> It’s easy to find talk, for example from people who think universal healthcare should be applied differently to people who live an unhealthy lifestyle.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
Brought to you by the same people who oppose healthy free school lunches.
That said, the random person buying grocery is paying a corp here.
Government would also reduce overhead from not collecting money for school lunches, thus making such a program more than 100% efficient here if scaled to every child.
A few old ladies working in a church kitchen (the typical form these sorts of volunteer endeavors take) to slap PB and J (or deli meat and cheese) on wonder-bread and pairing these with apples and single serving bags of potato chips are going to run circles around the government when it comes to lunches provided per dollar. The government is incurring similar input and labor costs (let's assume the volunteers are paid for the sake of comparison) to do comparable work (i.e. what happens in every school kitchen) but there are entire categories of overhead that the latter has to pay for, and furthermore, these categories of overhead apply constraints that increase costs. The government provides meals that meet more specific criteria. It does not provide them more efficiently on an resources in vs "output of thing we want" produced basis.
That product also needs to then be distributed to individual families vs being prepared inside a school.
So in terms of "output of thing we want" per dollar it’s a massive failure here.
PS: Deli meats and jelly are also terrible health wise, but I get that’s not really your point.
As to health and safety, biology and human nature can’t be hand waved away. Food banks get specific legal protections for cases of food poisoning, but the underlying issues result in people getting sick. Similarly all that wasteful tamperproof packaging comes from real events like the Chicago Tylenol murders, at scale people suck.
There’s also inherent disadvantages when you want food to be preserved without freezing or refrigeration. Jelly is mostly sugar to inhibit microbial growth. Deli meats need to use preservatives you eat while minimally impacting taste when added to meat and we don’t have good options here. That’s why people have refrigerators in their homes, it’s solving a real issue.
The health department will accuse you of running an unlicensed food pantry and threaten you with hundreds of thousands of dollars in fines. The useful idiots will endorse this action becase "it's not ideal, but we can't have unlicensed restaurants can we".
Source: happened in a city near me.
Jesus, talk about a strawman
If your can't afford to feed your kids in school you don't deserve to be called a first world country.