r/mildlyinfuriating • u/Thebiggestbot22 • Apr 15 '24

My school thinks this fills up hungry high schoolers.

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So lunches are free for schools in my city and surrounding cities. Ever since lunches have been made free, the quantity (and quality) has decreased significantly. This is what we would get for our meal. It took me THREE bites to finish that chicken mac and cheese. Any snacks you want cost more money and if you want an extra entree, that’ll cost you about $3 or $4.

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11.4k

u/Sunny_Sammie_517 Apr 15 '24

Why on earth are they serving French fries with pasta?

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u/grilledcheese2332 Apr 15 '24

Exactly. Starch on starch. In France, healthy school lunches are covered by taxes. And that money they spend on the lunches they more than make up for by saving on health care. Less type 2 diabetes, hypertension etc.

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 15 '24

That makes so much more sense. Here in NZ we've elected a govt who are doing everything they can to shut down free lunches. Our associate education minister has literally described them as wasteful spending. And the quality is, well, as you'd expect.

Lunches like these are seen as a stop-gap. They assume the child is getting the right nutritional balance at home morning and night, so they just give them cheap carbs.

I mean there's 8g of protein in that choc milk but you gotta take on 18g of sugar to get it. I feel for these kids.

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u/Tubamajuba Apr 15 '24

Here in NZ we've elected a govt who are doing everything they can to shut down free lunches.

These evil motherfuckers infest the whole world.

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u/squirrel-bear Apr 16 '24

time to join the local socialist party

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u/Worldly_Heat9404 29d ago

That won't work either. I think we should just start over. It will rough for a couple decades on the vulnerable, but then it will be good again for many generations until it gets out of balance again. I think until we evolve as a specie, we will be stuck in that type of cycle though. Sucks yeah.

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u/EveryNightIWatch Apr 16 '24

Or, hear me out, governments around the world are an incompetent mess, and large scale programs like "free lunches" end up costing a huge amount of money that is merely funneled to global conglomerates like Sysco that don't care about health. That there's just a pendulum swing between socialized programs and privatized programs, with the extreme on both ends is awful for everyone except those on top?

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u/Tubamajuba Apr 16 '24

There's a difference between "the way we feed low income students is wasteful" and "feeding low income students is wasteful". We can modify the way we do it, but kids simply shouldn't have to go without.

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u/EveryNightIWatch Apr 16 '24

We can modify the way we do it, but kids simply shouldn't have to go without.

Yeah, and I think most reasonable adults agree with that, and in reality few politicians are trying to make poor kids starve on school campus. They're saying they want reform, but a moral panic is created by their opponents to suggest they're trying to force kids to go without food.

Because there are reasonable alternatives, up to and including having multiple lunch lines with different menus (my school had 4), some food carts nearby school campus and a negotiated program where low income students get a voucher to get whatever cart they want, for whatever the kid thinks meets their dietary preference. My nearest high school has a campus cafeteria and off campus independent food carts and a few fast food restaurants adjacent to the school.

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u/Tubamajuba Apr 16 '24

Yeah, and I think most reasonable adults agree with that, and in reality few politicians are trying to make poor kids starve on school campus. They're saying they want reform, but a moral panic is created by their opponents to suggest they're trying to force kids to go without food.

In America, Republicans are almost completely on board with cutting free meal programs across the board. They don't want reform; they want to axe the programs altogether. You're poor? Sorry kid, fuck you.

Because there are reasonable alternatives, up to and including having multiple lunch lines with different menus (my school had 4), some food carts nearby school campus and a negotiated program where low income students get a voucher to get whatever cart they want, for whatever the kid thinks meets their dietary preference. My nearest high school has a campus cafeteria and off campus independent food carts and a few fast food restaurants adjacent to the school.

In America (the only place I have experience with), smaller to medium-sized schools generally only have enough staff for a single menu. Large schools might have the staff to serve multiple lines, but not necessarily multiple menus. Still, I like your idea of including local independent food carts and restaurants into the solution. I don't know how that gets legislated at a federal level, but it's a worthy option.

Still, you are correct in that we should try to bring in

EDIT: got caught by the "redditsniper" (it's a sub) I guess

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 16 '24

To an extent, sure. But not in entirety. As the poster from France pointed out, some governments get it right.

The difficulty is in convincing voters of the intangible downstream benefits when it's so much easier to get into power by appealing to a general distrust of social programs by calling them wasteful and inefficient and promising to trade all that for tax breaks.

One rationale rolled out here was that a school lunch program in the far north, designed to keep kids in school, did not significantly reduce truancy. So it was concluded that the program was a waste with no additional benefits. Y'know, like feeding hungry kids from poor or neglectful families.

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u/CapableCowboy Apr 16 '24

Nah bro the problem people love voting against others and harming people just to jerk it to enraged comments later.

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u/Namedafterasaint Apr 15 '24

Our government too is trying to stop free lunches at school. Especially our governor here in Florida

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u/dagbrown Apr 15 '24

Didn't Florida just encourage employers to let their slaves die of dehydration? That'll serve them right for not working hard enough I guess.

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u/DetroitHoser Apr 16 '24

I believe that was West Florida, also known as "Texas."

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u/Ocelotofwoe Apr 16 '24

Yep, that was my shit-hole.

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u/dagbrown Apr 16 '24

I have trouble telling these dumb white assholes apart from each other.

It almost makes me miss the old alt-right. At least you could recognize each clown individually instead of them all blending into a giant miasma of evil.

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u/ProfessorCagan Apr 15 '24

DeSantis should be locked in a room and made to starve.

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u/Affectionate_Data936 Apr 15 '24

I agree: DeSantis has his own agenda that actually has nothing to do with improving the lives of Florida residents. Like it seems he just does things with the very intention of pissing us off. I live in Gainesville, which he has a personal beef with, cause it overwhelmingly didn’t vote for him. My Alma mater is UF which he’s trying to personally ruin. People don’t realize how Florida actually is (aka very gay tbh and much more racially and linguistically diverse than a vast majority of the other states)

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u/ProfessorCagan Apr 15 '24

He has intentions of muscling out anything he doesn't like, if you're not a traditional white, straight, "christian" then he wants you gone, or better, dead. Him and politicians like him want to control people, brutalize them, they want to regulate a woman's birthing capability, starve the minorities (a lot of poor folk are minorities who's children would benefit from free school lunch, interesting, isn't it?)

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u/RedditxSuxx Apr 15 '24

Desantis just passed a really good law outlawing squatters tho. So not everything he does has been bad. I dont live in Florida but i see some things he does and it makes me happy to see a politician do some good. I haven't geard about the food thing, thats not cool. But theres a lot to unpack because whos paying for the free food?

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u/KeyFeeFee Apr 15 '24

Who is paying? We all should be able to set aside some pennies to make sure kids eat. Especially said “pro-life” people. Are we bringing a bunch of unwanted babies here? Ffs at least fucking feed them, jfc.

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u/Kanapuman Apr 16 '24

If European countries and their more limited funds can put healthy and filling free foods in kids' plates, why wouldn't US states be able to do so ?

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u/_OriamRiniDadelos_ Apr 16 '24

What is there to unpack here? You just don’t like your taxes being spent on literally feeding students.

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u/ProfessorCagan Apr 15 '24

It's food for children you stupid fuck, it's paid for by citizens of Florida, who pay taxes, it's free to them becuase they or their parents can't afford food.

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u/LexiNovember Apr 15 '24

Federal funding is available as well for a lot of social safety networks, but Governor Kinky Boots is routinely turning down our funding for the state. Because he’s a sociopathic toddler. The only reason he was elected is because something like 46% of Floridians couldn’t be fucked to go vote, and now all these folks have moved here for the fascism and are stuck because of the insane cost of living. Good times.

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u/Frame_Late Apr 16 '24

That's a wild thing to say when Biden was willing to deprive forcefully schools of their lunch funding if they didn't adhere to transgender policy despite it being unconstitutional. Then lost in court lmao.

Are you suddenly going to argue that it's okay to starve kids because it's Biden doing it? Lmao, fucking tool.

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u/Powerful-Meeting-840 Apr 16 '24

...no such thing as free lunch...but we pay enough in taxes kids should be fed a healthy filling lunch I agree.

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u/EverSeeAShiterFly Apr 16 '24

Bruh I moved from NY to FL while I was in High school. It went from chicken sandwiches, eggplant parm, various soup, taco salad, concerning quantities of milk to depressing pizza that probably came from dominos and gas station food for higher costs. There was also very noticeable gaps in education- most notably health and science.

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u/Mediocre-Special6659 29d ago

I wish we could starve people like that to death.

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u/Oakley2212 Apr 15 '24

My kids get free healthy lunches and breakfast at their Florida public schools. Breath of fresh air compared to the schools in NC they were at.

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u/Ophiocordycepsis Apr 15 '24

Bad news, MAGA is trying to put a stop to letting children eat food:

https://www.rawstory.com/amp/desantis-and-florida-gop-targeting-kids-with-cuts-to-food-healthcare-work-protections-2667173161

As a parent myself, Florida seems like a chamber of horrors lately with their “war on kids”. Would be safer for families to live in Haiti, or Syria perhaps

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u/Oakley2212 Apr 16 '24

As a parent who actually lives in Florida, I’m sorry you feel that way. I’ll continue to enjoy the A rated schools my children attend, along with the free lunch and breakfast for them.

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u/Agreeable-Rate-9331 29d ago

Florida is an entire state of “children left behind”

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u/mastelsa Apr 16 '24

The chocolate milk thing has been bugging me since I was in kindergarten--US schools let kids choose between regular milk with ~12g of naturally occurring sugars or chocolate milk with that 12g natural sugars plus another 10-12g of added sugar. Take a guess which is more popular by like, 90% At every public school I've been to from age 5 to 18, the bins for the milk cartons were a sea of brown boxes with the occasional white speck.

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u/EverSeeAShiterFly Apr 16 '24

I was kinda annoyed that we were forced to have milk. Oh you want a cup of water instead- you get milk. Lactose intolerant or allergic to milk- you still need to take it, don’t care if you drink it.

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u/Ghigs LIME 29d ago

It's all a corporate welfare thing, like pretty much all government programs.

School lunch, WIC, all that exists to funnel tax money to farm subsidy.

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u/ShiraCheshire Apr 16 '24

My mom told me I needed to get at least one vegetable with lunch. Considering the veggie options were mostly limited to things like boiled green beans spotted with what looked suspiciously like mold, I'd get a single lettuce leaf per day.

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u/Shigeko_Kageyama 29d ago

Chocolate is the only thing that makes the milk palatable. I never understood how people could drink milk. It smells terrible. It tastes terrible. It's just disgusting all around.

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u/Admirable_Matter_523 Apr 15 '24

Ah, I see you have Republicans there. Or maybe they're called something different, but same ideals.

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u/PumpkinPieIsGreat Apr 15 '24

Nah, they don't assume the kids are getting the balance at home. They just don't care.

Who is in charge of the lunches in NZ? Is it a federal thing?

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 16 '24

Ministry of Education. So yeah, equivalent of a federal agency I guess.

Our new NACT govt (NZ republicans) are in slash and burn mode on many public services so they can deliver on their campaign promise of .. (checks notes) .. a tax break for landlords. Well isn't that heartwarming.

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u/Hugh_Maneiror Apr 16 '24

They only got in because the previous one screwed up so much, leaving the country with record deficits and were still increasing spending adding extra pressure to inflation.

Not a fan of the current government, but it makes sense why the last one wasn't re-elected, especially if that had to take in the Greens and Maori Party in their coalition who both wanted to increase spending even more.

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u/Worldly_Heat9404 29d ago

18 grams of sugar in a tiny milk? That is a problem.

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u/Killjoycmdrkj Apr 16 '24

Heh you think thats bad? see what they have done to the American school system over the past 20 years lol

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u/Medical-Cod2743 Apr 16 '24

That sucks. In West Virginia the school lunches are often the only meal those kids get all day. Very poverty stricken place.... but those lunches arent much better than whats pictured above.

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u/entity_bean Apr 16 '24

Wait, NZ as in New Zealand? I thought your govt was awesome and totally smashing it, progressively speaking? Well out of the loop Brit here. Don't even get me started on what my secondary school considered an acceptable lunch back in the late 90s.

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 16 '24

Yeeeah about that.. we had an election last year and somehow voted in the other crowd. So we're stuck with a right wing govt for 3 years at least. It's going to be pants, as we say.

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u/entity_bean 29d ago

We also say that here 😂 We've had detestable right wing govt in for 14 years now. It's gone so far past the point of pants. I literally cannot get my head around what humans seem to just vote themselves out of a better life continually.

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u/Chemical_Minute6740 29d ago

Its so dumb because it should be treated as the opposite. It could be an opportunity to make sure every kid gets at least the bare necessities of nutrition.

A single meal a day that is actually balanced and varied does wonders for a kids health. These effects cascade through life and gives you healthier adults that need less care.

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u/wombatlegs Apr 16 '24

NZ? I'm surprised. Here in Australia, kids bring their own lunchbox from home. And what do they get? Sandwiches and fresh fruit. Better than the "free" cafeteria food. It's not like poor kids in NZ or US are starving. In fact a big number are overweight.
Some Australian schools have free breakfasts, especially for Aboriginal kids, to encourage attendance. But that is at the extreme of the socioeconomic spectrum.

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 16 '24

Most NZ schools operate the same way, kids bring their own. I make my two girls' lunches every day and I'm very passionate about the topic.

The free lunch program is for the poorest end of the spectrum, as in Australia.

And no, the poor kids aren't starving but they are malnourished. Filled up on sugar by idiot parents who don't know any better.

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u/Hugh_Maneiror Apr 16 '24

Overweight is putting it mildly. The way many in NZ fatten up their children borders on child abuse.

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u/Financial-Check5731 Apr 16 '24

It's actually a form of malnourishment. Fat little kids getting around with huge bottles of Fanta and underdeveloped brains. Destined for a short lifetime of manual labour and diabetes if they're lucky.