Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch.
These lunch ladies are the ones fighting to be allowed to do the same things for the children in their communities in the USA. But getting ham strung by the whims of federal politics and the crippling fear that someone somewhere might be given something for free they could have paid for themselves.
More power to the Lunch Ladies.
Each day in 2012-2014, a middle school girl in Scotland took a picture of her school lunch and wrote a review on her blog, including number of hairs and insects. The headmaster of the school told her to stop taking pictures of her lunches. So she published a note, "Goodbye". That got some small publicity. Then the local town council backed up the headmaster. More publicity. Politicians became involved. National press coverage. Coverage in Wired. "Time to fire the dinner ladies" article in a Scottish tabloid. Worldwide press coverage. BBC interviews. Girl wins "Public Campaigner of the Year award". Headmaster in trouble.
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
> In 2022, California became the first of a half dozen or so states to offer free school meals to all students, regardless of family income. Dillard supports free meals for all students with an emphatic, “Yes, yes, yes!” Food should not be based on income, she says: “It should be part of the school day. Your transportation is of no charge to students. School books are no charge to students. School lunch should be of no charge to students. … It’s just the right thing to do.”
On one hand, that seems like an excellent argument to use for free school lunches. On the other hand, it feels like school busses are like libraries, accidents of history out of step with the modern world. If this became a rallying cry there'd probably be a strong pushback to start charging kids to be taken to school.
The elementary school tried adding the "share table" where you can put anything you don't want so that someone else could pick it up, but that was shut down because they could assure the feds that everyone was getting a "balanced" lunch.
My highschooler tells me of all the kids going through line multiple times to get pizza on pizza day and then throwing the rest away because they don't want that.
Of course we had a second tax that was approved this year because the free lunches were more expensive than they had planned. Wonder why.
lighttower•1h ago
mc32•46m ago