It's not even the "healthy" mandate. It's that everything is prepackaged. The old-school idea of a grandmotherly lady shelling beans and whipping up bread and cookies from scratch is wrong. Instead, you've got reasonably nice ladies defrosting and warming up prepackaged EVERYTHING and putting it out for kids to eat.
The quality is FAR less than you'd get in your average TV dinner.
I wouldn't feed my dog a school lunch hot dog.
The only kids who ate in the school cafeteria were the Free Lunch kids, and even they would continually beg their mothers to bring them something for lunch so they didn't have to eat that garbage.
Our school did not have an open lunch period. Kids were confined to the school building. They either brought their own lunch, or they had to eat school lunch, or they begged someone to bring them something, or they went without.
There was some racket from the District Office about parents bringing fast food into the school for their kids, but our principal just said that he wasn't going to get involved with a mother who was bringing her kids something to eat at lunch.
In some places, it gets even sillier. There are schools in challenged neighborhoods where everybody gets free breakfast and lunch. My favorite was one where some of the little darlin's would come to school with their McDs breakfast, pick up the required free breakfast and throw the free meal away except for the milk.
About those packaged meals: It's really sad. In HeadStart programs within public schools, the tots get free meals. They fed those little 4 year olds stuff like plastic-wrapped pastries and as a "learning experience" they had to open the plastic packaging themselves. I wonder how many moms would feed that crap to their toddlers if they were in charge of feeding them.
Besides which, I just don't get the free meal program. Shouldn't the parents have to pay for the meals with Food Stamps? The gov is already providing them money to feed their families.
In my high school, there was an old gal that made big trays of cornbread. Moist, beautifully browned on top. It was always a sell-out. Probably full of butter and lard. Whatever.
“Having taught in a high school, and having seen what is served in the school cafeteria, I can promise you that if parents had to eat lunch there daily, this nonsense would have ended a long, long time ago.”
“Take Your Parent to School Day” should replace “Take your Daughters to Work Day”.
TontoKowalski but my friends just call me Bubba!
The old-school idea of a grandmotherly lady shelling beans and whipping up bread and cookies from scratch
= = =
This is exactly my school lunch experience. 1953 - 1966
The only menu item I was unfond of was Tomato Soup (orange, milky fluid). Added a lot of crackers.
We had those old school lunch ladies. OMG, you couldn't concentrate in 3rd period from the aroma of homemade yeast rolls wafting down the hallway.
Schools are modern prisons for unsentenced yutes.