To be fair, the public school I worked at (and still sub at) never had lunches that even remotely resembled the slop shown. The biggest changes to the menus in the last 8 years have been a switch to whole wheat hamburger/hot dog buns, whole wheat saltines (which are an affront to crackers everywhere), raw carrots & broccoli, dried cherries & cranberries offered as extras and the elimination of desserts that the kids and staff looked forward to (chocolate cake, cherry cobbler, to name two) once a week or so.
The portions were nearly always enough to fill one up.
The dirty little secret about the regulations covering school lunches is that the requirements are too onerous for most school districts to follow actually cooking, so they are forced to buy prepackaged meals from large distributors. To get lunches that are as small and ugly as those shown, I’ll bet somebody is getting rich on the side.
That's not quite true. My friend's sister worked in the cafeteria. The first thing they did was eliminate the salad and potato bars. Potatoes weren't "healthy". Salad was served to the students pre made in a little box. You could have lettuce and 1 ( count them...one) addition. Lettuce and tomato. Or cucumber. Not both. And heaven forbid you add cheese! Not allowed!
Next eliminated was salt and pepper. You could only use spices in the cooking issued by the government, which took several months to arrive. In the meantime.... spice less and tasteless food. Kids had a black market going with salt shakers.
Students were required to take a piece of fruit and vegetable as part of the meal, otherwise you were charged a la carte, which was more. They ended up being dumped in the garbage on the way from the line. Never even made it to the lunch table.
Finally.... calories were limited to 600. That is not nearly enough for my tuba carrying band student who marched for 3 hours after school. His solution was to hit the student club run snack bar, that had things like meat ball subs that were much more substantial. My friend quit. She was tired of serving garbage.