I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt

let's eat, kids.

let's eat kids.

punctuation saves lives.

https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/B1pppR4gVKL._CLa%7C2140%...

So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.

In Austrian civil service I worked with kids who had special needs and were predominantly from poor social backgrounds. I made homework with them, drove them to school and back from day care in a bus, and I prepared food with them, had them deal with the dirty dishes, etc.

Most of the kids totally crazy behavior immidiately made sense once you met the parents. In fact there were only two kids where this wasn't the case and the first had PTSD of a life-changing magnitude (fled the Syrian war) and the other had good parents but a mental condition (I suspect severe ADHD).

Most of those kids would have been classified by the general public as hopeless cases.

I cooked with them, did the dishes, baked, regularily. Even kids that get beaten at home or were riddled with war trauma are surprisingly reliable if you just give them a task they understand. And turns out tasks they do every day are easy to understand after a week.

If those kids could make it, I am not the least worried about kids in better circumstances. Will it always be 100% perfect when kids do it? Will every kid be at it with full effort every day? Will a new kid grok it instantly? No. But that is okay. What is the worst that can happen? They go without food as a consequence? Other Kids show them how?

You're making it sound as if preparing food together is some unnatural herculian challenge while preparing food together was probably the most common act humanity has ever shared doing throughout its history.

No it must not be everyone. Prepare food? Get food. Pretty simple. Waste food? That was yours. And the other kids also don't like to see that.

The rason for having a society is to deal with those kind of differences. If you teach kids how to get structure into their lives and how to eat healthy the wasted food will easily be saved in future costs in the health and social systems.

Also: my kids could do this, US kids can't. What does thst mean for the US economy 4 decades down the line in comparison? You really think the US can afford to "educate" kids that way?

That's just a roundabout way to spell diversity, isn't it?

Outliers will be everywhere, you only have to select the right ones, and not fix an entire suburbs culture, and ofc the obligatory: tax the rich.

Japan may look different to the society you are used to or grew up in, but it's no less or more conformist, it's just different.

As a very simple example, in the US, people work for tips and often struggle to make ends meet in minimum wage jobs: that's a form of cultural toll. In Japan, nobody needs to work for tips (you may be followed out of the restaurant to have your tip returned to you), most people can make ends meet more easily, but there are other expectations around work and family: that's cultural toll too.

What's interesting to me is that you seem to think that the status quo in the US is rightly defensible. Looking in from afar with limited skin in the game I'd argue it looks really, really dumb. This "individualism" (but where the courts get to tell people who they are and what they can believe when it comes to certain issues that have religious or historical undertones), seems to be leading to a fractured partisan nation where everyone hates anyone who even slightly disagrees with them. Not a great way to bring kids up... perhaps y'all could try something else for a while, hmm?

you got that completely wrong. it requires adults that teach children how to behave.

Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into

now that is just offensive.

this is how japanese culture developed. there was no toll to achieve it. (there are some downsides, but they are mostly in the behavior of men towards women, which is a global problem). this is how most asian cultures work. and african too. children learn to do these things, and they learn how to behave properly.

There is no need to paint it as some kind of cultural/racial narrative. American children could, in fact, have more civilized lunch behavior if it was desired by the adults in charge.

For me, I can barely remember school provided lunches existing as something that a small handful of students got. The majority of students brought a lunchbox from home that our parents prepared.

In kindergarten, we had a rotating chore to take the collective milk money for the class, exchange it for a crate of milk at the cafeteria, and return it to the kindergarten room. I can imagine social norms have changed since then about this de facto mandatory financial exercise.

In later grades, we had some rotating lunch duties including, at least, rinsing the lunch trays and loading the big dishwasher. I can't remember if we ever helped serve food, but I do remember being told to be careful with the very hot water spray nozzle in the washing basin. I can imagine this having changed due to shifting safety and liability norms.

He sent me a picture of what he was served -- cold pizza slab with a cup of fruit. His comment was simply "How are you to learn when your soul hungers? Is this really how American schools prepare the minds of the youngest?" I responded with "Oh you're lucky, you got the fancy meal."

That a cheese slice between two slices of bread with some mayo would be served to a child as their only food of the day was spiritually disgusting to him in a way he did not have words for.

At least he stopped complaining about school lunch. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

No, it exists to prevent people from receiving public services, both by its direct operation and indirectly by making the service more painful to use so people who would be entitled to use it nevertheless avoid it.

Meanwhile kids themselves have participated in the problem. It's common to have several different choices for lunch, with a daily rotating menu "hot" item/meal, or choices of cheap staples like chicken burgers, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, and the worst quality "pizza" you can imagine, think if Domino's found a way to cut their supply costs in half. A shocking amount of children will insist on eating that god awful pizza every single day. I couldn't understand it when I was a kid, and I was super picky at the time!

Michelle Obama wanted to improve this, but she was called a communist and a man and a monkey, and now conservatives all belief this poor quality school lunch problem is her fault? It doesn't actually make any sense.

> To put the world in order, we must first put the nation in order; to put the nation in order, we must first put the family in order; to put the family in order; we must first cultivate our personal life; we must first set our hearts right.

Confucius, The Great Learning

I feel like in Japan it works because the culture adds enough social pressure that those not doing their part fall in line - or something. I don't think most western culture has that social pressure any more nor do I expect it can by added back

— Gandalf

In places where there is not such a strong governance structure, what you see is people doing more of what comes naturally to everyone. The communal idea arises naturally for things that people want to do. Sure, it's messier without town planning officers, etc, but the governance structure doesn't stop things getting done.

You say they are poorer but gdp, salary or whatever is not the only metric one can use to measure meaning in life. Time is the real money.

I recognize things won't easily change while people think that, that it's a tricky, vicious cycle. I wish I knew how to fix it, other than - as another commenter points out - doing the 'little' things and pushing ever so slowly for the change we need.

Removing the loose paint, figuring out if there’s a moisture problem, rot/rust, or other physical repairs needed, buying appropriate paint (maybe matching the color), then sanding, cleaning, priming, sanding, cleaning, and painting.

Slapping a bit of new paint over a problem is not the answer unless you want to make a recurring problem out of it.

This is a HUGE, dangerous leap.

> If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.

Plenty of parents (and plenty of people generally) just aren't aware of social services but are quite aware that they're supposed to feed and care for their children. Plenty more forget to fill out paperwork and return phone calls. Many states' governments actively make applying for welfare and support difficult or inconvenient - plenty of parents can't take the time to return paperwork in person, make phone calls during the workday, etc. Needing support - either welfare or just kindness and assistance - is not a moral failure and not a sign of a bad parent.

Beyond that, CPS wouldn't necessarily provide a great life for the child. There is a lot of difference between an imperfect parent and a danger to a child. Oh, and of course, CPS is a lot more expensive to run than a few meals. Giving out free meals at school is a lot easier if we want kids to be fed.

As an anecdote, I was laid off from my job once, and someone asked me if I applied for unemployment within my state. I didn't know it existed, nor that I was eligible until months later when a barista told me during small talk. The whole time I managed to remember to feed myself (and my family). I sure hope no internet commenter would look at that and decide to take my children away!

this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing

You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if its deemed important, keep the federal government out of it

Say you have no children. Is it an acceptable position to hold that 'those people who have children should also be the ones to look after them'? Shouldn't you have considered these sorts of expenses and being able to meet them, rather than expecting to receive handouts?

Budgets might be cut directly, so can not feed some percent, budgets might be cut indirectly (less tax revenue). Giving out free food might make people feel entitled and less likely to learn to be self sufficient. The "give a man a fish he eats for day, teach him to fish he eats for a lifetime", type of thinking. Some people might believe it encourages parents to be irresponsible. Back to budgets, it might remove money from other school needs. I guess the thinking would be, schools should teach, food is not their responsibility. If it comes their responsibility then they'll do less teaching which is back to not helping make their students able to ultimately fend for themselves but instead makes them dependent.

I'm not saying I buy those arguments but I can see them as valid arguments.

Helping directly is not always helpful. There's plenty of examples of that. Whether that's true in this case I don't know.

I know that free breakfast is another thing that Minnesota did, apparently?

That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)

Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).

None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.

It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".

No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.

Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.

Objectively speaking, the past several years (especially post lockdowns) have demonstrated the folly of a fare-free system. It only takes one homeless person misbehaving once to permanently dissuade dozens or hundreds of other people from ever using public transportation again.

In the past few months since LA has upgraded fare equipment and begun checking for valid fares, drug use and property crimes has fallen by over 3/4th. People have begun riding the Metro again now that the homeless aren't using it to shoot up. It has worked so well that they're expanding it to the entire rail system over the next several years and trying to figure out how they can do something similar with the buses.

[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...

As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.

There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.

Our school just had "lunch tickets." There was a register on a different floor from the lunch room where you could go buy them, pick them up if your parents bought them by check, or pick them up if you were on the assistance list. Once you had them they were all the same. Only the person at the register would know your status.

None of my friends who got that ever were embarrassed in any way about using them as they were the only ones to know.

When I was a kid in Italy in the '90s we paid for lunch in middle school, but this was done through "lunch tickets".

You'd get those from the town hall, some of us paid for them, some got them for free, but you would not know about it when getting lunch.

(Still, free lunch for all kids should obviously be the default)

You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.

Having not-starving kids is beneficial to literally everyone in the community, not just the kids who use the program.

No, but it's well documented that students who eat lunches generally perform better.

> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.

Sorry buddy, but you won't find a lot of sympathy from people who actually care. School lunches *are not expensive*, and there are plenty of parents who are in poverty and literally cannot afford to pay for their child's lunch.

Should the child starve? No. I strongly believe that anyone who thinks a child should starve, for whatever reason, does not belong in civilized society.

> That's not solving the problem.

You're right, it's not. But you also don't offer a different suggestion. How will you solve poverty? How will you solve neglect?

Until you offer suggestions for that, your comment strikes me as coming from someone who (at best) is sociopathic in a bad way and (possibly) someone who does not belong in civilization.

> It's making sure there will be more problems.

Perhaps.

But you could also consider it as several different types of investments in the future.

An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment whose return is in the form of that child's future taxes; the lack of investment is instead the death-by-starvation of that child and loss of that child's future income and/or business taxes.

An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment in that child's care for their fellow person. Children who have been there (in poverty and starving); who have literally had only one meal per day, are more likely to be more empathetic to the plights of the people (not just children) around them in similar situations. You should hope that, if you're in such a situation, that you could find someone who would be willing to help you.

An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, does solve problems. Most parents are happy to be able to afford that investment themselves, but some parents -- through pride or neglect or other reasons -- are unable to afford that much. Why do you think you shouldn't help them?

Hate to turn into Helen Lovejoy here, but won't you please think of the children? The victims of the problem are the children. You're trying to punish the parents, and the kids get caught in the crossfire.

The entire economic future of you and all the taxpayers depends on those kids growing up.

Our entire economic structure is a ponzi scheme at global scale. It depends on kids growing up and cashing into the stock market so people can cash out of their 401ks.

So why not ensure those little gremlins and nice and plump when they grow up so we can retire more easily.

Take Finland as an example. Schools are paid for by taxpayers, costing around 8,000 euros per student per year [1] (the numbers don't change much regardless of which level of education you look at). Of that just 570 euro pay for balanced and healthy meals (mostly labor costs).[2] That works out to roughly 3 euro per meal.

The benefit of a good meal probably outweigh many other things you could do with that money when it comes to educating children that are your future taxpayers.

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1134054/finland-regular-... [2] https://www.schoolmealscoalition.org/sites/default/files/202...

A decent portion of that goes towards your retirement though right? It's not like it's just vague government services you don't benefit from.

You also seem to have added business taxes onto the income taxes.

Economic though is focused around employers and employees but it's the customer that covers the bill down the line. As long as the consumer is healthy you can set tax as high or as low as you want to.

It wasn't that child's choice to be born. Some of the biggest lifetime ROI's out there are ensuring a childhood isn't filled with trauma, involves enough nutrition to help their bodies and brains develop, etc.

I have no time for people who make an argument about "the government shouldn't be providing food because it creates a dependency or expectation they'll want for life". Their lifetime earnings and contributions to society will be vastly larger if they aren't hungry during the school day.

It's tough to focus and learn when you're only eating a few hundred calories per day.

https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/370341...

Sure but half of that is profit, so it's a silly thing to even mention. If you are using bad faith exams intentionally, it's a good sign that your comment is being made in bad faith.

>$77 billion a year.

I'm not sure you how go to 77 billion from 71 million kids, but whatever, if that's what it costs we should do it.

The School Breakfast Program started in the 1960s/70s. [2]

More recently, in 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed which enabled the Community Eligibility Provision which lets low income area schools offer free food to all kids without individual application/qualification. [3][4]

Various schools I went to in the 90s/00s had some kids bringing their lunch, some kids paying the school for lunch, and some getting free lunch (because they were poor enough to qualify).

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp

[2] https://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/factsheet

[3] https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2014/05/...

[4] https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep

I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.

Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.

No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.

I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.

It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system. Though obviously people who personally are ok with or like that will be better represented in such a system.

> Or said in their parlance, it teaches you self reliance or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.

Rephrased another way you're basically saying "it's not my team doing that, it's the other team." And this is exactly the kind of divisive garbage that perpetuates the system.

What these systems teach in practice is "don't you dare step an inch out of line, no, intent doesn't matter, out of line is out of line and will be punished" which in a perverse way is exactly the kind of thing government schools will wind up teaching because every bit you make those future adults more likely to comply will pay dividends in reduced enforcement over their lives. Support for that sort of crap generally crosses party lines, as does opposition.

Often you have a program created, with "free below X, sliding scale until no subsidy at Y" - done right, this is "perfect" in that each marginal dollar is lightly "taxed" (losing a subsidy is the same as a tax, from the worker's perspective).

This is great! Though let's say (theoretically) that the end result is a 1% "tax" for our family, so each dollar they increase income costs them a penny of subsidy. They probably have other subsidies besides school lunches, like WIC, or ACA, or whatever. Those are also sliding down at various amounts, which can cause it to start to get annoying. But it works.

Then the program is expanded, to be "nice" - even nicer! Now the subsidy is 100% below X, but they're going to also cover 100% up to Y! That's great! Everyone is better off now ... except now you have the situation where at Y + 1, you earned one more dollar, but lost potentially thousands in subsidy. This is NOT ACTUALLY WORSE than before, because at Y + 1 in both scenarios you have no subsidy, but it hurts much more in the second because the subsidy wasn't slowly being drained.

The real answer is that gradients are hard, and clear lines are easy. A shocking number of Americans don't understand how our income tax brackets work; they believe that if you cross the line into a higher income bracket, your entire income is taxed at that new, higher rate, and you end up losing money overall.

Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.

It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.

Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.

It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.

The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.

Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.

They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.

Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.

However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".

I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.

TFA describes the first circumstance.

Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:

Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>).

Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...>

Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.

I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).

I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:

- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.

- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.

Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.

I mean I've heard tell that children yearn for the mines but when it's the responsibility of adults to provide for the material needs of children any adult who actively participates in a system which seeks to deny a child those needs is at the top of my shitlist. There is no universe where I wouldn't just give food to a child who is hungry in my proximity.

individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests

High school was like eating at a truck stop. But it did have a salad bar that was excellent, although myself and Lisa Simpson were the only students that used it.

Meanwhile in my quite red state, a family at the 20th percentile of household income with 1 kid will get $480 in food assistance per month, which is basically enough to afford groceries to stay afloat.

My son's school is private but has a "free lunch" program (apparently paid for out of grants and involving the local grocery store's deli); we send him with a lunch we pack ourselves because we prefer he not eat Goldfish and apple juice boxes every day.

It's always crazy to learn that you guys are so different from us when you dig into the details of things.

Not sure about other states, but...

All NYC public school students can have free meals[0]:

"New York City Public Schools offers free breakfast, lunch and afterschool meals to all NYC public school students during the school year."

As for NY State -- well, better late than never[1]:

"Universal School Meals: Governor Hochul Announces Free Breakfast and Lunch for More Than 2.7 Million Students in New York as Part of the 2025 State of the State"

To be fair, free and reduced price meals were already available across NY state, but with a means test[2]:

   The School Breakfast and Lunch Programs are federal programs providing free, 
   reduced or full priced breakfast and lunch at participating schools 
   throughout New York State. In New York State the New York State Department of 
   Education administers these programs, and local schools operate the programs. 
   The meals are the same for all children regardless of payment category, and 
   schools are not permitted to identify students who get free or reduced-price 
   meals.


   Eligibility Meal Categories  Eligibility
   Free  Income up to 130% of poverty ($39,000 for a family of 4 annually)
   Reduced (no charge to student)  Income up to 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)
   Full price* - paid by family  Income over 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)

[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/universal-school-meals-gove...

[2] https://otda.ny.gov/workingfamilies/schoollunch.asp

If your kids are hurting because you stand on the moral high ground… you get your cigs stolen from, by your children no less. All for the psychological comfort of being right.

You could say he was right, just early: this is also known as very wrong in e.g. financial markets.

You are correct, my dad was a civil engineer, he very much could afford it. I guess he thought high end alcohol and golf were better expenditures. I found it interesting that the article mentions a lot of the debt isn’t from the lowest income brackets.

I quite frankly don't care about that type of arguments anymore. If someone wants to be a bad person they are free to do so. I don't care, it should not stop the 95%, or more, that want to do the right thing.

We continuously make more and more convoluted rules, which are a nightmare for decent people to navigate, but which are just ignored by the assholes. I don't care about fighting the assholes for what is minor amounts, if it means overburdening good people with rules which weren't meant for them anyway.

Moving it to taxes essentially does the same thing. The assholes weasel their way out of paying their fair share, while those who want the best for society and everyone is stuck paying the full amount.

I do.

> The tricky thing is, if you let anyone just choose not to pay, there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother.

It isn't tricky. It's taxes.

There's not nuance here. There's only hate and spite for those less fortunate.

I say this as an IT worker making what most would consider an absurd amount of money and pays 0.55*absurd money in taxes, a dad, a human, etc... what the fuck does any of this matter.

If a child is hungry, the only concern is feeding that child. A child is, pretty much by definition, incapable of fully caring for themselves. If their parents fail to care for them, we have various mechanisms for the state to step in in their stead up to and including taking them away and giving them to someone else.

"Sorry, Johnny, your dad has the money to pay for lunch but chose not to so we're punishing you with going hungry until he wises up."

Full stop no.

If a child is hungry, they get fed. Politics can dictate that adults who are less valuable deserve to starve to death. Politics can dictate that adults who can afford to feed their child but choose not to need to be punished, taxed more, or anything else.

But we, as a society, have the means to ensure that no child ever has to go hungry. Every decision that leads to hungry children is offensive, and anyone choosing to punish adults by starving their children is a monster.

Downvote, flag, or come fight me. I'll die on this hill: Neglecting children is bad and anyone who could help and doesn't is at fault.

So what? Assuming you have a progressive tax system in the first place, the people that are capable of paying are, in fact, actually paying for the service in any case. Why charge them again?

> So as long as you're going to charge for lunches, you need to have some kind of enforcement mechanism.

Yes, and one of the reasons for free universal public programs paid for by progressive taxes are often better than means-tested programs is that enforcement isn't free (and neither, in the case of school lunches, is handling money for payment for the people that your means-tested free lunch program now means are required to pay for the service) so you end up spending a whole lot more between payment processing and eligibility verification and enforcement than you save by excluding the people actually paying for the service by higher taxes from receiving the service.

And if we really think that's true, why do we let people accrue wealth at all? Why do we then think that the most productive people in our society are also the richest? Shouldn't it be the opposite? I struggle to see the pillars of this moral structure in any other way than "poor people are a different breed and need stricter rules to keep them in line". Which again is super wrong! TFA cites research that shows that these kids' parents work, but their wages/bills are too low/high. Does anyone want to guess how bad those parents' jobs are? Do we need to detail the struggles working people go through (lack of health care, wildly inconsistent hours, sexual harassment and assault, etc)? The nicest thing you can say about this kind of thinking is that it's out of date.

And what is "freeloading" anyway? Kids of all backgrounds and parenting situations get to eat? Bring on the freeloading then. Who do I make the check out to?

> there will be plenty of people who are capable of paying who don't bother

I'm past pretending this argument is made in good faith. It only comes from hate and selfishness.

But it went a step further. He didn't want to pay either way, so the poster was in exactly the same situation as the poor kids.

If we're scared to help people who need help, because there's a small chance that someone else may benefit as well, we've lost as a society. Just raise the taxes and give it to every kid.

One is whether kids should get fed.

The other is how this is paid for.

The approach of "the child is charged like anyone else buying a thing and hopefully their parents have given them money" is easy but has obvious problems that we're talking about.

However we can split these problems up, one is saying that we will just feed the kids as a flat statement. Then the problem is how to pay for it.

You could have state level taxes, but that's not the only option. On the other end of the spectrum you could send a bill to the parents - this is at its core the same as charging the kids in the best case but avoids issues where people don't give the kids the money. You could do that but have programs to only charge the more fortunate. You could do it by taxes on income, you could do it by income but only if you have kids. You could do it with property taxes.

All have various benefits and drawbacks, as what's "fair" is arguable.

However that is all distinct from whether the kids get fed.

I did learn around 7th grade that I could steal his cigarettes and sell them. I guess he did pay for more lunches than I realized, now that I wrote this.

In the Netherlands we packed our lunches or we cycled home to eat lunch with our parents and then cycled back to school. Lunch was one of the most favorite times of my day. A break from school during school hours. What a treat!

Yeah, this is wild.

Maybe to lower the chances of other children against your own (wealthy) offspring? So from a very selfish individualistic perspective there is sense? I suspect that might be the base motivation, even though you likely won't find many openly stating that or even are aware of it.

Sometimes an honest conversation—with carefully placed, introspective questions—can be revealing to all parties. When we use our tongues to learn about others and build them up rather than tear them down, we’re actively making the world a better place. When we resist the tendency to judge others, we’re actively bettering ourselves.

I'm from another EU country (the Netherlands). Primary schools do not provide any lunch or other food whatsoever, secondary schools might have a canteen selling some snacks or low quality fast food. But everyone is basically expected to bring their own or go out/home for lunch.

As the saying goes, "Healthcare is such a complex problem that only 32 of the 33 developed countries in the world have solved it."

I don't get where the "33" number comes from and don't inherently agree, but the point? Yes. As someone who is or has been a citizen of the UK, EU, Australia and the US.

a sandwich is enough for a mid morning snack, but not for a midday meal unless the kids get another meal right when they come home. traditional wisdom has it that you should have a good breakfast and lunch, and a smaller meal for dinner. that's possible when the kids come home no later than 2pm but if they usually come home at 3-4pm or later then a sandwich is not enough to get them through the day.

note its also expected that you've already had breakfast before you arrive at school.

Among those:

TIME Magazine, "School Lunch in America: An Abbreviated History" <https://time.com/4496771/school-lunch-history/>

Wikipedia, "School meal programs in the United States" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_meal_programs_in_the_Un...>

PBS, "The History of School Lunch" <https://www.pbs.org/food/stories/history-school-lunch>

And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]

icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.

The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).

The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>

I'm a center-lefty, but America appears to be mostly right and I find it fascinating that this is just "accepted".

Why does America just accept that some (a large enough number that most schools have to feed them) people cant raise their kids?

At the very least I wish my school had let kids use the microwave, cold leftovers get a bit disappointing over time.

This is not a universal.

you can be the most courteous about helping a kid out, and it may be that in many cases that avoids humiliation, but in some it doesn't. and that's enough to make that picture.

and don't think that people working in schools can't be humiliating. i have had to experience it at least once myself. not because of lunch money but something else, but that's besides the point.

also how exactly are they supposed to see for themselves? it's not like they can just walk into a school and hang out during lunch until they see it happen.

Unless it's gotten a lot better from when I was in grade school, the "alternative meal" was the bare minimum they could get away with (it was a piece of white bread with cheese, although it sounds like now the standard is a seed-butter sandwich). It doesn't exist to feed the kid, it exists to shame them, and any nutrition provided is a happy coincidence.

I had to get it once as a kid (although my parents didn't get a bill) and it was too embarrassing to even eat. Even at a table with all your friends you feel like an outsider through no fault of your own.