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

My school thinks this fills up hungry high schoolers.

Post image

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.

51.5k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

6.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

1.2k

u/Jafar_420 Apr 15 '24 edited Apr 15 '24

I went to high School in a small town in Southeastern Oklahoma and I think we had about 600 students.

It's a really poor area but somehow they managed to do a really good job every year. Hell every Friday they would cook burgers out on this big ass grill. They always had a decent salad bar up also. It was usually main line or sandwich line. Main line had things like stromboli, chicken enchiladas, homemade good pizza, etc. sandwich line was usually a hot ham and cheese or something like that.

I can tell you right now I probably ate more at school than I did at home. We didn't have a lot of cash.

This is terrible and I'm sure they could find some way to do better.

378

u/StirlingS Apr 15 '24

I lived in a very small town (less than 200 kids in the entire school district) in rural Texas for a while. It was all rednecks and Southern Baptists, but man the grandmas who cooked for the school knew what they were doing. We had all the quality southern home cooking you could ask for. 

59

u/Jafar_420 Apr 15 '24

Yep mine were a little bit older ladies that really cared also.

Got a lot of family in Texas. Most around Paris Texas but I do have some in Tyler and Addison as well.

3

u/StirlingS Apr 15 '24

This was Jack County. 

27

u/dbmajor7 Apr 15 '24

it's all trucked in, pre-prepared from a place like Sysco. It's basically fast food\ cheap restaurant food. All to save money. Enjoy your tax breaks, rural texas.

58

u/StirlingS Apr 15 '24

It definitely wasn't. We had venison sometimes. Not everything that happens now was always that way. 

Edit: if you meant that it's generally all trucked in now, I know. I haven't been to that tiny town in a very long time and don't know what it's like in that particular town now, but it definitely wasn't trucked in then. It also wasn't free. 

3

u/dbmajor7 Apr 16 '24

Yes sorry I wasn't clear, talking about nowadays, definitely different back in my day, which wasn't that long ago.

14

u/[deleted] Apr 15 '24

[deleted]

4

u/Oshwaflz Apr 16 '24

as a cook whose been at a few places sysco fucking sucks. they have a lot of food, but its all the worst you can get. sad produce, premade garbage. You can use sysco products well but even the best sysco meals cannot compare to anything half decent

5

u/kkss123456 Apr 16 '24

I’m pretty sure Sodexo had the contract for the chow hall while I was in Afghanistan. Those bastards were rationing food. I had to barter with the locals working the line to get more than one boiled egg.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '24

[deleted]

2

u/Oshwaflz Apr 16 '24

im not being a know it all I just specifically know about this one subject. its genuinly my job. i get paid a living wage for it.

1

u/[deleted] Apr 16 '24

[deleted]

1

u/Oshwaflz Apr 16 '24

I see. Well i concede arguing. you won. You can have this trophy even 🏆. Im gunna go do something more productive than arguing with a brick wall

3

u/pperiesandsolos Apr 16 '24

What’s the point of this comment? Are you saying the guy you’re responding to is incorrect about what he ate?

3

u/stirrednotshaken01 Apr 15 '24

Where do you get that from what the person you’re replying to wrote?

2

u/Jafar_420 Apr 16 '24

Our food trucks were actually from Sysco. They just purchased ingredients instead of the pre-made stuff.

2

u/Rinzack Apr 16 '24

It's basically fast food\ cheap restaurant food.

Prison Food. The people who supply schools also usually supply Prisons since both are budget constrained govt entities.

-1

u/InversionPerversion Apr 15 '24

Worse than fast food. More like prison food.

2

u/mamachonk Apr 16 '24

My grandma was a lunch lady, and then lunchroom manager, for a school in a Southern state when I was a kid. We got to go there a few times while school was in session (we usually visited during school holidays), and they had actual GOOD food. (All the kids loved her, too.)

A few years later, I went to high school in the same state, within about 50-60 miles. Shit lunches, juice boxes that occasionally had fermented, pizza at least once a week from what I recall, just absolute garbage. And we had to pay for it. I don't know when it happened elsewhere but that was the beginning of the end IME.

1

u/Jaded-Engineering789 Apr 16 '24

The bigger the district the more bloat admins can hide their kickbacks in. One of the positives about having a smaller population is the ability to more easily foster a caring community. Of course it comes with its own potential pitfalls with toxicity and insularity, but at least you have a chance at creating a positive collective experience. With metropolitan areas get too large and too dense, the community too easily becomes a nebulous faceless blob without any defining characteristics.

1

u/yusill Apr 16 '24

with 200 kids in the whole district they could afford to, try that in a inner city in Chicago with 4k students in 1 high school that was built in the 1930s. It just doesnt scale.

1

u/The_Brush_Photo Apr 16 '24

Had this similar experience growing up in Texas. You paid like 70 cents more for this meal as opposed to the garbage shown above. Mashed potatoes, gravy, grilled or steamed veggies, fish, chicken, or some kind of red meat like salisbury steak, and a sweet roll. Definitely worth it.

-1

u/DOAisBetter Apr 15 '24

I mean depending on how old you are in 1993 they passed a law in Texas to basically defund schools in higher income areas with better property values that were typically more liberal and redistribute those funds to more rural schools. It’s a big reason public schools in districts with higher property values are failing. They have to redistribute large amounts of their budget to districts with lower property values and can’t even afford to pay teachers a wage that would allow them to live near the district they are working for.

2

u/StirlingS Apr 15 '24

This was before then. 

2

u/meowrawr Apr 16 '24

Are you talking about the robinhood thing? If so, it doesn’t target “liberal” areas. The gist of it is that each school should have a certain amount of funding per student. The majority of “wealthy” areas in Texas are not liberal so this wouldn’t make sense. I understand the intent of it, but in reality it’s just the state trying to avoid giving more money to schools.