I neglected to give a shout out to Jamie Oliver who might actually be responsible for the school food revolution in both the UK and the US
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/jamie-oliver-is-his-...
https://www.publicschoolreview.com/blog/jamie-oliver-is-his-...
How do we mitigate these issues? We add things. We'll add emulsifying agents, de-clumping agents, things to retain moisture, other things to retain color(or just treat it with gasses, or dye it), etc etc.
While it's easy to say "they're just making a paste", in reality that is not what's actually being done.
That said, there are plenty of mechanically processed foods that are fine but fall under the "processed" headline because they're technically processed.
The devil is in the details though and people really need to get educated on basic food processing/preparation. I don't mean raw milk or grass-fed carnivore Idiocracy, but even a basic understanding of what a preservative is would be helpful.
The underlying point of contention has always been money, not desire. Who doesn't want healthier kids? For the first 50 years or so the hurdle was the price of food, but since the 1990s the hurdle has been labor. California public schools today offer free breakfast and lunch to everybody, independent of ability to pay. The push for that change started circa 2010. But to make it work fiscally that appears to have accelerated the shift to centralized kitchens distributing prepared--and increasingly highly processed--meals to schools.
Before it was closed, my oldest son went to a parochial school that prepared hot lunches out of a tiny kitchen jammed into a corner, pricing them at cost. But it was only possible because of one very dedicated cook (who possibly may not have even been paid staff) assisted by rotating parent volunteers. When that school closed he moved to a new parochial school with a large, well-equipped (albeit old) kitchen. But the kitchen is unused. There's no budget to fund a reliable, affordable cafeteria program even with paid meals, so like most of the parochial schools in the city they contract a private company to deliver prepared "hot" meals, which are no better than the horrible prepared meals the public school district gives kids even though they're sold at "market" price. (The city has their own central kitchens, but the economic pressures result in the same product.)
The idea that you can have a national lunch program, with 0 national dishes and no standard for preparation is only something that could come from D.C.
America has plenty of regional cuisine that is likely cheaper to source locally, people just rarely take into account the fact that money spent close is much more likely to come back to you, 90%/10% is a good rule here. For every dollar you spend you get 90 cents back if the entire supply chain is local and 10 cents if it's completely external.
Also, to suggest food has never been expensive in the United States seems quite a hyperbolic statement to make given the history of poverty in the 19th and early 20th centuries, at least up to the New Deal. You seem to be making a social (laziness) or political (greedy powers-that-be) point, but it's sort of irrelevant to people, including working class people.
We have it extremely good in 2025 despite what people feel is going on. Compared to even a couple decades ago we are very well off.