Fear of legal action against them.
Giving all kids a hot meal is a no brainer eat win for society. We gave it to them, then took it back.
Massachusetts extended the free school lunch (and breakfast) program to all students in 2023. Here's the report on 2024:
https://www.mass.gov/doc/universal-free-school-mealsfinal070...
It's nominally 20 pages but the first five are boilerplate and ToC and the last ten are a listing of how much each school district received, so you could reasonably read all the actual report.
https://www.ibo.nyc.ny.us/iboreports/if-no-student-pays-cost...
The report used 2014-2015 numbers, where the cost of lunches for elementary students was $102 million and the participation rate was 57%. It estimates that universal free lunch would cost the city an additional $5.2 million. Part of the costs would be offset by federal reimbursements, so the full estimate is higher than $5.2… the details are in the report.
So yes, it would cost more to make it free for everyone. I still think it should be free for everyone, but it is hard to argue that you can save money that way.
If you want better numbers, a good place to start would be to take total cost per student for a given year and the cost per lunch for the same year, and multiply cost per lunch by number of days and some participation rate %.
I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right? Even if we did exactly what you suggest, and even if the numbers were more accurate, the outcome doesn’t change: it’s weird to account for lunch outside of the rest of the system, when lunch is such a tiny minuscule cost, it could be funded without blinking.
I found $23,884 expenditure per child in 2014-2015, which is when the $4.30 school lunch cost is from. With 180 instructional days, lunch would be $4.30/day x 180day/year / $23884/year = 3.2%.
> I was more or less trying to do what you suggest, but without getting stuck doing research until next week. I could be off by a factor of 10 or even 100 without the point having a significantly different summary, right?
You were off by a factor of 150, about. Kinda big. I guess you could be stuck here doing research until next week. I searched “nyc cost per student school 2014” and plugged some numbers into a calculator. I made sure to put all my numbers up there with units in case you disagree with the numbers or disagree with the formula. If you want to use newer numbers you can do that, but I think it’s important to use numbers from the same time, more or less.
These “off by 3x, 2x, 4x” errors add up to orders of magnitude if you make enough errors like that. I was disagreeing with your estimate because there were too many errors. Just kind of a gut feeling.
I think the comment I was replying to believed that some big chunk of the cost was due figuring out which students deserve free lunches or not. That’s untrue.
The lunch program is substantial and can’t really be hidden by burying it in some much larger budget.
I get the argument “this is valuable, we should do this” but I don’t buy the argument “this cost is small”.
There was a scandal in the neighborhood I live in because one school tired of lunch debt was making the hot lunches, letting the kids pick them up, and then taking them away and throwing them in the trash, to make a big show of parents not paying their lunch bills. That saved no dollars and punished the children for what the parents did, poor children disproportionately. Even though most of the kids’ families could afford the lunches, that’s just a shitty thing to do.
The cost actually is small, in the big picture. The truth is that the U.S. can easily afford to pay not just for lunch but for all of education, both elementary and higher education, and it pays for itself many times over, if we look at the extra income tax people with degrees pay over people who don’t have any higher education. We are choosing to not give our kids college degrees by default, and we are choosing to withhold hot lunches from elementary school kids, and it is not because it costs a lot, it would be trivial to fund (and we already proved that during COVID.) It’s because we have politics and a social belief system that is allergic to the idea of free lunch, regardless of the costs.
While I agree that a full analyst of the social benefit would be better, and I bet it would almost certainly end up being a net positive (and also, the possibility that kids are just not getting fed because of record-keeping screw-ups, missed paperwork, or incomplete programs is just unconscionable), the question the asked about the overhead does have the benefit of being a lot more answerable and direct.
In fact they seem designed to hide these consequences, both good and bad. The features we tag profits and losses are right out front, while other important features are labelled "externalities" and essentially ignored.
This is very obvious in the differences between US and other Western attitudes to infrastructure spending. In the EU, public transport is heavily subsidised. It isn't expected to be profitable because it provides both direct and indirect returns.
No one rational - who isn't a chef - expects their fridge or cooker to be a profit source. Big public infra projects are no different. They're a kind of giant public appliance. You buy them to provide a service.
In the US and UK, the goal of infrastructure spending is usually to create private profits. This certainly creates returns for a small class of people, but it only seems rational because it's pretending other kinds of returns don't exist.
Are you disagreeing with me, or just reframing the discussion? Pick one mode of discussion, please, I find it hard to follow if you start off disagreeing but then switch gears and decide to reframe the discussion.
I encourage you to speak as much as you want about the fact that our accounting system sucks at dealing with externalities. However, we are still slaves to accounting, somewhat. Nobody rational expects a fridge to be a profit source. But if you take taxes, people expect an accounting of how the taxes are spent. “This program costs money but has benefits that outweigh the cost” is pretty easy to understand. The program doesn’t pay for itself because we don’t have a way to put better outcomes on the books.
We also don’t have an accounting system that lets me show a net positive for buying a movie ticket.
That's assuming everyone would sign up for the free lunch. We have 2 kids in public schools and pack their lunches even though we could sign them up for free lunch (our state makes it available to all families). We're not alone in that either. (We're also not rich, but we put a high priority on healthy food.)
The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of that. It is very likely that these new systems will actually reduce revenue, as the agency has admitted. Not to mention the operational overhead of waiting for people to tap as they get on.
I strongly believe in social democracies, but our governments are awful at spending our money.
Which would be related to the other symptomatic reasons such a barrier might be sought. As a society my country (USA) sadly has low respect for the commons generally. There's a lack of investment (not none, but not enough), a sense of 'me-ism' entitlement in the population (as if sharing and consideration of others shouldn't mutually be the priority for a public space), and unwillingness to address national scale issues that lead to blights upon the commons (mostly thinking of people society has failed).
None of those are easy enough to fix that a reasonably sized reply could even begin to adequately cover a solution, but those problems are some reasons why a gated access to a public resource might be sought other than as a form of funding.
One, they are indirectly paying for it already by way of taxation. Two, I'd argue it is much better to be respectful towards things you didn't pay for.
"I Don't Know How To Explain To You That You Should Care About Other People" -- https://www.huffpost.com/entry/i-dont-know-how-to-explain-to...
Such is the tragedy of the commons.
We are to celebrate those who get out of paying taxes by any means and looking the other way when others take from the commons.
You answered "yes" in your original comment, but your supporting arguments imply "no" so I can see why people are confused.
Read the original question again:
>Is the overhead in deciding who gets free lunch and who doesn't and then managing the debt really saving more money than just giving all public school kids free lunches with no strings attached?
TBH I’m a little skeptical of the payment system story, it sounds oversimplified and might be agenda driven. All our transit systems need payment system maintenance and upgrades over time. Riders want & demand tap to pay, for example. All costs cut into and balance against incomes, but that doesn’t mean they can opt out, nor that it will save taxpayers in the long run. Keeping the old payment system might have rising costs and lead to reduced ridership over time, costs which may not have been assumed in the story you shared. I doubt the payment system is very significant compared to train cars, rails, crossing lights & gates, employees, etc.
We tend to cherry-pick and arm-chair debate individual budget items without seeing the big picture, in order to justify the preconceived claim that governments are bad at spending. Making families pay for school lunches is pretty funny when taxpayers pay for the building, books, teachers, and janitorial and food staff, the sum of which is literally thousands of times more than lunch. Debating the funding of school lunches is missing the forest for the trees, right?
As for your other points, without annualizing it’s actually a fairly significant line item — their budget is about 3 billion. Annualized it’s not as bad, but that is hardly relevant as the fact of the matter is it costed 934 billion. Why did cost that much? My best answer is that a bid was held and cubic transportation systems won. This does not mean that the price was reasonable, only that cubic won. As for the new income, yes, that’s true. Trains will run slightly faster as people can board on many doors above ground (free system also does this). Ridership may increase thanks to tap to pay. I discuss this. But they also have, on numerous occasions, drastically overestimated the new revenue. Newer estimates show that the systems enable more fare evasion than before, cutting into profits.
My best guess as to why is mismanagement. After this was approved the MBTA’s management was overhauled for being a circus.
If you want to write a data driven counter argument, I would be more than happy to link to it at the top of my piece and offer rebuttals
It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
If you pick a low enough price you even decrease the number of fare dodgers, which means that enforcing is not as important or costly.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
No. They're really good at it. There's a lot of kick backs, deal making, and free tickets behind that purchase. You know how hard it is, from the inside, to push through a billion dollar long shot like that? Nearly impossible. Whoever did this pulled a miracle to make that happen.
Our governments are bad at punishing corruption and graft.
This program replaces free & reduced-price lunch for qualifying kids, with "free for everybody".
They directly cite reasons like increased participation and better service (faster lines). It also cuts down on administrative overhead (don't need to separately qualify each kid). Another benefit is kids are not shamed for getting free lunch, since everybody gets a free lunch.
It is a USDA program: https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep
I'm genuinely worried the current administration will decide it is a waste of money, or woke, or some other BS.
[1] https://www.chalkbeat.org/2025/03/12/house-republican-budget...
As a non-American, reading about the welfare rules in the USA feels absurd, there are so many overlapping programs with distinct qualifications, rules, payouts, it simply cannot be efficient to keep track of all of that for recipients. It feels like the design is to make it as hard as possible to keep track of what one is eligible to, it's designed to be painful and unreliable.
There is a cultural thing in the USA about punishing poor people, as if it's only through their own failure of character that they are poor, instead of trying to help lift the less fortunate ones the approach seems to be to punish them in the hopes that will force them out of their precarious position through some heroic individual action. It simply isn't reasonable or has any basis in reality, probably some weird cultural leftover from the religious nuts who founded the country.
As far as "rich people are getting free lunches!!!" argument. 1) rich people for the most part send their kids to private, not public schools. 2) rich people who can afford better lunches than the school lunch are going to send their kid to school with a lunch.
Penny Rich Dollar Poor.
The article points out another issue that is so widespread. Often times, being right above or below a cut off line can make a huge difference and it's kids just above the cut off line here that are suffering. I have a brother with disabilities and there are "lines" drawn all the time with funding that are either all or nothing. If you cross a line, you lose funding. It encourages them to work less, save less money, and be more reliant on state funding. Why haven't we figured out gradients yet? For example, above this line you get 90% of costs covered. Above this line 80%. Above this line 70%. etc... etc... etc...
I'd rather keep the dysfunction of national politics away from my kids' food, personally. At least I can reasonably move if local dysfunction goes past tolerable levels.
* Against the rules to hand them out to non-students (even after some priority window)
* Operating in an unusual context where relative load is highly unpredictable
* No system of reservation to try to forecast load
There's also a bunch of data that's absent, like any potential causes for the variable load. Plausibly it might have been weather related, or related to families participating in a cultural event that's special even if they were celebrating in quarantine at home.
The first is food regulation and safety law; the same applies to restaurants who serve buffet style as well.
The second isn't going away. Attendance is spotty at best in underperforming schools, in particular the ones that need free lunch the most. Many kids also won't eat some foods. The amount of waste just gets shifted from "too much prepared" to "not enough served food was eaten".
The third is just an attempt to solve the second, but if there was a system of reservation in place, it would still be part of the problem- after all, what we're trying to solve is that parents aren't utilizing the already available free lunch programs because going through the means testing is too much effort for them.
Next pandemic, no government programs. None. We've seen how it goes.
No benefits next time. People just try to turn it into eternal government welfare programs.
I don't want eternal government welfare programs to deal with temporary problems. Next time, no. No "temporary" government programs.
Hungry children are not a temporary problem, and letting them go hungry is only going to cause further problems down the line.
The simpler and more convincing explanation is that lawmakers write bad laws, regulators write bad regulations, and everyone votes on hot button issues like the economy, immigration, and trans athletes in sports. School lunch policy details don't get enough attention.
Everyone votes emotionally on issues they don't even understand (e.g, there is ~1 trans athlete out of 10,000 NCAA athletes right now, so why the hell is it even a minor issue, let alone a national debate?).
https://www.newsweek.com/trans-sport-pool-women-harriet-hayn...
If you truly believe transwomen are women, then its great. For anyone who doesn't share that arbitrary idea, it looks like women's sports is basically over, at least at the high end. Might as well get back in the kitchen, huh? Even women's sports is a man's game now.
That said, the ideal outcome would be apologies to every female athlete affected by this, and for these men to be retrospectively disqualified and stripped of any medals or titles, with these instead being awarded to the women who would have won had these men not been competing. I doubt this will happen any time soon, but if those running these competitions had an ounce of integrity and sense of fair play, they would do.
These people hold the mindset that if you are not disabled and don't have any learning disabilities, you should be able to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
There isn't any room for nuance with them, they will just call people who are neurodivergent "lazy" and "welfare queens".
The attempt to steelman the policy probably comes down to encouraging personal responsibility (the libertarian way). Forgiving debts without consequence promote a culture of non-payment, undermining the sustainability of school meal programs.
The steelmanned version of why lunches require payment is likely down to sustainability of the program in general (ie: school budgets are already stretched to the limit, so parent contributions are necessary).
Now, this could obviously be solved by just budgeting for the entire thing to be included in the overall taxes of the state, but then you've got to surpass the hurdle of tax raises being insanely difficult in the states.
Honestly, this exercise kind of makes me see (yet again) how broken the whole USAmerican system is. "I've got mine and I don't want to give any more away for something I don't need"
What are the good faith arguments in favor of this?
- ignorance
- lack of critical reasoning skills
- religion
- sadism
- ?
I do have trouble finding good faith arguments in favor of this policy. It is cruel. But the people who decided to implement it aren't "other". They're humans who think they're good people (aside from a small minority of people who really don't care) and much as we'd like to think so we're not that different than them. If we can understand their justification, that's a step toward actually convincing them there is another way. And yes, I have changed many people's viewpoints with this level of patience, not everyone is too stupid/mean/insult of your choice to change their minds.
it's the continuous assumption of malice that prevents people from listening to each other. and that is still the case even if there is actual malice. almost by definition, if you do not present the assumption for good will to the other side, they will have difficulty attributing good will to you, no matter whether they themselves are acting are maliciously or not.
The people who decided to implement the policy believe that cruelty will create deterrence.
Persisting in this line of thinking despite centuries of cruelty and no end to the undesired behavior is what leads to sayings like “the cruelty is the point.” Psychologically, it’s well understood there are those who really get a kick out of making people suffer.
A cafeteria worker is likely doing what they're told to do from the principal and board of education. They're doing what they're told because of laws that have been passed. At any point along this chain of human beings, someone could be relying on their job to keep one of them family members alive.
I know I'm throwing out a random scenario, and that doesn't make it true, but there IS a story here, and it is one that none of us will ever know. There are so many human things that happen that people attribute directly to malice, especially when they have very little information.
Anyways. Point is. I really have a hard time blaming any individual here (except perhaps lawmakers) no matter how depressing the whole fiasco is. It is simply another unfortunate consequence of rigid policies that have serious impact.
It will never happen because additional analyzing would pretty quickly make it obvious that the problems are systemic and cannot be easily described by the kind of partisan quips and advocacy for "obvious" or "easy" solutions that dominate discussion of topics like this.
Basically any serious effort to understand and solve these problems precludes general audience participation and will therefore not be popular.
If you were cynical you might think that is precisely why some favor that solution.
On the contrary. Many people favor individually managed efforts because they disagree with your premise, and believe that such efforts scale better than centrally managed ones.
There is deep, culturally entrenched ideas here about how wealth is equated to goodness and righteousness, signs of $diety's blessings on you, etc. etc. and nobody, absolutely nobody is trying to unwind that. It's as American as Apple Pie and Baseball.
It's not the people peddling cruelty, it's the system. Though obviously people who personally are ok with or like that will be better represented in such a system.
> Or said in their parlance, it teaches you self reliance or to pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
Rephrased another way you're basically saying "it's not my team doing that, it's the other team." And this is exactly the kind of divisive garbage that perpetuates the system.
What these systems teach in practice is "don't you dare step an inch out of line, no, intent doesn't matter, out of line is out of line and will be punished" which in a perverse way is exactly the kind of thing government schools will wind up teaching because every bit you make those future adults more likely to comply will pay dividends in reduced enforcement over their lives. Support for that sort of crap generally crosses party lines, as does opposition.
The rules of the system are made by people. And yes, for quite some of them the cruelty is the point when making the rules.
I'd argue that recent elections demonstrate enough of the people _are_ voting cruelty.
Often you have a program created, with "free below X, sliding scale until no subsidy at Y" - done right, this is "perfect" in that each marginal dollar is lightly "taxed" (losing a subsidy is the same as a tax, from the worker's perspective).
This is great! Though let's say (theoretically) that the end result is a 1% "tax" for our family, so each dollar they increase income costs them a penny of subsidy. They probably have other subsidies besides school lunches, like WIC, or ACA, or whatever. Those are also sliding down at various amounts, which can cause it to start to get annoying. But it works.
Then the program is expanded, to be "nice" - even nicer! Now the subsidy is 100% below X, but they're going to also cover 100% up to Y! That's great! Everyone is better off now ... except now you have the situation where at Y + 1, you earned one more dollar, but lost potentially thousands in subsidy. This is NOT ACTUALLY WORSE than before, because at Y + 1 in both scenarios you have no subsidy, but it hurts much more in the second because the subsidy wasn't slowly being drained.
The real answer is that gradients are hard, and clear lines are easy. A shocking number of Americans don't understand how our income tax brackets work; they believe that if you cross the line into a higher income bracket, your entire income is taxed at that new, higher rate, and you end up losing money overall.
Massachusetts, which has the highest percentage of college educated citizens in the entire country, also shot down ranked choice voting last year, because the math was too hard.
The math wasn't "hard" - it was wrong. The decision process was to be instant runoff voting, which has significant problems. IRV is basically what people stuck in the two party mindset think they want so they can express support for a third party. But once a third party gains enough traction to become viable, perverse incentives (strategic voting) shows right back up again. What we really need is Ranked Choice ballots with Ranked Pairs decision process. This satisfies Condorcet which means that a winner is preferred by the majority of voters.
People like the ones I described exist in both parties but I think it’s telling that people assumed I’m talking about one political party because it made those slogans it’s brand. The hard lines vs gradient doesn’t make sense in terms of public because this doesn’t raise to the level of public discourse.
Also Massachusetts is a bad example because they enacted free lunches across the board. They may have gradient issues in other welfare programs but school lunches is something they’ve solved for now.
As for RCV being shot down, I don’t think it’s an education issue. I personally prefer approval voting as it’s simpler to explain and faster results. Not wanting to switch to RCV (specifically IRV) can have all sorts of reasons and claiming it’s because the electorate is dumb is the wrong take I think.
That's the ostensible reason - the reality is that Blue MAGA also really hates power challenges. Look no further than CA where they also shot down (even the possibility for local elections to consider) ranked choice voting.
What's the cost of living in Massachusetts again?
It is true that this can end up having a donut hole effect, where the middle classes are squeezed out of areas that they cannot afford, and yet are too wealthy to qualify for social services.
No one gets to live in that state unless they earn far more than I do, or suffer the misfortune of having been born their to parents too impoverished to leave decades ago.
Our state income tax rate is 20% higher than that of Massachusetts, and we don't provide free lunch to kids.
It's one of the reasons people push for UBI. Welfare programs waste a lot of money trying to make sure the "right" people are getting it; UBI just gets rid of the waste.
The solution is simply: Make school lunch free for every student.
Outputs would change from bool to float between 0-1. That much is relatively easy given a calculator.
They just go off of last year's 1040, with overrides for "now a thing happened" - like job loss this year when you made a good amount last year.
I think steep gradients are OK, as long as they are not over 100%. When someone is working and earning very little, they need all the help they can get. As they earn more, they need less help, and should start to shift to instead contributing to helping others. There is probably some ideal "ramp" that provides the right set of incentives. I think 75% is probably too high.
Some huge number of people think "writing it off as a business expense" means it's basically almost free.
Most people like receiving a big fat refund.
Many don't understand saving for anything, let alone retirement.
The absurd thing in your scenario is the steep cliff on the benefit...this doesn't change the observation that some people have absurd beliefs about how progressive taxes are implemented.
Which is how some parts of US taxation works, but not other parts. You seem to be in one part, and unaware of the rest.
(And is a mix of taxation and other "eligibility" issues, with poorly advertised massive cliffs here and there for extra helpfulness).
Indeed, any decent modern society should provide free quality education, and that should include free quality meals. Especially the richest country in the world.
Same with food. Subsidize it for everyone. Cannot pay? Serve few hours to the local community and get a meal. There should be no starving people anywhere in the world.
However, I'm not sure it is the responsibility of a "decent modern society" to provide free quality meals to the populace. How far does this go? Does the government need to run restaurants? Vouchers to use at restaurants? I'm not convinced restaurants are even serving necessarily "quality meals".
I think a program providing groceries is a good idea, with some additional support for the rare cases of people who are completely unable to prepare meals from groceries.
It's more efficient to provide services gratis (think of community-funded fire, police, education, and parks services), and apply the measurement problem to the revenue side through progressive taxation of income or assets (wealth).
This also creates a larger political constituency for the service as everyone benefits. This was the thinking behind a universal social security system, rather than providing a needs-based system.
There's a fair argument for abandoning free market principles when one considers both that children are literally outside the market (they have no independent wage or income), and that the positive externalities of rearing and educating children redound on the local community. (Well, net of out-migration / brain drain, which is in fact A Thing, and not a minor consideration in many cases.)
TFA describes the first circumstance.
Patio11 has noted that the optimum level of fraud is non-zero, a point picked up by Cory Doctorow as well:
Patio11: <https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/optimal-amount-of-fra...> (HN discussion: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38905889>).
Doctorow: <https://doctorow.medium.com/https-pluralistic-net-2025-04-24...>
Means-tested benefits are something you really want to think through before advocating. Gradient-benefits or sliding-scale benefits are forms of means testing.
I don't know if there's well-developed theory of when means-testing should or shouldn't be applied. There are some surprising arguments from surprising positions (a quick glance at the beginning of this National Affairs article, from a conservative position, is against means-testing, though it's also critical of social welfare programmes generally: <https://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/detail/means-te...>).
I'd suggest that means-testing / sliding scale works better or is more appropriate where:
- It's applied locally rather than globally, to small populations in regular contact and where even eyeball assessments are likely roughly accurate.
- Where resources and/or services offered are limited.
Provision of sliding-scale services (healthcare, dental, vision, legal assistance) often falls under such cases. School lunches might, but the risks of abuse and long-term community harm are high.
In our public elementary school, there are two or three options each day: a hot meal of some sort, some days a hot vegetarian meal, and a salad bar that kids can choose what they want from (which usually includes some options that you wouldn't call "salad").
It's not fine dining, but the quality and variety is generally pretty decent. The kids have accounts, and parents are expected to refill a negative balance, but every kid gets the lunch of their choice regardless.
It's not the school's debt, it's individual families. If they fall behind on lunch fees, their children have to eat cold meals.
> Do different kids get different meals in US schools? I mean for non-medical or dietary purposes?
Depends. US schools are run by the states, so it varies from place to place. As other commenters have said, some states just fund lunch so debt isn't an issue. I'm sure some accommodate dietary requirements & preferences more than others.
My experience was that if you have specific requirements that the school can't meet, you just bring your own lunch. If you're lucky enough to have organized parents.
When my children were in school, their school said that anybody who didn’t have lunch would be given a “sun butter” sandwich and food from the cafeteria. I wasn’t familiar with sun butter; it’s peanut butter made from sunflower seeds, because people allergic to peanuts may not be allergic to sunflower seeds.
On the topic I agree and believe strongly that all kids should receive free food at school. It amazes me people will fight to prevent when to me the costs are small but the benefit can be huge for the next generation.
“I never actually witnessed this scene myself, but I’ve interviewed enough lunch ladies, principals and kids to construct a sort of composite mental image that now plays on an endless loop between my ears. It’s become my own personal film of educational injustice, frame by frame, in high-definition slow motion: the momentary confusion on the child’s face, the hushed explanation from the cashier, the sudden understanding dawning in the kid’s eyes, the burning shame that follows.”
And from that, cooking up an opening paragraph precipitated on “witnessing” it, and Nuremberg-like somber intonations about the banality of “the ritual humiliation of second graders. It’s watching the adults in the room — ordinary, decent people who’d never dream of snatching food from a child in any other context — perform this strange ceremony with the mechanical resignation of DMV employees, while around them life continues uninterrupted, because this is just How Things Are.”
==
He didn’t witness this. He talked to people who were heartsick about it happening at all. Even in his imagined example, the kid doesn’t go hungry, the kid gets a sandwich instead of an institutional pizza slice.
The adults I remember from situations like this would absolutely go out of their way to treat kids with dignity—I remember foodservice workers seeking out any kids who still looked hungry to slip them leftover hot food from the line, and in some cases workers or counselors or teachers covering kids’ meals themselves.
Dunning lunch debt is probably a silly way to run a program, but there’s no honest policy assessment here. I don’t see why school lunch shouldn’t be free at the point of service, but I also don’t know why it isn’t under the status quo. I bet it’s not raw sadism. The pearl-clutching seems to focus on behaviors that are unsubstantiated at best.
you can be the most courteous about helping a kid out, and it may be that in many cases that avoids humiliation, but in some it doesn't. and that's enough to make that picture.
and don't think that people working in schools can't be humiliating. i have had to experience it at least once myself. not because of lunch money but something else, but that's besides the point.
also how exactly are they supposed to see for themselves? it's not like they can just walk into a school and hang out during lunch until they see it happen.
Unless it's gotten a lot better from when I was in grade school, the "alternative meal" was the bare minimum they could get away with (it was a piece of white bread with cheese, although it sounds like now the standard is a seed-butter sandwich). It doesn't exist to feed the kid, it exists to shame them, and any nutrition provided is a happy coincidence.
I had to get it once as a kid (although my parents didn't get a bill) and it was too embarrassing to even eat. Even at a table with all your friends you feel like an outsider through no fault of your own.
Edit: Fixed some misunderstanding in my comment.
But yeah, the problem you point out — families can go into debt again — is real, I think.
Students from low income families can qualify for completely free lunch, and others can qualify for drastically reduced prices for lunch.
I don’t know if there are any federal requirements about how to handle students who forget or lose their lunch money, or students who normally bring their lunches to school but somehow forget or lose them. Most schools will have a specific policy, such as providing the food to the student and requesting the money later. The “debt” in question is between the school and the student, not between the school and its suppliers.
There is a relatively new policy (maybe ten years old) that schools with a large number of low income students can provide free breakfast and lunch to all students ( https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep ), so school lunch debt would be an issue in areas doing just a little better than that.
You have a balance it charges against. In theory, when it hits zero, no more food for you.
But that's impractical because kids are bad about just about everything, and so denying food because they forgot to remind their parents to recharge the thing is harsh. So the system lets them go into "debt" and still get a lunch.
And it doesn't really stop, but the school will often put up a bit of a fight over final grades or diploma to try to get the debt paid off, but often it just gets written off.
What is the reason US doesn’t have this already at federal level?
Most of these programs are done state-by-state in the US. Because the US is so large, it takes a large amount of political willpower to push programs out at the federal level. Education is mostly handled on a state-by-state basis. The funding split is around 90%/10%, with 90% handled by the state and 10% federal. (That may be changing.)
As a rule of thumb, it makes more sense to compare countries in Europe against individual states in the US, rather than comparing countries to countries.
individualism; I think people in our crazy state of states tend to be only interested in what they want, and no other interests
But to have individualism for everybody, everybody needs to eat and have a dignified life.
Cutting less lucky people's food and healthcare for penny pinching, or worse religiously followed ideology isn't individualism. It is sadist selfishness. It kills individuality of large swaths of people for a tiny minority's extravagant and boringly repetitive habits.
With four kids I've made a lot of lunches over the years.
More recently schools have started "nutrition club" kind of things for kids that fall through the cracks, but it is mostly just things like nutrigrain bars or apples.
So it kind of varies.
I don't want any child to go hungry, but it is unfortunate that school meal programs usually seem to involve prison-style terrible food. I did see a program on Italian lunch programs and that stuff was just amazing.
High school was like eating at a truck stop. But it did have a salad bar that was excellent, although myself and Lisa Simpson were the only students that used it.
Meanwhile in my quite red state, a family at the 20th percentile of household income with 1 kid will get $480 in food assistance per month, which is basically enough to afford groceries to stay afloat.
My son's school is private but has a "free lunch" program (apparently paid for out of grants and involving the local grocery store's deli); we send him with a lunch we pack ourselves because we prefer he not eat Goldfish and apple juice boxes every day.
Which is why I'm actually not sure why certain states don't do this. Like richer states like Maryland, Virginia, New York, California.
Not sure about other states, but...
All NYC public school students can have free meals[0]:
"New York City Public Schools offers free breakfast, lunch and afterschool meals to all NYC public school students during the school year."
As for NY State -- well, better late than never[1]:
"Universal School Meals: Governor Hochul Announces Free Breakfast and Lunch for More Than 2.7 Million Students in New York as Part of the 2025 State of the State"
To be fair, free and reduced price meals were already available across NY state, but with a means test[2]:
The School Breakfast and Lunch Programs are federal programs providing free,
reduced or full priced breakfast and lunch at participating schools
throughout New York State. In New York State the New York State Department of
Education administers these programs, and local schools operate the programs.
The meals are the same for all children regardless of payment category, and
schools are not permitted to identify students who get free or reduced-price
meals.
Eligibility Meal Categories Eligibility
Free Income up to 130% of poverty ($39,000 for a family of 4 annually)
Reduced (no charge to student) Income up to 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)
Full price* - paid by family Income over 185% of poverty ($55,500 for a family of 4 annually)
[1] https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/universal-school-meals-gove...
It is highly inefficient, but if you are on top of the wealth pyramid none of that matters to you. Average citizens however can't afford all of that.
Why did this idea ever take off?
I went to a weird high school in the US where that was the case. They just didn't have a lunch room, so everybody sat in the hallways at lunch time. But yeah, all the other schools I've heard of provide lunch. Most offer breakfast as well, as an option.
note its also expected that you've already had breakfast before you arrive at school.
For the US specifically, major federal programs began during the Great Depression as a two for one combo. It solved the direct problem of... people being poor and their kids not having food/lunch, and it also provided a reasonable supply sink for the government to buy out supply from farmers to help keep things going.
Anyhow, since then for a variety of reasons, subsidized/free lunches have stuck around. Primarily because the underlying problem (food insecurity) has not been adequately solved. School lunches also tends to be amongst the more politically palatable/defensible forms of welfare in the United States, since its very structure and beneficiaries make it harder to criticize.
So while expansion of SNAP or other programs that might help tackle general food insecurity might run into headwinds, most of those arguments tend to falter when it comes to feeding children directly at school. For example, it's hard to argue that getting free lunches at school would encourage "abuse and malaise" amongst students. Similarly, since the composition of lunches tend to be under control of the supplying organization, there's reduced concern of people spending their assistance on "luxuries".
Among those:
TIME Magazine, "School Lunch in America: An Abbreviated History" <https://time.com/4496771/school-lunch-history/>
Wikipedia, "School meal programs in the United States" <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_meal_programs_in_the_Un...>
PBS, "The History of School Lunch" <https://www.pbs.org/food/stories/history-school-lunch>
And a 1971 PDF from the US Department of Agriculture (Dept. Ed. hadn't yet been created), "History of the National School Lunch Program" <https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp/program-history> [PDF]
icegreentea2's summary is brief but accurate. There was some earlier Progressive Era (~1890--1915) work largely at the city level (Boston and Phladelphia), and through volunteers and charities.
The Great Depression emphasized the scope of the problem, and WWII raised it to a level of national security (under-fed, malnourished, and poorly-educated children cannot grow to defend the country).
The period also parallels growth of secondary (high-school) education from a small fraction of children (~6% of 18-year olds claimed a high school diploma in 1900, that grew to roughly 95% by 1950, where it's largely held since: graduation rates and graduate test scores tend to balance off one another, as one rises the other falls, both are fodder for much political jawboning). Education statistics are presented in "120 Years of American Education: A Statistical Portrai" published by the US Department of Education (1993) <hhttps://www.google.com/books/edition/120_Years_of_American_E...>
As a child I never had "provided lunch" but I also went to private school; we didn't even have any option through elementary (grade 8, about 12). High school had a greasy burger joint (think: high school football game concession stand) but that was it.
Providing lunches involves enough work that providing breakfast, too isn't much more expensive.
(The programs may have started for other reasons but the above is usually why they continue. It's also hard to stop doing something like "provide kids food" once you start.)
I'm a center-lefty, but America appears to be mostly right and I find it fascinating that this is just "accepted".
Why does America just accept that some (a large enough number that most schools have to feed them) people cant raise their kids?
Or perhaps are you saying that the government should provide a nanny to everybody that can't raise their kid?
I see people on Facebook who refer to their kids, unironically, as "future warriors for Christ".
That might happen, but I hate to say that another possibility is people come to expect that someone will just pay the debt. Where unpaid bills may look like some kind of problem, a lack of unpaid bills looks like things are fine and no change is needed. Short term solutions are best implemented along with long term ones. But to the authors point, you gotta start somewhere or nothing will happen.
but patching up the problem involves new people. people who do have more resources and are thus actually capable of lobbying for change. and that's exactly what seems to happen.
also, a simple law change just to enforce that all children get the same food, whether it's paid or not, even without any funding moves the incentive for the caterers to lobby for more funding. so even that would be a win.
Heck, I'm even ready for brand new unforeseen problems arising from those efforts. After decades of being lectured about the myriad slippery slopes that come with "too much" charity I'm ready try taking a slide down one or two for a change. We've been trying nothing for a long time and it doesn't seem to have much effect.
Please note that I'm absolutely not disagreeing with you and I apologize in advance if my tone comes across as strident.
> ...
> It was less than some monthly car payments.
I'm not sure what kind of car, but that's way above any car payment I've ever had to pay. ;)
[1]: https://www.lendingtree.com/auto/debt-statistics/#:~:text=Th...
- people buying new
- but looking for the cheapest trims
- on an aggressively short loan
is particularly large. Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the 108 month or more loans starting to show up, but still.
Nope. At least not AFAICT. In fact, it seems to have a lot to do with the Prosperity Gospel[0] which, IIUC is a Protestant thing.
The primary tenets of that are (others please do correct me if I mis-state this) that if you are a devout servant of Christ, you will be rewarded with riches on this Earthly pale. If however, you are not sufficiently devout, you will not be rewarded.
As such, if you're rich, you're a decent, devout Christian. If you're not, you are insufficiently devout or just downright evil and, as such, you deserve your poverty.
When it was introduced, my son was in P1 or 2. We spoke to the head and asked if we could pay for our son's lunch as we didn't need the freebie. She said there was no way to pay for it: it was free whether you wanted it or not.
Crazy.
I'm a rampant capitalist, every man for himself and all that but there is something about denying kids the fundamentals, like shelter, food etc. that rubs me up the wrong way. There should never be a situation where they are denied proper lunches. Never.
School lunch debt is an adult-designed problem that we shouldn't be passing onto kids.
One state's form of children's medicaid or whatever it is bills a "please pay this amount" each month, but the bill has a note that says "not paying this won't affect your coverage" and the coverage is granted not on whether you paid, but your financial situation. So the end result is the "bill" is actually an optional payment.
At least in the USA, if you ever think you were wrongly given a tax or other financial advantage, you can donate the largess back to the government: https://www.pay.gov/public/form/start/23779454 (yay they take Venmo)
I couldn't find something directly for Scotland, and I know that assuming the UK is the same thing has caused spicy reactions before, but this does exist:
https://www.dmo.gov.uk/responsibilities/public-sector-funds-...
Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago.
I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve.
Shifting the cost from the parents who had the kids onto the taxpayers is not solving the problem.
It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
That's not solving the problem.
It's making sure there will be more problems.
You are shooting everyone including yourself in the foot because you personally don't need to walk places.
It's possible that's not a bad thing considering they're built on excessive consumption and an ever expanding population.
Child labor was legal until 1930. It has been a part of society for longer than it hasn't. I think your calculus is a little off.
> your lifestyle would not exist
Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough? Which, again, has been a norm in our society for longer than it hasn't. We didn't fully get rid of horses as beasts of burden in agriculture until the 1950s.
> you personally don't need to walk places.
Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
We live in a world of odd incentives. There is no point at which abandoning the middle way will benefit you, regardless of how pretty those ideas sound.
Are you serious.
> Because /some/ children struggle to eat enough?
They said "without kids", not without this particular program.
> Carrying everyone who can't walk is not a universal good. Particularly when some of those people can't walk because of a tiny, temporary, and highly solvable problem.
> Now you have people who make it their career to carry people. Their motivations are to carry as many people as is possible. If we actually made it so no one had to be carried they would be out a job.
These are children. Someone is carrying them no matter what.
Having not-starving kids is beneficial to literally everyone in the community, not just the kids who use the program.
No, but it's well documented that students who eat lunches generally perform better.
> It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem.
Sorry buddy, but you won't find a lot of sympathy from people who actually care. School lunches *are not expensive*, and there are plenty of parents who are in poverty and literally cannot afford to pay for their child's lunch.
Should the child starve? No. I strongly believe that anyone who thinks a child should starve, for whatever reason, does not belong in civilized society.
> That's not solving the problem.
You're right, it's not. But you also don't offer a different suggestion. How will you solve poverty? How will you solve neglect?
Until you offer suggestions for that, your comment strikes me as coming from someone who (at best) is sociopathic in a bad way and (possibly) someone who does not belong in civilization.
> It's making sure there will be more problems.
Perhaps.
But you could also consider it as several different types of investments in the future.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment whose return is in the form of that child's future taxes; the lack of investment is instead the death-by-starvation of that child and loss of that child's future income and/or business taxes.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, is an investment in that child's care for their fellow person. Children who have been there (in poverty and starving); who have literally had only one meal per day, are more likely to be more empathetic to the plights of the people (not just children) around them in similar situations. You should hope that, if you're in such a situation, that you could find someone who would be willing to help you.
An investment, at the mere cost of one child's meal per day, does solve problems. Most parents are happy to be able to afford that investment themselves, but some parents -- through pride or neglect or other reasons -- are unable to afford that much. Why do you think you shouldn't help them?
Hate to turn into Helen Lovejoy here, but won't you please think of the children? The victims of the problem are the children. You're trying to punish the parents, and the kids get caught in the crossfire.
The entire economic future of you and all the taxpayers depends on those kids growing up.
Our entire economic structure is a ponzi scheme at global scale. It depends on kids growing up and cashing into the stock market so people can cash out of their 401ks.
So why not ensure those little gremlins and nice and plump when they grow up so we can retire more easily.
Let it fall. No more ponzi schemes.
It is mind boggling that we leave kids starving in america, and we are going to pay for it for decades.
My money supports my kids and those kids that live in my area. I would say yes to paying more property tax to support my local schools to an even greater degree. I am in no way ok with my kids school funding getting reduced to fund other areas. I specifically moved to this area for the good schools.
I would be ok with an additional penny of sales tax to fund a statewide program to ensure all kids have access to food.
It costs about $6 around here, so let's say without toy it's $5.
https://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/pop1.asp says there are 71 million kids.
$466 billion a year.
Ok, ok, that is maybe too high. Let's assume a wonderful world where you can produce a meal for a dollar (less than the local school district).
$77 billion a year.
https://www.defense.gov/News/Releases/Release/Article/370341...
It's confusing (and embarrassing) because, in the grand scheme of government spending, it is something that could be (and should be) easily provided without any strings attached. If literal 10-year-old Richie Rich is dropped off at school in a helicopter, he should still be able to get a free lunch: that's how simple it should be. Adding means-testing of stuff like this is what cocks the whole thing up and makes it doubly expensive.
Sometimes, adults want children to go through the same "character building" rituals that they did. For example, working some kind of job, to supposedly teach values about hard work and responsibility.
Other times, adults don't want to subject kids to "character building" that they went through. For example, enduring bullying. Or working a crappy job, while their schoolmates played sports, socialized, did extracurriculars, or got a decent night's sleep.
On this one, my opinion is: Just feed the children already. Stop stomping them harder with class inequality, and conditioning them to accept that as normal, from a young age. I'd rather have children be raised to reject class inequality -- as unfair, greedy, cruel, and dumb. And more immediately, I want children to be fed, and to get other basic care.
If DOGE was anything other than an attempt to entrench executive control and execute performative cruelty, this is the stuff it would be tackling.
There are so many arbitrary conflicting policies that each only make things slightly less inefficient to the point where it doesn’t make sense to spend the energy fixing them, but put together they really add up to tangible and significant experiences in people’s lives.
An “all of the above” concentrated effort that looks at everything together, and then makes a list of suggestions to consolidate and harmonize policies that Congress can then pick through for the ones they agree upon on both sides of the aisle and pass quickly and unanimously would make a massive difference.
Sure, it may take a year instead of a few months to achieve this, but the changes would be beneficial, non destructive, and lasting, none of which can be said of even a generous perspective of what was actually done.
Try getting a kid to eat vegetables when processed bread products are being handed out at school. Healthy eating pretty much stopped that year. Which is a shame because it’s not expensive.
The scale at which governments can organise, and (despite much protestation to the opposite) the efficiency with which it can do so, really is unmatched.
Even the word's wealthiest individuals and families (save a few which function as states, e.g., the House of Saud, or some royal families) pale next to the level at which large advanced national governments can operate. The Gates Foundation, one of the largest philanthropic organisations in the world, is "rattled" by the present US administrations threat to its mission:
<https://www.seattletimes.com/nation-world/gates-foundation-i...>
The NGO / non-profit space does do a great deal of good work, and as it's decentralised it's difficult to disable all of it all at once. Though curtailments of major benefactors, ironically national governments in the present moment, or should I more accurately specify one specific government, can wreak havok at international scale.
But NGOs are inefficient, often work at cross-purposes, suffer from corruption, and often have staggering administrative and overhead ratios, with only a minority of raised funds reaching active operations. The Tiny Spark podcast has been discontinued but has an excellent back-catalogue detailing many of the problems with philanthropic charities and welfare projects:
<https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/tiny-spark/id505053432>
So, yes, you can strike out on your own, and I'd really hate to discourage anyone from doing so. But you can do far more if you link up with others. And governance is really the technical art of linking up with others.
When Breaking Bad was on there was a comic strip about how in any other developed country Walter White would have went to the doctor, gotten the cancer treated, and went on with his life.
Edited to add: I knew there was a term for this but I couldn't think of it.: https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/orphan-crushing-machine
As the saying goes, "Healthcare is such a complex problem that only 32 of the 33 developed countries in the world have solved it."
I don't get where the "33" number comes from and don't inherently agree, but the point? Yes. As someone who is or has been a citizen of the UK, EU, Australia and the US.
Any income etc based coupon system is inefficient and automatically excludes a big portion of children that such measures are supposed to be for, eg because a lot of them come from families that are too dysfunctional to apply for those, ignorant of them due to language and other barriers, or because of (perceived or not) social stigma. And while adults are considered responsible for their own lives, it is a total moral bankruptcy for a society to have their children starve for their parents dysfunction. At the same time, providing free lunch to children at school solves/eases a lot of social, health and other issues all at once, for a cost that is basically peanuts compared to how impactful it can be.
Sounds like child services should take those children then? If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.
This is a HUGE, dangerous leap.
> If they can't apply for the lunches, then surely they aren't getting food at home, nor the proper medical care.
Plenty of parents (and plenty of people generally) just aren't aware of social services but are quite aware that they're supposed to feed and care for their children. Plenty more forget to fill out paperwork and return phone calls. Many states' governments actively make applying for welfare and support difficult or inconvenient - plenty of parents can't take the time to return paperwork in person, make phone calls during the workday, etc. Needing support - either welfare or just kindness and assistance - is not a moral failure and not a sign of a bad parent.
Beyond that, CPS wouldn't necessarily provide a great life for the child. There is a lot of difference between an imperfect parent and a danger to a child. Oh, and of course, CPS is a lot more expensive to run than a few meals. Giving out free meals at school is a lot easier if we want kids to be fed.
As an anecdote, I was laid off from my job once, and someone asked me if I applied for unemployment within my state. I didn't know it existed, nor that I was eligible until months later when a barista told me during small talk. The whole time I managed to remember to feed myself (and my family). I sure hope no internet commenter would look at that and decide to take my children away!
If you're telling me they are "starving" then it isn't.
I've helped a bunch of homeless folks apply to assistance programs (not for school lunches, but for a lot of other aid) and almost universally, applying for aid is extremely difficult. I've walked at least 30 people through the process of applying for housing aid and I'm pretty sure exactly none of them have actually received aid. The only program's I've seen people actually successfully apply for were medicaid and SNAP. It is the norm for it to take over a month to receive medicaid, and it's the norm for it to take over 6 months to receive SNAP. Meanwhile people are dying of medical conditions and starving.
Now add in all the reasons people are in this position in the first place--these people are struggling. It's hard to apply for these programs, and it's harder when everything else in your life is going poorly as well.
And after all that, you might discover that you don't qualify even though you clearly have need. In the OP the author notes that many families with lunch debt were right above the income line for receiving aid.
Some political forces are concerned that people will take advantage of these programs who shouldn't, and others simply don't want these programs to work so that they can have an excuse to cut them, and as a result there are numerous hurdles set up before you can obtain any sort of aid.
But most people can't change the world. Most individuals shouldn't have the power to change the world. What we can do is be a force for good in the lives that are proximal to us. If we can make a few people's lives better, we should rest easy knowing that we've done our part.
If we can do more than that, then great. But never let the overwhelming hugeness of the entire world cripple your ability to make your little dent. Most people only get the chance to make a little dent - if that - and there's nothing wrong with that.
> "I was in the Air Force a while, and they had what they call 'policing the area,' and I think that’s a pretty good thing to go by. If everyone just takes care of their own area, then we won’t have any problems. Be here. Be present. Wherever you are, be there. And look around you, and see what needs to be changed."
-Willie Nelson
I'm interested in what the community thinks are some of the methods I could use to improve these things, and why people quickly become inured to these kinds of problems.
I'm thinking, specifically, about peeling paint, litter, dirty signs, the kind of thing that even a passing effort, a hammer and a nail, or a bit of soap and water can fix for a surprisingly long time (~months, certainly).
It's one of the things I think is an interesting contrast between "first world" countries and many of the places I've been that are poorer - less wealthy places seem to put a significant effort into basic maintenance, because replacing things are so expensive compared to the cost of living.
Our school just had "lunch tickets." There was a register on a different floor from the lunch room where you could go buy them, pick them up if your parents bought them by check, or pick them up if you were on the assistance list. Once you had them they were all the same. Only the person at the register would know your status.
None of my friends who got that ever were embarrassed in any way about using them as they were the only ones to know.
In Australia you bring food from home 90% of the time. On special occasions or every now and then you order lunch from the canteen.
It seems almost against American individualism to have a communal meal where everyone is served up the same food and sit indoors in a dining hall. Maybe it is just strange to me but I can't be the only person to think this.
The School Breakfast Program started in the 1960s/70s. [2]
More recently, in 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed which enabled the Community Eligibility Provision which lets low income area schools offer free food to all kids without individual application/qualification. [3][4]
Various schools I went to in the 90s/00s had some kids bringing their lunch, some kids paying the school for lunch, and some getting free lunch (because they were poor enough to qualify).
[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp
[2] https://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/factsheet
[3] https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2014/05/...
Some schools run a "breakfast club" that everybody's welcome to attend, where they provide things like toast or cereal to kids that don't get breakfast at home, and it's couched in shame-softening language, though most kids know that if you go to breakfast club it's probably because you can't actually afford breakfast.
Schools will often have some bread and spreads available in the office for kids who are sent to school without lunch. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I know that in some schools this is just funded voluntarily by some of the staff who will pick up more bread or whatever when it's required, because they don't want to see kids go hungry.
I think the idea of having lunch provided as part of your school fees is actually a good one. No kid should go hungry, or be subject to humiliation and shame, because their parents can't afford or can't be bothered to provide them lunch.
America is a place where we don't like the idea of people going hungry. The government provides a great deal of food assistance; 13% of the country receives food stamps. Government policy is that every American should be getting at least $291 of food; if providing yourself that would be more than 30% of your income after expenses like rent, the government makes up the difference. Groceries are cheap, relatively speaking - they're sure cheaper than what they cost in Australia. We have extra programs for pregnant/nursing moms which provide food like milk, eggs, beans, and fresh produce, or if they can't or don't want to nurse, we provide infant formula for them. (Income based, but about half of new moms qualify, although in turn only around half of those new moms bother to take advantage of it.) We have excellent food banks that (at least in my area) are well-stocked. They currently have "expanded eligibility" (meaning they don't screen you when you come in) because they aren't running out of food.
We don't like the idea of kids at school going hungry either, so first we had school lunches, and now we have school breakfasts in places. We also have "summer" food programs. My state decided to use the federal funding for this for "summer EBT", which means food stamp amounts go up by what would be the cost of providing school lunches. (Americans skip out of school for 3+ months in the summer.) The general trend is towards free lunches for everyone, instead of making it income eligible.
Whether any of this is a good idea is another question. We don't seem to be a terribly healthy nation, and we eat way too much ultra-processed food which does not seem to be good for us. Big Food and Big Ag have an incredibly strong grip on government. The amount of money involved is big money. To give you an idea of the dollars we're talking, the amount of food stamps spent in America on soda was around $10 billion. You can go ahead and guess which corporation lobbied to expand soda to be eligible for purchase with food stamps.
I remember the horse trading at lunch as we rotated sambos to align better with taste.
During COVID my wife and I got a EBT (food stamps) card in the mail from the school district with like $2,000 on it for food. It was basically the dollars spent on school lunch for the time the kids were not in school.
I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.
Excellent garden path sentence.
> When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.
....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those requirements (which is almost nothing).
To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.
It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.
Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into. No exceptions.
Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen *everywhere* in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.
It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that *everyone* will pay the cultural toll. It must be *everyone*, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.
------
Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.
So by fixing things in one school, any school, you're really fixing things for all the kids that go there.
~75% of k-12 students bring lunch from home. If you are on assistance then your lunch is prepaid. Generally the food is so hilariously bad that most won't pay for it, but there are good schools here and there. 9-12 students generally are allowed to leave campus during lunch hours.
There may also be an additional "a la carte" system where you can buy single items either if you have extra money in your account or have cash on hand, but not on credit. Like a canteen.
I took a packed lunch to school almost every day. Later on I packed it myself. If I wanted the canteen had hot meals. Sometimes if you forgot your lunch they would give you 1 meal on credit.
IIRC there's a program in the absolute poorest aboriginal communities to provide free hot lunches at school, because it nearly guarantees attendance and works towards defeating malnutrition. I dont think yanks are that hard up yet but who knows.
Somehow the yanks are constantly demanding free lunches like there's no alternative or workaround?
this is exhibit A of showing that these country sized states are fully capable of handling their own affairs and universal access to things, the same as the 21st century developed nations that do the same thing
You and the other parties actually agree that it isn't controversial, there are many funding sources if its deemed important, keep the federal government out of it
Fast forward to 2025, and now free school lunches are nearly ubiquitous. Once people experience it, few want to go back. Because it's a much more efficient and hassle-free system.
Yes, of course the money is coming from tax: in other words, if you're a middle-class parent, nothing changed. You're still paying for your kids' lunch one way or the other. But you don't have to pay for a gratuitous system of bureaucracy that keeps track of which kids' parents are making how much money, and whether each kid is "eligible" to eat lunch today, so your money is actually being used more efficiently with less overhead.
It’s nice when things work out.
We’ll spend the rest of that child’s life convincing them that the answer to that is complicated.
dredmorbius•1d ago