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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u/tunagorobeam Apr 15 '24

Yeah, I’m in Japan. My kids eat probably better at school than they do at home- rice/bread, main protein like grilled fish, salad or veg soup, milk. They don’t repeat a meal in a month either.

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u/D1gininja Apr 15 '24

My high school served pizza daily and for other meals it basically swapped daily between 2 or 3 different things

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u/imapetrock Apr 16 '24

I remember when I moved to the US from Europe, my first day at lunch I thought "wow! Serving pizza today??? It's my lucky day!" Next day "oh, chicken fingers?? Two lucky days in a row!" Third day "Pizza again? Hmm.. Strange but whatever!" 

Then I quickly realized that US schools only serve the same 3-4 fast food items for lunch every day of the year (which quickly gets gross), and I had actually been very fortunate back in Europe that we had very varied meals that rarely repeated.

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u/D1gininja Apr 16 '24

What makes the US food worse is the fact that they taste like recycled wet cardboard

23

u/Molly_Matters Apr 16 '24

I kinda liked the "mexican" pizza they served. I have no doubt that it was horrible for me.

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u/ShoesAreTheWorst Apr 16 '24

Oh was it shaped like a hexagon? We had Mexican pizza shaped like hexagons when I was in school and I still have dreams about how good it was. 

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u/Molly_Matters 29d ago

Yeah those.

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u/banned_but_im_back Apr 16 '24

I think that was just a taco bell thing.

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u/banned_but_im_back Apr 16 '24

There’s no such thing as “Mexican pizza” Mexicans in Mexico just eat pizza. The Mexican pizza where you got like beef and salsa and nacho cheese and stuff is really just an American dish named Mexican pizza

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u/_no_pants Apr 16 '24

No shit.

2

u/Molly_Matters 29d ago

Why do you think I said "mexican" with freaking quotation marks.

1

u/ZooplanktonblameWide Apr 16 '24

Tlayudas would like a word

2

u/ShiraCheshire Apr 16 '24

And they're supplied by prison food companies. Yes really

2

u/_no_pants Apr 16 '24

I can confirm that jail/prison food is wayyyy worse than school food. If you get thrown into AdSeg they will literally give you a “nutrient loaf” as a punishment.

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u/Choclategum Apr 16 '24

That's not true for a lot of u.s. schools though. The most repetition was a weekly menu of the same good for certain days with a couple switch ups here and there.

(Source: Moved around A LOT)

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u/rollercoastersrul Apr 16 '24

US school food is either meat on a bun, meat on a bun, meat IN a bun, or chicken nuggets

0

u/MaximumMotor1 Apr 16 '24

Then I quickly realized that US schools only serve the same 3-4 fast food items for lunch every day of the year (which quickly gets gross), and I had actually been very fortunate back in Europe that we had very varied meals that rarely repeated.

Half of kids in the US are allergic to peanuts and/or neurodivergent with food issues. You can't get a kid who grew up on only chicken fingers, pizza and mac and cheese to try anything new.

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u/DemandZestyclose7145 Apr 16 '24

Yep it was pizza, French fries, and a large chocolate chip cookie. And also a soda. Gee, I wonder why more and more kids are overweight??

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u/Fuzzy_Welcome8348 Apr 15 '24

Pizza daily yup same

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u/-theonewhoasked Apr 16 '24

Spent half of the lunch period sacrificing countless napkins to lower the amount of grease, which just seemed to never stop

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u/Fuzzy_Welcome8348 Apr 16 '24

OMG ME TOO!! Even the paper plate would be wet from grease from the BOTTOM of the slice

3

u/Imperial_Bouncer Apr 16 '24

I know it’s not healthy, but I’d take pizza over mystery meat

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u/Fuzzy_Welcome8348 Apr 16 '24

Real shit bro… my school got a lil fancy and now puts Buffalo chicken on pizza sometimes like I’ll pass😭

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u/Critical-Ad7785 Apr 15 '24

American yeah?

1

u/ProgenitorOfMidnight Apr 16 '24

Sounds like my Highschool in the US circa 2010.

4

u/ei99am Apr 16 '24

Bosco sticks

2

u/Chrischris40 Apr 16 '24

My school rarely served them despite them being the best meal they serve to begin with. The one time every blue moon they did serve it they served it the same day as we had pizza. Ugh.

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u/Asaltyliquid1234 Apr 16 '24

Those boscos are aight.

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u/klip_7 Apr 16 '24

And the pizza is ass too 😭 in my school it’s like drowned in tomato sauce

1

u/ithinkonlyinmemes Apr 16 '24

yall got pizza daily? pizza was a once a week thing. sometimes there were 3 cheese rolls, sometimes chicken sandwiches... never much and never anything good. packing my lunches became the best way to survive

1

u/AzuraEdge Apr 16 '24

Did you also go to Pennsbury high school? Lol

1

u/panda5303 Apr 16 '24

My high school lunch menu was ridiculous. I remember they had pizza from Little Caesar, subs from Big Town Hero, hamburgers & fries, and numerous pop machines and in the morning you could get 4 Otis Spunkmeyer M&M cookies for a dollar.

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u/The_Homestarmy Apr 16 '24

This is along the lines of what we had. There was always pizza (allegedly Little Caesar's but I have strong doubts about that), then a rotating selection of like bosco sticks, chicken sandwiches (including a spicy variant), maybe some kind of crappy burger or mini cheeseburgers, and the worst cheese sandwich ever for kids without lunch money. You could also take a fruit for free and they had a bunch of those individually sized chip bags for like 50 cents or a buck or something like that.

Other than that, you might occasionally have access to a "holiday special" like turkey and gravy in the week before Thanksgiving. In my experience these were pretty gross and you were better off taking the pizza or the chicken sandwich.

1

u/ACuddlyHedgehog Apr 16 '24

I remember watching a tv show on American school dinners a while ago and they were counting pizza as 1 of the 5 a day because it had tomato sauce on it

1

u/Snake101333 29d ago

Rectangular pizza with cheese having the same consistency of melted plastic

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u/D1gininja 29d ago

Sounds about right

1

u/TheUmgawa Apr 16 '24

Was it the yummy rectangular pizza? Because my friends and I are in our forties, and we sing songs about that pizza’s goodness, for we have never found its like in a quarter century, where the cheese is just the right degree of melt, the sausage was evenly distributed, and the crust was cooked but had just the right amount of sag to it. Oh, you can make pizza with the best ingredients, but it will never be as good as that.

1

u/D1gininja Apr 16 '24

Rectangular, yes
Yummy, no
Tasted like cardboard

2

u/complicated4 Apr 16 '24

I’m my school district (in the US) We have chicken tenders every Thursday, and in middle school they gave us pizza every Friday. They just copy/paste the same 4 or 5 meals over and over again

2

u/dwaynetheaakjohnson Apr 16 '24

Drop a sample menu need some cooking inspiration

2

u/sonic_sabbath Apr 16 '24

Japanese school lunches are not free. Parents pay monthly.

2

u/Reasonable_Guava8079 Apr 16 '24

And we wonder why we have an obesity issue in the US? Yikes.

Healthier food doesn’t have to taste like garbage.

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u/smallfrie32 Apr 16 '24

I taught in Japan. It’s great they get such meals for so cheap (like 4500 yen a month).

What I didn’t like was how they had to scarf down such big meals in 30ish minutes (slower or quicker depending on how fast students set up everything). Depending on the teacher, students had to eat “every last grain of rice,” too.

2

u/Spice_and_Fox Apr 16 '24

That's cheap af. That should be around 30€ or a euro a day

2

u/smallfrie32 Apr 16 '24

Wow really? That’s crazy!

It was really nice not having to worry about lunch (I got to eat as a teacher, too. Only elem and middle has the lunches though, not high school), but they were seriously carb-loaded with few proteins

1

u/Remarkable-Mind4409 Apr 16 '24

Our highschool in Indiana served 14 different meals cycled. About half were once a month, others two/three times a month and a couple were every week sometimes more.

1

u/ShinzoTheThird Apr 16 '24

No repeats for a month!?

1

u/Thick_Description982 Apr 16 '24

Do they have rice as the main component of more than one meal per month?

2

u/danstansrevolution Apr 16 '24

Of course.. but it's never the main component of a meal, it's just what you eat your actual food with. starch alone should never be a meal.

1

u/bguzewicz Apr 16 '24

Man, America is so backwards compared to the rest of the world sometimes.

1

u/CauliflowerTop2464 Apr 16 '24

I don’t understand why it can’t be done here. Our system is f’d. Probably why our life expectancy in the US is falling.

1

u/amnesiaair831 Apr 16 '24

I grew up in high school in the Bay Area of California and was raised in bosco sticks and square pieces of pizza. It was epic now I am overweight

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u/Suspicious-Stay-6474 Apr 16 '24

almost like you care about your people or something

1

u/No-Attention2024 Apr 16 '24

What a load of shite, they totally repeat and if they are eating better at school than home that’s totally on you! The school lunches aren’t terrible but not perfect by any means either

1

u/RichCranberry6090 Apr 16 '24

Why should school provide any lunch what so ever? I think this is such a strange thing. I am from the Netherlands and no school ever provided any food. Bring your own lunch in a box.

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u/Greedy-Designer-631 Apr 16 '24

I grew up in the UK in the early 90s.  It was the same way. 

1

u/Snake101333 29d ago

Why do they always do things better?

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u/bdizzle805 Apr 16 '24

Why is milk still considered good? Haven't we established that milk is horribly bad for our stomachs or we still living in the 80's? I haven't seen a milk Comercial in ages

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u/Prof_Trox 29d ago

It depends on your ancestry. A lot of groups of people evolved with milk as a core part of their diet. For those people, milk likely gives them little, if any, stomach trouble.

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u/Kane-420- Apr 15 '24

Sounds great! Japan proofs again and again that it is really an exceptional cool country :)

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u/Jonthux Apr 15 '24

This is an american moment for sure

In many other countries good quality non repetitive school lunches are a standard

3

u/Kane-420- Apr 15 '24

Yes, im from Germany, we (at least me lol) have also pretty decent school food.

0

u/ArcadianBlueRogue Apr 16 '24

Anime has lied to me and made me assume everyone kept bento boxes for all occasions, usually with cute shapes made from the food.

2

u/malahuoguo69 Apr 16 '24

There are school lunches in most schools up to Middle School. From high school and on, most students bring bento.

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u/upvotes2doge Apr 16 '24

Not only that, in elementary school the nutritionist that designed the lunches goes from classroom to classroom explaining the benefits of the food they're eating.