment is on fire.

My child doesn't watch TV, and is surrounded by ad blockers of all possible varieties. Consequently she rejects food that she can't break down easily into ingredients with plain English names.

The more general problem with America is the prevalence of business models that depend on sales of people's attention. "If it's free, you're the product" is such an integral part of living in the US these days that most people don't even realize how deeply in hock they are.

Cutting the cord, abandoning traditional TV programming (including daytime content-less shows and infomercials) and fighting the good fight against ads will eventually leave consumers free to make their own decisions. I'm worried only that it might take too long: the genetic damage to humanity will already be done.

> they don't have the experience and the awareness to understand the differences between the shows they're watching and the ads they're consuming

citation? There's no way anyone under 18 just lacks the ability to distinguish between commercials and the program they're watching. Source: was once a kid

>distinguish between commercials and the program //

Perhaps the parent means the purpose for the programs and the commercials - as in that the commercials aren't just there to entertain you but to manipulate you in to wanting a particular product. Mind you essentially you can say the program is just there to soften you up and create a method to feed your brain the marketing message of the commercials ...

My disbelief still stands. What is the age range for human beings who can't distinguish between commercials and programs? You don't think kids get irritated when they're shows are interrupted by commercials?

To me this just comes across as an excuse for bad parenting. There were junk food commercials on tv when I was a kid, but I didn't get to have them, because I didn't have money to buy them.

Anecdote, yu-gi-oh; bey-blades; etc.

People in general don't really realise the impact that advertising has on them even if they are aware of them.

What you're saying (and the somewhat muted point in the article) about advertising is totally true, but I don't think it just applies to children. People are hugely susceptible to advertising, which is why it is, and always has been, extremely effective if done correctly. It's especially disturbing when children are specifically targeted by advertisements pitching products are that demonstrably harmful, but it's not the exception. I think that one of the main reasons that most parents don't heavily discourage or forbid their children from watching these ads is that they themselves aren't aware of the broader picture. In that vein, I think education is just as important, if not more-so, than regulation of advertisers.

It's a bit of an odd article, that assumes the blame is on the food prep departments. "The US has food far below France's quality, but the departments only get $3/head instead of $7/head". All this means is the problem isn't in the departments, but in the willingness to fund appropriately.

It's probably also not fair to compare pretty much anywhere to France, given France's extreme cultural connection to fine food (and hence pool of suitable school-level cooks).

I actually don't understand the $3/head part without any examples for the smaller state portion. If a state matches $2-3 then the difference with $7 is negligible.

Beyond this, I want to add that, if we're complaining about the overhead and staff, Chipotle (ignoring recent ecoli outbreaks) and similar have very fresh options ->$6.

What do you do with the "negligible" 15-30% of your money?

Save it, reinvest it?

From a more corporate standpoint, at $7 a meal, schools are entering competition with "gourmet" fast food options, of which 15-30% is going towards profit margins.

If mall food courts at all compete nutritionally with school lunches, then, at $6-$7 a meal, schools should charge (at market, not cost) for the space and restaurants should have profit margins.

US government policy in a nutshell: increase standards, don't increase funding.

US schools have among the highest per-student funding in the world. Funding has been steadily increasing for decades, though test scores haven't budged: http://object.cato.org/sites/cato.org/files/cracking-books/t...

Perhaps that money should be going into school lunches instead of wherever it is going at the moment...

> instead of wherever it is going at the moment...

Testing?

Sports?

Administrative bloat and overhead. You need ever so many people to help ensure you are complying with all the standards.

>US schools have among the highest per-student funding in the world.

We actually looked at this in comparative econ, and I believe that the statistic is misleading, at least if it leads us to conclude that teacher quality should be higher in the US. You must correct for the alternative jobs available to the type of person who will become a teacher. In the US, since per capita income is higher, people who are deciding whether to become teachers or not will have to be offered higher salaries in order to do it because the alternative is more attractive, so the fact that per-student funding is higher in the US is actually the least we should expect, not some surprising statistic.

Rings true to me: it looks like American teachers' salaries are further below average than in most countries: http://www.olinmontalvo.com/2012/09/ratio-of-teacher-salarie...

There are a few questions worth asking about this, though: Do those numbers include benefits? American teachers may get more of those than overseas teachers. And how skewed is that data by the very rich in America?

This page is also worth a look: http://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cmd.asp

The US is "below trend" for per-student spending vs GDP, fit linearly. Not by a huge amount, but it might be wrong to go on about how generously American schools are funded.

That does depend on how the money is spent, though. Wages might be higher in places that are more developed, but it's not clear that materials should be more expensive there.

Some of US teachers' retirement and healthcare benefits would be unnecessary in countries with proper social systems, so I don't think they should be counted in comparisons.

A lot of that is different accounting.

In most US states, schools are nominally independent bodies of government, they carry all of the costs of facilities, pensions, etc. They also need to comply with all sorts of cost enhancing building and labor standards.

So in my city, the school collects $28k/pupil. That includes something like $150M in debt for buildings, salaries, 20% of salaries for pension obligations, 15-20% for employee healthcare, key expenses for the various charter schools, etc.

They also need to deal with compliance issues. Because some redneck place in Mississippi would give poor kids a slice of Bologna and stale bread, there are prescribed calorie and nutrition standards that get audited. So you can't prepare fresh foods.

The bans on fresh foods are due to lobbying by national good companies to regulate against local competitors. It isn't because of citizen complaints.

Students also probably don't want it. Fresh foods don't keep as well. I always felt more comfortable eating "crappy" food at school because it's hard to mess up. A couple wilted leaves in a salad doesn't really actually affect the quality, but it does turn you off from eating it. There's no where for me to wash the apple they gave me that was handled who knows how and possibly not washed before I'd be eating it.

The Chipotle debacle provides a bit of evidence that fresh and local isn't necessarily the easiest to quality control.

Why does having prescribed standards prevent fresh foods? It's not that difficult to work out the nutritional value of commercially cooked food, you'll already know portion sizes and what ingredients go into that in order to plan how much you need to feed everyone.

You need to have people smart enough to interpret the standards and answer questions when audited.

Americans don't have a food-culture. Simple as that. That's the problem.

I stumpled on a conversation about foreign food once and still laugh when i think about it. None of the listed _foreign foods_ from countries i know well enough even existed there. It was all just typical american food.

A few years ago, disillusioned with the fine dinning industry, I walked away from being a chef. Not working in Miami with summer coming, I wrote emails to summer camps with sailing programs trying to get a job as a sailing instructor. Kingly Pines Camp in Maine responded to my email saying, "I won't lie to you. We still do need a sailing instructor, but if you are working here you will be cooking." So I went to Maine for the summer.

All the other camps in the lakes region started to outsource their dining to the Aramark corporation. Kingly Pines didn't want to go that route. How does an institution like a summer camp provide three meals plus an afternoon snack a day for $5 per person? The camp has average 200 campers under the age of 15 and 100 staff. Also, everybody is very, very physically active so people are hungry. That's a food budget of $1500 a day. The decision was to make everything from scratch. There were only three of us in the kitchen

The food director who was in charge of the pizza station at U of Maine during the winter was awesome. I appreciate that he listened to me because I was coming from the best restaurants in Northern California. We created a salad bar with 5 different types of homemade salad dressing. We baked our own meats for cold cuts. It's not difficult to make home made roast beef and turkey breasts before using a slicer to cut them. The tiramisu caused a riot. Instead of Dinty Moore beef stew, we purchased two top rounds. It's one thing to make beef stew with carrots and potatoes but my recipe uses parsnips, celeriac, turnips, and potatoes. Why only make one type of lasagna if you can make three different types? I bet I could get your kids to eat roasted portobello mushroom goat cheese lasagna. Once a week we would make several different facaccia pizzas.

The camp's philosophy is to challenge children to do things they haven't done before whether to get up on water skis for the first time or get to the top of a rock climbing wall, to explore their world, and to learn to be independent. That philosophy was extended to eating too. By the end of every session many the kids even the most reluctant faced with peer pressure to try new things -- it works two ways -- had become gourmands. Turns out that we spent $4.25 a day per person well under budget. The last day of each session when the parents picked up their children we had a big lunch for everybody as the camp did activities that included all the campers and parents for the day. I would say things to the dinning director like buy me four sides of salmon, a couple bags of spinach, and a box of puff pastry. So we were making prime rib and salmon in croute. One of the parents was just amazed and asked if the campers eat like this and his daughter said yes, every day.

Children are curious and if they trust the cook to serve them something that isn't dull and bland,they are open to the experience of good and interesting food. If someone is serving me canned vegetables and overcooked broccoli that was engineered to have an extended shelf life not for flavor, I'm not going to want to eat veggies either!

If you have kids, have a look at Kingsly Pines camp. [1]

http://www.kingsleypines.com/

This is amazing!

I am not a chef. I cook at home, and my cooking skills might be above average. I believe that the cheapest way to run a school cafeteria is to make food from scratch. It is also a much healthier approach.

For example, instead of serving pre-made and super-unhealthy chicken nuggets, buy those cuts of meat and fish that are deemed "undesirable" in grocery stores, but perfectly fine in term of health and nutrition. They can be used to make stews, or they can be made into ground meat by the kitchens themselves and in turn made into meatballs, bolognese, lasagna fillings, burgers, fish cakes, etc. The same idea can be applied to vegetables and fruits, too. A large amount of perfectly fine vegetables and fruits are thrown away every day just because they don't look nice. They aren't rotten. People won't get food poisoning after eating them. They just don't look good. They are either in odd shapes, too big too small, or have some light bruises, etc. School kitchens can buy them and make perfectly healthy and delicious meals from them.

I do see the issue of this approach. It needs cooks who know how to cook from scratch, especially how to cook those cuts of meats they are not familiar with, or cooks who are willing to learn these techniques. I suppose it is much easier to find these cooks in the countries who have a long and rich cuisine history, like France, Italy, China, Mexico, etc. It could be a challenging task here.

The camp bought food wholesale in bulk at a discount over small restaurants in the next town over. Figure the camp spends 1/3 or 1/4 the amount you do at the supermarket for the same if not higher quality product. We would make a turkey dinner once for every session. Who doesn't love turkey dinner with all the fixings, even in July? Take the every day snack, for example, there doesn't need much choice. I'd make homemade chocolate chip cookies and zucchini bread. But, we would also buy a box of Italian ices or a box of peanut butter in single serve cups and serve them with celery sticks.

Children don't have immune systems that are as developed as adults so bacteria contamination is much more serious. It is important that children are served the most 'desirable' food. I don't understand why it is ok to even think about serving the crap food to children? You are suggesting we give the old food that has lost its flavor and more likely has developed undesirable flavor to children. It's like you have this idea that we can just serve kids whatever.

I'm just saying that I had an experience where an institution served really good simple healthy balanced food to children within a constrained budget. It's doable. I know how to do it.

> I don't understand why it is ok to even think about serving the crap food to children? You are suggesting we give the old food that has lost its flavor and more likely has developed undesirable flavor to children.

This isn't what the original poster meant. There are lots of fruits & vegetables that are thrown out because they're not aesthetically pleasing. As the poster said, they're not rotten. A carrot may have some twists and be a little crooked. An apple may look gnarled. A cucumber may have an light green stripe down one side instead of being uniformly dark green.

Food safety is definitely the most important thing for a kitchen. It doesn't matter it serves food to children or adults.

Pardon my English if I didn't make myself clear. When I say "undesirable" cuts, it doesn't mean they are bad. For example, in local fresh fish markets, there are expensive fish fillets. There are also many big chunks of fish meats that were cut from from filleting. They are as fresh as the fish fillets. Instead of being priced for like $15 per pound for fish fillets, they cost like $3 per pounds. To make fish cakes, they are as good as the fish fillets.

The same goes for beef, port, lamb, etc. Also, the tougher the meat, the cheaper they are, like pork shoulders, beef chucks, etc. It requires more time, more patience, and different skills to cook them than steaks. Actually, I feel children like richly flavored meat stews, no matter it is Italian/French/Mexican/Chinese etc. much more than grilled steaks/chops.

I would go further to say buying from locally grown meat/fish/veg/fruits. Establish good relationship with local farmers/butchers. Mention the food are for children who are growing. One may most probably get healthier foods than from wholesalers.

With the tougher cuts of meat, have you tried sous vide cooking? Recently got my own small sous vide cooker and have fell in love with being able to prepare the next weeks meals and freezing them. Things like steak, pork and lamb when defrosted and reheated for 15-20 mins in the sous vide don't seem to lose flavour after initially being cooked already. Bought-frozen fish like salmon taste much better too before searing the skin in a non-stick pan.

It's been a god-send being able to pre-prepare meals on a single day and only needing to do 20-30 mins of actual work for each meal (incl preparing veggies/salads) - and not ending up with stir-fry or single pot slow-cooked meals (which I still occasionally make because mmm..).

I'd usually end up buying meals because I didn't want the same damn thing again, now I get to prepare all sorts of different meats on Sunday for the following days. Everything from fried chicken, duck breast and steak to pork belly, chuck roast and salmon (usually cook fish on-the-day because it's pretty fast).

Really awesome and inspiring that you made the move from your comfort zone to the opposite coast at a sailing camp to pick up sailing skills and help kids learn and explore along the way. I hope to enjoy one of your culinary creations one day. Thanks for sharing your experiences.

"I bet I could get your kids to eat roasted portobello mushroom goat cheese lasagna"

It's scary to think that we are advancing towards a world where kids could say no to this...

When I went to school in the 80s and 90s (I live in Australia), our parents had to send us to school with our own lunch.

We had cafeterias but they were by and large for treats not for day to day lunch.

I don't understand why taking their own lunch is not an option if the food served is so abysmal?

The issue with kids having lunch boxes prepared by their parents is that the kids are completely dependent on their parent's abilities to serve them a balance diet. They don't get a chance to try and discover anything else.

A bigger issue with trying to force meal choices is that you are then attempting to raise the kid instead of allowing the parents to do so.

Just because you don't agree with how a parent decides to feed their child, doesn't give you the right to arbitrarily take away their choice.

>Just because you don't agree with how a parent decides to feed their child //

It's not a simple decision - here in the UK I would have my kids eat school meals most days (perhaps miss the meal they anticipate to be least appetising and instead make their own). Instead they have packed lunch [aka bagged lunch] nearly every day because we can't afford the school dinner.

I'm afraid it is really necessary to provide a decent school meal for many children in order to ensure they have some chance at a moderately healthy meal once a day.

You always have the option of preparing food to your kids. If you feel what you give them is better than what they get at school then of course, it's a no brainer.

On the other hand, if it's chore to take the time to prepare and cook their meals, and if school was presenting an affordable alternative, why wouldn't use it?

No-one is forcing the kids to eat at school, no-one is taking away the parent's choice.

Call me daft but feeding their child is the kind of thing that parents typically do school or no.

From the article:

The top four sources of calories in the average American child’s diet are grain-based desserts, pizza, soda and sports drinks, and bread. One-third eat fast food every single day. More than 90 percent don’t eat enough vegetables. And each year, our children are bombarded by around $2 billion in child-directed food and beverage advertising, much of which promotes the least healthy products.

If the kids bring their own lunches, those lunches will be crap. I can supply some anecdata on this. My mom taught high school and observed what the kids brought to lunch. I saw it when I did things like chaperone for field trips when my kids were in grade school. One kid's lunch was a sack of cookies. And if you want to be a snob for a while (disclaimer: I'm a bit of a snob), look at what people put in their shopping carts at the supermarket.

And it's quite noticeable that affluent people buy seemingly healthier food, and are much less obese, likewise for the lunches that their kids bring to school and the physical condition of those kids.

And it carries over into adulthood: A large fraction of my colleagues eat restaurant food for lunch, at least a couple times a week. The vast bulk of restaurant food is a pile of sugar, fat, and salt.

In my view, the US is not a fancy food country, and what works for us might not be fancy food, but teaching people how to prepare healthy food with modest ingredients. For instance I suspect that a sandwich and an apple would be a vast improvement over what most kids eat for lunch. That's all I ever got in the lunch that I brought from home as a kid. When I got old enough, it was my job to make my own sandwich.

> If the kids bring their own lunches, those lunches will be crap

As you indicate, this depends a lot on class.

Anecdotally, I always begged for the pack'ed Lunchables at the grocery, instead, I had make my sandwich with mustard, lettuce, meat, and cheese.

I often wonder if we (parents or schools) taught kids how to make their own lunches again if it would drastically help the health of most families, but especially impoverished families.

Healthy food is more expensive both in time required for prep and materials. That is why affluent people seemingly buy healthier food. When you grow up poor, or live poor you don't have as much time or mental energy to properly diet.

Indeed. Despite my snobbery, I appreciate that it's not a purely moral issue. And I suspect that an effect of mental energy is being able to withstand marketing and cultural forces, peer pressure, etc.

Often poor means underemployed, not overworked. It's the middle class that have no time.

Somewhat surprisingly "95 percent of school districts in California...are successfully serving healthy meals that meet strong nutrition standards."

Source: Pew Charitable Trusts, 2014 (cited by the NYT article) http://www.pewtrusts.org/~/media/legacy/uploadedfiles/phg/co...

Maybe the easiest way to meet exact numerical requirements is to serve chemical slop.

The university meals in France where I studied where quite balanced. Maybe twice or thrice a month the food wasn't very good, like leftovers. But overall it was very good food and cheap at that.

Of course a 5 course balanced meal.

You can eat an 800 calorie Soylent 1.5 meal for $3.08 all-in which is probably going to be healthier and less of a time-waste than either American or French school lunches.

> a time-waste

If this is how you view eating then Soylent is probably the best thing since sliced bread in your mind. For the rest of us... not so much.

If the school's budget was constrained, wouldn't it be better to serve nutritious (but tasteless) soylent than to serve whatever "regular" food that could be obtained at the same budget?

I don't think that would be popular, neither with the parents nor with the kids.

Maybe your high school was different but as far as I remember we all scarfed down our brown-bagged sandwiches as quickly as possible to go play soccer or poker. Nobody wanted to spend their lunch time enjoying a drawn-out, healthy, cooked meal.

the 'muricans can be counted lucky they even have (free) school lunch. where i live you don't and you bring your own bread or buy stuff. i think Michael Moore is pretty much cherry picking. france has huge problems in other areas (political islam & terrorism, unemployment, economy). norway is a petrostate.

The other thing to remember, in the U.S., is that parents are constantly in a one-up war with each other. The two sides of that spectrum are "my kid's got the best lunch for him ever" and "my kid's got the most awesome lunch the other kids will be jealous of". This is why packed lunches should be flat out banned, in my opinion, but I concede that it's a parent's ultimate choice in how they raise their child. On the flip side of that, it's also their responsibility to do more than write articles about the poor state of food and actually try to do something about it.

I'm far too lazy to find the reference, but I recall that empowering the children to do it themselves has worked more than once.

You want to ban lunches because someone might feel bad about it? I went to the wealthiest (public) schools in the wealthiest town in the wealthiest county in my state. A place where kids got on that MTV Sweet 16 show, and not once was this ever a thing. This is the same argument they used for uniforms, that people would get made fun of. Never once saw that either. It's a joke. Sorry not everyone is wealthy, but that is a solution looking for a problem.

I've got two kids in school, and have honestly never seen that kind of competition. We pack lunches for our kids. Typical fare is a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Sometimes it's leftovers, and maybe cut-up vegetables if we run out of fruit. We bake our own bread.

If parents were competing over lunches, I'd see pictures of those lunches on Facebook, because that's how parents compete nowadays -- like the pictures that people share when they summon up the courage to cook a meal at home.

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