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...so I went to a nothing-special, mid-tier public highschool in the US in the early 2000s, and while I wouldn't go as far as calling our lunches 'good', they were fucking gourmet compared to some of the shit I've seen posted from students recently.
Has that shit gone downhill, or did I win the lottery of school lunches without realizing it?
Has that shit gone downhill, or did I win the lottery of school lunches without realizing it?
I think it's a little of both. School lunches definitely have gotten worse, but they've also always kinda been bad in many parts of the country. I think a lot of people don't realize how good their lunches actually were compared to what the kids in their neighboring districts were getting. When I was a kid, we moved one city over and I was in a new school district; went from having pretty decent lunches with lots of options for everything, to having small portions of awful-tasting food with few options, if any.
IMO, it's one of the reasons why local politics are so important, because the schools with bad lunches are typically severely under-funded.
School funding is incredibly localized in the US.
Same here, and no it's definitely gone downhill. And even if we ignore intentional changes in some areas, inflation has outmatched school funding. Costs get cut wherever they can when there's never been enough to go around.
I went to schools that were so shit the teachers got part of their student loans waived for teaching there if they did it long enough. You’re about my age, and I would say the pic in the article does look worse than what we ate most days but not by much. Add canned corn or green beans to it and it’d pass for one of the less appetizing meals that we got.
The main difference is almost certainly funding. The really nice neighborhoods probably made both of our lunches look like prison food.
70s and 80s school food was revolting, though a fair bit better in high school.
SYSCO - It's not people but you'll wish it was
Love shitting on sysco.
During covid they shipped us molded items consistently.
They'd just replace things also. Hey you ordered bulk flour we were out soooo here's 2 containers of ramekins without the lids GLHF 😎
American institutional food - schools, hospitals, etc - is some of the foulest muck that anyone has ever had the gall to call food.
The first time I saw american hospital food my sick partner had to calm me down and explain that it's normal. I was ready to take her to a different hospital, thinking that no one willing to serve five wet sponges and call it a burger could possibly care for a fellow human's wellbeing.
Hospital food has rocketed in quality, at least around here. They're almost a hospitality (heh) business now, want you coming back. Of the 4 hospitals around here, I know exactly which I want to go to, in what order.
The place we had our kids at treats you like a 4-star hotel. The cafeteria food is healthy, tasty, varied and cheap. If it was nearby, I'd drop in for lunch, and people do just that.
After one surgery they wouldn't let me eat anything but a light salad. Damn, it was so good I all but licked the bowl.
This sounds great and all, but pleasing patients doesn't always dovetail with proper medical care. 🤷♂️
(And FFS, I'm punching the next medical person who tells me they practice "evidence based medicine". "I would fucking hope so and I'm not fucking stupid." God I hate that Americans are now so ignorant that medical staff has to say shit like that. /rant)
along the same lines as evidence based medicine is holistic care: oh, you're not going to ignore important bits like my mouth and eyes, like the insurance company?
I lucked out with my kid's school, their lunches smell SO GOOD, and it's as good as a restaurant ong
"Whole grain is a term used by capitalists to deceive people. The skin of grains is called bran. It was previously fed to pigs, but now it is sold to humans at a higher price."
I would say it is still fed to pigs honestly.
Apart from that, whole grain products are in fact more healthy.
apart from having a higher glycemic index than white sugar and being entirely non-essential, sure ...
lol it’s a lost cause. Americans literally, fundamentally cannot understand that they get fed pig slop while the entire rest of the developed world has delicious healthy food.
Americans that go on vacation universally rave about how much healthier they feel and how good the food was, for every country they visit. They never make the connection.
And the funniest bit?
There’s a red note creator that just makes huge slop piles to feed pigs and it’s literally better than what Americans eat.
I think that's a step too far. The average diet is probably more processed than in other nations but plenty of us choose to eat healthy fresh foods. I go to the local farmers market weekly.
it is easier to fool a man than to convince him he's been fooled
To be fair, the quality will definitely vary from school to school and location to location.
None of the schools I went to had bad food or food anywhere near as depressing looking. In fact, the only thing I could complain about is when they changed the goddamn granola breakfast rectangle bar things I really liked in elementary school to something else. That, or how greasy the pizza was in middle/high school.
This TikTok ban is turning out so much better than I had expected.
Nobody who is not American has never had anything good to say about American food though.
I grew up with them and am repulsed by them. Japan definitely does it better (as I'm sure many countries do, but I only have experience with the two).
Most all countries, as a whole, do much better in all parts of the educational system. The fun part is, if these chucklefucks get their way and seriously reduce or eliminate the department of education things are going to seriously roll right back to serfdom.
Iirc, one of the complaints against Michelle Obama's proposals was that (paraphrased) "kids won't eat locally-produced things because they don't like them" and I kinda just died inside.
In my case, I was in school in the '80s and '90s in the rural Midwest and our food was not great and made at a pretty low budget