3 ms·

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.
- yamtaddle 4y ago
  It costs way, way less than $12/meal to deliver a healthy, quality, fixed-menu hot meal to a 100-400 people in the US. We could do it for $5/meal, maybe less. Still expensive, but not that expensive.
  - jlmorton 4y ago
    I'm sure you're right. Maybe an easier way to describe the trade-off is to simply say every $1 spent on school lunches in the United States is about a $3,700 annual cost per classroom, and about ~$10 billion nationally.
    - yamtaddle 4y ago
      Right, your broader point that it'd be a non-tiny expense is correct, the ballpark total was just far enough off (~double) from the highest remotely plausible figure we might conceivably spend on public school lunches that I thought it worth pointing out.

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.

yamtaddle 4y ago
It costs way, way less than $12/meal to deliver a healthy, quality, fixed-menu hot meal to a 100-400 people in the US. We could do it for $5/meal, maybe less. Still expensive, but not that expensive.
- jlmorton 4y ago
  I'm sure you're right. Maybe an easier way to describe the trade-off is to simply say every $1 spent on school lunches in the United States is about a $3,700 annual cost per classroom, and about ~$10 billion nationally.
  - yamtaddle 4y ago
    Right, your broader point that it'd be a non-tiny expense is correct, the ballpark total was just far enough off (~double) from the highest remotely plausible figure we might conceivably spend on public school lunches that I thought it worth pointing out.