7 ms·

Can't think of a thing with a better benefit to cost ratio for a than providing school children a free meal. It's very cheap and it sucks very much if isn't don

Can't think of a thing with a better benefit to cost ratio for a than providing school children a free meal. It's very cheap and it sucks very much if isn't done. This applies on society, government, municipality, village, family - so many levels.

adabyron 4y ago
Free school meals for all kids could simplify a lot of things. Obviously it could be paid for by an income based tax. Nation wide tax makes most sense to me. It's the cheapest & easy way to help these kids get nutrition. It benefits society more than the cost. It also prevents the need to waste money on lunch cards, payment systems & some poor lady having to manage & collect payments.
- pessimizer 4y ago
  > Free school meals for all kids could simplify a lot of things. A universal benefit guarantees 100% utilization. If you put in bureaucracy and/or a token payment, people will fail to navigate it (and downstream bureaucracies with their own budgets can make it more difficult to navigate), so like magic the program becomes a lot cheaper (by leaving children hungry.)
  - BitwiseFool 4y ago
    >"A universal benefit guarantees 100% utilization" Not necessarily, I know a lot of progress has been made since I left school but back in my day there were some seriously low grade meals served at the cafeteria. It was not uncommon for other kids to bring lunchables and homemade meals to eat instead and we'd throw out the tray of food provided to us. I'm not anti-free school meals for all, however. I just wanted to add the caveat that the 100% utilization metric is not quite as it seems.
    - denton-scratch 4y ago
      My kids wouldn't eat the (paid-for) hot school meals. They both preferred the sandwiches I made for them.
      - tomrod 4y ago
        Your kids are privileged to have loving parent(s) in their lives -- many of my children's classmates are not as fortunate. Free meals took one bit of stress out of their lives, and benefited us too on those occasional days we weren't able to get a good lunch together.
        denton-scratch 4y ago
        For clarity, I'm strongly in favour of free school meals; preferably not means-tested.
- nerdawson 4y ago
  Taxation is already used to fund schooling and ensuring kids are fed should simply be an extension of that. The government have just cut taxes so they're heading in the opposite direction. With that said, it doesn't address the underlying problem of kids being allowed to go hungry. If free school meals were universal (and they should be), that's still only 5 / 21 weekly meals provided for.
  - adabyron 4y ago
    Not sure about England but in the US there are programs like "Backpack for Kids" that allow kids to sign up to receive a backpack for the weekends. They also do lunches during the summer. It's not the best food but it's calories with some nutrition & easy for kids to make. During my time volunteering I learned that the challenges are not getting enough funding or food but getting the food to the people who need it. From elderly to babies.
yamtaddle 4y ago
Our schools serve pretty awful meals here (fairly shitty US state), but it was hard to say no to them when they were free due to Covid policies, and man, just the logistical improvement of not having to worry about having stuff on hand for lunches and getting it put together and packed in the morning and making sure the lunches made it into backpacks and into the car was so damn nice. That's like 25% of the getting-the-kids-around morning stress just gone. Made things way more chill.
- wollsmoth 4y ago
  It's definitely possible to give better school lunches out. There sort of a general school funding issue too which is frustrating to hear about so often.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    I know at least one private school around here has pretty damn good & healthy (but not extravagant or fancy) lunches at something like $2 more per meal per day than what the public schools charge. It amounts to roughly double the cost. The public schools here don't even seem to operate real kitchens anymore like they did when I was a kid, and aren't equipped to actually cook at all, but just to heat up frozen stuff. Instead of even assembling sandwiches from ingredients, they serve those might-as-well-be-a-candy-bar "uncrustables". That's the degree to which they don't function as a real kitchen anymore. Not-coincidentally, I expect, I'm pretty sure most "kitchen" staff isn't even employed by the schools anymore, but by companies they contract to handle lunch for them.
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    It's certainly possible, yes, but it's worth considering the cost, because it adds up quickly. In England, the cost of a school lunch is about ~£2.35. In the US, it's about ~$3.80. When I go out to eat in the US for lunch, a typical take-away place to get something like a sandwich is maybe around $12. In the US, if we increased school lunch funding equivalent to that, the increase would be something like $8 per student per day. There are 50 million K-12 students in the US, so that would cost $400 million per day. The per-pupil cost would be $1,472 per year. In a classroom of 20 students, that would be nearly $30,000/year -- enough to substantially increase teacher salaries, and nearly enough to pay for a teaching assistant in every classroom. Obviously, there's nothing saying we couldn't increase funding by $1 or $2. But my point is simply that there are indeed trade-offs.
naich 4y ago
[flagged]
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
bombcar 4y ago
I would be entirely in support for nation-wide soup kitchens open for lunch that provide a basic nutritious and free meal to anyone and everyone, no questions asked.
- ljf 4y ago
  I genuinely think this could solve so many ills. I really love a library near me that has near the door a load of nice paper shopping bags, labelled up - that anyone can take. Each will have different things in but contain stuff like wash kits and deodorant, tampons and sanitary towels, socks, gloves and even warm jumpers in winter. Anyone who needs one can just grab one. It is sad that we have to give out stuff like this, but equally, if we need to provide these things for people, let's do it in the lowest drama way of doing it, and that doesn't cause stigma or shame.
- conductr 4y ago
  Making it universally accessible is the expensive part.
  - bombcar 4y ago
    I wonder how expensive it would be after awhile, if the food was very basic and boring. I suspect that most people who do have other options would get bored with it relatively quickly; McDonalds may exist but so do many other restaurants.
  - andrekandre 4y ago
    not necessarily, since you can just tax it back from rich families later (no need for means-testing bureaucracy, which can be the real expensive part since it has to scale with usage)
    - conductr 4y ago
      The food has to be near the hungry though.
      - 4y ago
tomjen3 4y ago
Based on the food that is served in US schools, I wonder if you are not better of without. That said, it is ridiculous to have hungry children in a country that also has national health care. It is much, much cheaper to feed a child than to deal with health issues from hunger.

adabyron 4y ago

Free school meals for all kids could simplify a lot of things. Obviously it could be paid for by an income based tax. Nation wide tax makes most sense to me. It's the cheapest & easy way to help these kids get nutrition. It benefits society more than the cost. It also prevents the need to waste money on lunch cards, payment systems & some poor lady having to manage & collect payments.

pessimizer 4y ago
> Free school meals for all kids could simplify a lot of things. A universal benefit guarantees 100% utilization. If you put in bureaucracy and/or a token payment, people will fail to navigate it (and downstream bureaucracies with their own budgets can make it more difficult to navigate), so like magic the program becomes a lot cheaper (by leaving children hungry.)
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  >"A universal benefit guarantees 100% utilization" Not necessarily, I know a lot of progress has been made since I left school but back in my day there were some seriously low grade meals served at the cafeteria. It was not uncommon for other kids to bring lunchables and homemade meals to eat instead and we'd throw out the tray of food provided to us. I'm not anti-free school meals for all, however. I just wanted to add the caveat that the 100% utilization metric is not quite as it seems.
  - denton-scratch 4y ago
    My kids wouldn't eat the (paid-for) hot school meals. They both preferred the sandwiches I made for them.
    - tomrod 4y ago
      Your kids are privileged to have loving parent(s) in their lives -- many of my children's classmates are not as fortunate. Free meals took one bit of stress out of their lives, and benefited us too on those occasional days we weren't able to get a good lunch together.
      - denton-scratch 4y ago
        For clarity, I'm strongly in favour of free school meals; preferably not means-tested.
nerdawson 4y ago
Taxation is already used to fund schooling and ensuring kids are fed should simply be an extension of that. The government have just cut taxes so they're heading in the opposite direction. With that said, it doesn't address the underlying problem of kids being allowed to go hungry. If free school meals were universal (and they should be), that's still only 5 / 21 weekly meals provided for.
- adabyron 4y ago
  Not sure about England but in the US there are programs like "Backpack for Kids" that allow kids to sign up to receive a backpack for the weekends. They also do lunches during the summer. It's not the best food but it's calories with some nutrition & easy for kids to make. During my time volunteering I learned that the challenges are not getting enough funding or food but getting the food to the people who need it. From elderly to babies.

yamtaddle 4y ago

Our schools serve pretty awful meals here (fairly shitty US state), but it was hard to say no to them when they were free due to Covid policies, and man, just the logistical improvement of not having to worry about having stuff on hand for lunches and getting it put together and packed in the morning and making sure the lunches made it into backpacks and into the car was so damn nice. That's like 25% of the getting-the-kids-around morning stress just gone. Made things way more chill.

wollsmoth 4y ago
It's definitely possible to give better school lunches out. There sort of a general school funding issue too which is frustrating to hear about so often.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  I know at least one private school around here has pretty damn good & healthy (but not extravagant or fancy) lunches at something like $2 more per meal per day than what the public schools charge. It amounts to roughly double the cost. The public schools here don't even seem to operate real kitchens anymore like they did when I was a kid, and aren't equipped to actually cook at all, but just to heat up frozen stuff. Instead of even assembling sandwiches from ingredients, they serve those might-as-well-be-a-candy-bar "uncrustables". That's the degree to which they don't function as a real kitchen anymore. Not-coincidentally, I expect, I'm pretty sure most "kitchen" staff isn't even employed by the schools anymore, but by companies they contract to handle lunch for them.
- jlmorton 4y ago
  It's certainly possible, yes, but it's worth considering the cost, because it adds up quickly. In England, the cost of a school lunch is about ~£2.35. In the US, it's about ~$3.80. When I go out to eat in the US for lunch, a typical take-away place to get something like a sandwich is maybe around $12. In the US, if we increased school lunch funding equivalent to that, the increase would be something like $8 per student per day. There are 50 million K-12 students in the US, so that would cost $400 million per day. The per-pupil cost would be $1,472 per year. In a classroom of 20 students, that would be nearly $30,000/year -- enough to substantially increase teacher salaries, and nearly enough to pay for a teaching assistant in every classroom. Obviously, there's nothing saying we couldn't increase funding by $1 or $2. But my point is simply that there are indeed trade-offs.

naich 4y ago

[flagged]

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

bombcar 4y ago

I would be entirely in support for nation-wide soup kitchens open for lunch that provide a basic nutritious and free meal to anyone and everyone, no questions asked.

ljf 4y ago
I genuinely think this could solve so many ills. I really love a library near me that has near the door a load of nice paper shopping bags, labelled up - that anyone can take. Each will have different things in but contain stuff like wash kits and deodorant, tampons and sanitary towels, socks, gloves and even warm jumpers in winter. Anyone who needs one can just grab one. It is sad that we have to give out stuff like this, but equally, if we need to provide these things for people, let's do it in the lowest drama way of doing it, and that doesn't cause stigma or shame.
conductr 4y ago
Making it universally accessible is the expensive part.
- bombcar 4y ago
  I wonder how expensive it would be after awhile, if the food was very basic and boring. I suspect that most people who do have other options would get bored with it relatively quickly; McDonalds may exist but so do many other restaurants.
- andrekandre 4y ago
  not necessarily, since you can just tax it back from rich families later (no need for means-testing bureaucracy, which can be the real expensive part since it has to scale with usage)
  - conductr 4y ago
    The food has to be near the hungry though.
    - 4y ago

tomjen3 4y ago

Based on the food that is served in US schools, I wonder if you are not better of without. That said, it is ridiculous to have hungry children in a country that also has national health care. It is much, much cheaper to feed a child than to deal with health issues from hunger.