Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

Comment by kamaal | Hacker News Reader

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Government provided <anything> will never work fine. Because that is always subjected to bureaucracy, processes and averaging. You will always have lowest averaged quality, because things are always subject to costs, bidding and all other kinds of processes involved to maintain sanity during administrative control. And this is considering every body works with honesty. While the fact is with no quality control and regulation it becomes easy to serve bad quality food for some profit in return. Or it can always be worked with bribes.

These sort of things serve a perfect mess for bribe business and other sort of bureaucratic shit.

Also like so many people have mentioned, its not governments job to provide food to your kid. In fact I find it scary that governments run and set school syllabus. Schools and education form perfect weapons for brain washing. Ideally schools must be private run, with regulations.

> Government provided <anything> will never work fine

I beg to differ. I'm French. Not everything about our government is satisfactory (very far from it) but the one thing that's fantastic is the food in our schools: fixed menus (no pick and choose where kids would take fries and nothing else), with real meals of two main courses + cheese + desert (usually fruit).

And it shows, too; while children's obesity rates have been getting worse, they are nowhere near those in the US or UK. In fact there are virtually no fat kids under 12; after that age kids tend to be more "autonomous" (meaning more TV and more fast food lunches) but when they're young and in the school system they are incredibly healthy.

What happens when kids have special dietary requirements?

For instance Jewish kids whose families want them to eat kosher food, or kids with various food allergies, etc.

When I was a kid (30 years ago) there were zero "special dietary requirements" and zero "food allergies"; if kids didn't want to eat the food then they didn't eat it and that was fine (frowned upon, but fine) -- but there weren't any special menus for religious reasons or medical conditions.

Now things have changed a little; you can specify that your kid doesn't eat pork or is allergic to nuts -- but that's about it.

I cannot talk for the French, but in Sweden they usually handle special food requirements rather well. The children with special needs are all known to the kitchen staff so they get what they need directly from them.

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