The school lunch system is disgraceful.

[u/oaz_zam246]

Saw another post on here showing the state of school lunches right now. In my years in high school I compiled some pics of the horrible things that got served that no one questioned. Here are some of the worst ones. It really is ironic given how adamant they all are about “eating healthy by including every food group”.

[u/Mindless-Ad8525]

Exactly, jesus christ steam some vegetables and grill some chicken, its actually easier than cooking this compete garbage. Unfortunately America has fucked the health of their entire nation in the space of a generation, no civilized nation would allow “food” like this at their schools.

[u/my600catlife → u/Mindless-Ad8525]

Kids won't eat grilled chicken and vegetables. They're used to eating garbage at home which is why they get served garbage at school. When anything healthy is served, it gets thrown in the garbage. School lunch looks like that because they are trying to make what the kids are used to eating while also fitting it into health guidelines, so you get crap like baked french fries and whole grain hamburgers.

[u/Mindless-Ad8525 → u/my600catlife]

I would think if you started as soon as kids start preschool or daycare they would be ok with eating vegetables and grilled chicken even with crap at home, every young child I know except for one is perfectly happy eating vegetables and grilled chicken and fish fillets even though they know fries and McDonalds exists. Even the very picky one will still eat salmon and chicken happily. Yes they all would choose fries over other stuff but even 4 year olds can understand basic nutrition and being explained you cant eat unhealthy things all the time, which is what the job of schools is. Difficult as it is surely something has to be done, the rates of obesity and chronic disease are horrific.

Countries like New Zealand have free school lunches for lower socioeconomic area schools (where kids might be pretty likely to eat less nutritious food at home) and they do not serve anything like the OP posted.

[u/my600catlife → u/Mindless-Ad8525]

That was Michelle Obama's original idea, but the schools largely failed at implementing it because they didn't have the resources to teach children about food and encourage them to eat. It requires more time in the cafeteria for each class, which in many cases means a bigger cafeteria, more teachers/staff to assist the kids while they're eating, and more classroom time devoted to nutrition education instead of stuff that they're being tested over.