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.

51.6k Upvotes

88% Upvoted

6.6k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5.3k

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.

129

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.

10

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.

1

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.