This is wild to me. In Estonia school lunches are free for everyone, paid by the taxpayer. Doesn't matter if you are poor or wealthy, everybody gets the same food.
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!
Something I thought a lot about when I moved to Mexico and saw kids leaving school at lunch to wander out and eat lunch together in the surrounding part of the city.
Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
Sadly, I think they stopped allowing that the year after I graduated.
> Too much dangerous liability to allow going outside during lunch hours in a wealthy part of Texas, but not in Guadalajara, Mexico and nor of the world. Sigh.
Do you think it actually was or is the US just really strict about this?
For example, in the same high school, I had an unopened beer can on the floor of my car from the weekend, and one of our golf cart parking lot cops saw it while doing her window snooping. And I got sent to reassignment school for a month and a minor in possession charge even though various people in the faculty thought it was unfair that I couldn't just dispose of it and go on my way since I was a good student who clearly wasn't intending to drink at school.
Meanwhile my dad said just decades earlier he kept his BB rifle in the bed of his truck when he drove to high school in Houston. Something that would probably get SWAT called on you if they found it in your truck by the time I went to high school.
Either way, it made no economic sense to pay for lunch, so for most of it I had some sandwiches, this was the norm for most people. I'm nearly 40 now and still (should) bring a packed lunch to the office, because going out for lunch costs €10,- easily. If I went to the office every day like in the Before Times, that'd be around €200,- a month or €2400 a year, which is A Lot.
More can, but American poverty is harsh for people who haven’t seen it. There are kids who don’t have stable living conditions (my wife has had students who rarely sleep under the same roof two nights in a row, one school in the district had a homelessness rate around 40%), or who might not have access to a refrigerator or rodent-proof storage, or who have abusive/mentally ill parents who don’t give them enough food, withhold it as a punishment, or think that enough Jesus will cure an allergy or other medical condition which means they can’t eat some things, etc. Social services may eventually catch up to this at some point but they’re chronically underfunded even in blue states and that can take a good chunk of someone’s childhood.
At this point, we have over a century of studies concluding that one of the easiest ways to improve education is to make sure kids aren’t hungry and the cost of doing so is cheaper than almost anything else (free glasses probably win there) so, like OP, I basically treat this as a litmus test for human decency.
It's bread, butter and cheese. Not dry bread and cheese. I didn't eat that as a kid though, I hated cheese when I was young.
The quality of the bread varies, depending on the views of the household. The way I grew up everyone favored white bread but me. I always ate brown bread.
Nowadays, I come to the US quite often and it frustrates me that there's almost no supermarket that sells a good loaf of bread. A lot of bread has added sugar and I don't even want to know what other stuff they add to it. I'm not a fan of the bakeries either as the bread they make tastes alright, but not for $8. So whenever I'm in the US, I make my own bread, because even after a first try, it was better [2] (by an American baker. It's not that they can't - it's just that affordable nice bread is not a pervasive thing in the US).
And if you genuinely think it's dry bread and cheese. You're wrong, I know what dry bread tastes like. Done well, it's called toast.
My school lunch was bread with butter and a fried egg.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HdoP33KPYtY&ab_channel=Brian...
Yeah, this is wild.