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Awesome and hilarious - I would be a very proud father or older brother. But on a serious note, directed at the media woohoo that always ensues, demanding bett

Awesome and hilarious - I would be a very proud father or older brother. But on a serious note, directed at the media woohoo that always ensues, demanding better food for schools Jamie Oliver style misses the constraint of a limited budget. Presumably there's some price/utility tradeoff between the cost of the food and the health/taste. Then there's a tradeoff between teacher quality and wages, school size and the number of teachers you must hire, etc. What we should be asking is whether the nutritional value outweighs wherever else the money would be spent. Maybe it is, maybe it's not, but 'oh the school is shamed' is a little much. Edit: of course the other discussion to have is whether there is a tradeoff between cost and health (including additional cooks needed to produce healthier food on a large scale). But I don't see this in most media discussions either.

leot 14y ago
Blarney. Healthy food is not pricier unless you get fancy. Legumes, quinoa, and vegetables aren't more expensive (though they do have smaller margins!) than the crap that they had been serving previously.
- hack_edu 14y ago
  The cost of the materials is only a small part of it. Preparing and cooking fresh food requires much, much more effort than prepared packaged foods. Microwavable or similarly low/zero-prep food products require very little labor, require only a few steps before they are served, and create almost zero items to be washed and cleaned. You would be surprised how much cheaper a flat of microwave burritos is compared to an equally caloric-dense flat of fresh or bulk goods. Also to consider is the cost of a skilled laborer -- someone who can actually cook -- versus a minimum wage worker who only needs to unwrap a package, press a button, and plate it.
  - tjpick 14y ago
    > Preparing and cooking fresh food requires much, much more effort than prepared packaged foods. Microwavable or similarly low/zero-prep food products. Microwaving corn on the cob is pretty much as low effort as it gets.
    - MattLaroche 14y ago
      Corn is a grain, not a vegetable. Dietarily, Americans do like to treat corn as a vegetable, but it should be more thought as as a starch.
    - hack_edu 14y ago
      Someone has to remove the husk, de-hair it first, and chop it to size, not to mention dress it with butter or etc. Each single one. Compare that to the amount of effort it takes to microwave a 20lb bag of creamed corn that is already dressed, and ready to be scooped onto a plate. Go inside a small kitchen at 4pm or so and watch the amount of effort it takes to even chop onions in preparation for dinner service.
      - mkr-hn 14y ago
        You can buy cobs of corn that are already processed in bulk.
      - tjpick 14y ago
        No you don't. You take the whole thing, with the husk on, and microwave it. Then you give it to the kid, and they pull the husk off, eat it, and throw the husk and cob into the compost bucket. If you are worried about healthy meals, you probably don't put butter on it at all.
  - hencq 14y ago
    Very true. It's definitely easier to make packaged food cheap than to make fresh food cheap. Regarding labour costs however, there's also a chance that the people currently pressing the microwave buttons, would actually be able to (and perhaps even enjoy to) cook real meals. In that case these costs need not necessarily be much higher.
  - leot 14y ago
    Given the success of various "healthy fast-food" restaurants, it seems nearly everyone can be taught to cook the simple stuff. But I was thinking, here, of quinoa prepared in a rice cooker (comparable in difficulty to microwaving a burrito), salad, and pre-made vegetarian chili. There's no way the total cost of this is higher than calorie-equivalent microwave mexican fare. E.g., Costco organic quinoa is about 700 kCalories/USD (plus 25g protein, 15g dietary fibre). Given a big enough rice cooker, I could teach any minimum wage employee how to spend 30 minutes and prepare quinoa enough to feed a school of 6000 for around a dollar per student. With another 30 minutes I could even make it palatable.
    - rquantz 14y ago
      I don't want to undermine your basic point here -- I hope that you're right. Quinoa in particular might be a problem though, since it's already increasing in price due short supply. Mass adoption by America's schools would probably result in making it unsustainable both for the schools themselves and for South American communities that rely on it. http://www.newser.com/story/114536/in-bolivia-a-quinoa-quandary.html http://www.newser.com/story/114536/in-bolivia-a-quinoa-quand...
      - leot 14y ago
        It doesn't look like quinoa can only be cultivated in particular regions, but rather that it takes time to get good crops going. The price should come down in a few years.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
  - kaybe 14y ago
    Deep-frozen vegetables are even cheaper than fresh ones and still have nearly all the nutrients, plus they usually come cleaned and preprocessed. Put it in some boiling salty water, wait a few minutes and you're good to go. How much easier can it get?
    - vacri 14y ago
      Mmm mmm. I remember as a kid, my favourite food was plain boiled vegetables. Like all kids, I just couldn't get enough of them. How I'd pester mum again and again to boil up some vegies. Yummy!
dusing 14y ago
You should watch Jamie Oliver's show he spends a great deal of time talking about budgets. Healthier food doesn't need to be more expensive, he has proved it a bunch of times.
- markkanof 14y ago
  He talks about budgets only after publicly embarrassing school district representatives and performing some outrageous stunts (ie. filling a school bus with sugar). I just don't think his approach was the best way to get people on his side. But of course a different more subtle approach wouldn't make for entertaining television.
- olliesaunders 14y ago
  Yeah I’ve seen him devise recipes to fit within budgetary constraints. He found it very challenging because the budget is like 40p per meal or something ridiculous like that. So he’s well aware of the problem. I think one of the things he campaigns for is more funding.
- kamaal 14y ago
  >>Healthier food doesn't need to be more expensive Healthier food isn't tasty either. But our brain perceives anything non tasty as unhealthy. That's where things get messed up. Healthy + tasty food is actually expensive.
ktizo 14y ago
Doesn't really matter how much extra money you can spend on the teaching if the kids are all sugar crashing and can't concentrate.
jdietrich 14y ago
If your political system doesn't see child nutrition as a priority, your political system needs to be burned to the ground. Are we honestly expected to believe that a first world nation can't find room in the budget to give children vegetables? I cannot imagine a future in which they do not look back and think "Food was cheaper in their age than at any point before or since, but they fed their children worse than cattle. How could a school have computers but no fruit?".
- mvzink 14y ago
  That first sentence isn't quite right. I agree, personally, that every political system should be burned to the ground but, as usual, some Marx might give a slightly saner perspective here: the problem is precisely that there is a political system, which separates political personhood from private, civil personhood. Today, a group of people acts in social cooperation primarily through a political system. They may have an important social goal, like improving child nutrition, but the political system has already leeched the social power necessary for its achievement. Thus, any other social goals being worked out through the political system, such as economic growth, national security, even personal liberty, are at odds with the social goal you're concerned with, simply by nature of having to work through a defined, singular system. You can only push and pull a lever in so many directions, no matter how complicated and multi-axial it is. And as a sidenote, the political system itself doesn't have goals, even if its initial creation did have specific goals. They inform the system, but are not properties of it. The intent of communism (esp. with the abolition of the state) is not, contrary to many views, some evil dictatorial master plan, but simply to put social power back into the hands of the people, allowing the existence and implementation of real social priorities, such as child nutrition.
  - fennecfoxen 14y ago
    "the problem is precisely that there is a political system, which separates political personhood from private, civil personhood." I don't know about that! I have plenty of Politics in my life without it needing every fibre of my life to be infused with it, thank you very much. Rather, I shall go into the office tomorrow and go about business with Ron Paul supporters and Occupy SF supporters alike, and sip espresso with them in the afternoon, and I think there's something fundamentally humanizing about being able to do that. But then, I guess that's a classic divide, as I recently saw evidenced in this opinion piece: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304371504577406670699090132.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437150457740... on the fundamental differences in the outlook on life as evidenced by commencement speeches delivered by Barack Obama and by Mitt Romney.
Splines 14y ago
Growing up in central Canada I never had a school that provided meals. Now that I'm in the US I find it odd that schools (of all ages) can provide lunch for students. My son now gets his food at school - while it's nice that we don't need to prepare his lunch beforehand, I'd much much rather have my school district's food-related costs be used towards teachers and learning. I have prepared lunch for my son when he was in elementary, it is not a hard thing to do.
- malnourish 14y ago
  The biggest thing with this is that there are some parents who are unable to prepare food for their child due to financial costs. For some kids, a school meal might be the only thing they eat, or the largest meal of the day.
  - sopooneo 14y ago
    There are many families where it is an issue of finance and time preventing them from making their kids healthy lunches. There are also a great many families where it is an issue of broken culture and defeated people that actually could provide nutritious meals. Of course if it's only one kid in a poor school that comes every day with simple cheap home-made food, that child risks serious ostracism.
    - ekianjo 14y ago
      Well if you don't even expect parents to care about what their children eat, how can you expect parents to care about education ? It boils down to the same thing. Besides, I hear this argument often but I don't buy in the "finance" issue to get good food. Getting veggies/rice is cheap enough and can be cooked pretty fast. You don't need meat 3 times a day to be healthy. Just 60 years ago, people were eating 10 times less meat than now and they had no issue becoming smart (and probably smarter than now, seeing the extremely poor achievements of school education nowadays). Basically lunches in School is an extension of the School system: you ensure people have to rely on you, everyday. This is toxic in so many ways. Kids never learn what it takes to prepare food, because they never see their Mom/Dad prepare food for them. It makes them value food as a commodity. It also "breaks" another link between parents and children, since you rely on a separate organization to feed your own kids, on which you have little knowledge and control. Seriously, providing lunches at school is just a broken solution to the broken culture problem you mention. It does not fix anything, and provides comfort that it's OK to be part of that "broken culture". It just makes things worse in the end.
bootload 14y ago
"... The UK has the highest rate of childhood obesity in Europe, with 25% of young people being classified as obese or overweight. The Government’s Foresight report suggests this will only get worse, with 40% of Britons expected to be obese by 2025 ...." [0] Are these constraints factoring in the long term health benefits & lower health costs? [0] "Why is school food important?" ~ http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/ http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/
- gouranga 14y ago
  it's not school food making them fat. It's parent spending money on highly taxed cigarettes, sports clothes and lottery tickets then moaning that all they can feed their kids is processed shit. Ban cigarettes entirely, stop the lottery and give benefit claimants vouchers rather than cash and health problems will decline instantly. This comes from experience working in schools (I do part time reading with primary school children). The unhealthy kids with poor education smell of cigarettes and are on benefits WITHOUT EXCEPTION.
  - ChrisAnn 14y ago
    Not sure about the vouchers idea. You can already get milk vouchers and I've seen people exchange them for things other than milk.
    - gouranga 14y ago
      If you look at the supermarkets in the UK, they issue "e-vouchers" which can only be used against certain people. These people are identified by a non-photographic ID card (ClubCard/Nectar). They can easily be replaced with a benefits card with a photo that does the same.
ekianjo 14y ago
Just a question but is School Lunch free in Scotland ? If everything is subsidized you can't seriously complain about the quality of food, imo. If you were paying for it (and I don't mean through other taxes, but paying directly for it) and still got something as poor as this, certainly you could complain. It's the eternal debate between leaving your responsibility as a parent to feed your child and taking the matters in your hands. In Japan there are still a fairly high percentage of mothers (even working ones) who prepare meals for their kids going to school. That's caring.

leot 14y ago

Blarney. Healthy food is not pricier unless you get fancy. Legumes, quinoa, and vegetables aren't more expensive (though they do have smaller margins!) than the crap that they had been serving previously.

hack_edu 14y ago
The cost of the materials is only a small part of it. Preparing and cooking fresh food requires much, much more effort than prepared packaged foods. Microwavable or similarly low/zero-prep food products require very little labor, require only a few steps before they are served, and create almost zero items to be washed and cleaned. You would be surprised how much cheaper a flat of microwave burritos is compared to an equally caloric-dense flat of fresh or bulk goods. Also to consider is the cost of a skilled laborer -- someone who can actually cook -- versus a minimum wage worker who only needs to unwrap a package, press a button, and plate it.
- tjpick 14y ago
  > Preparing and cooking fresh food requires much, much more effort than prepared packaged foods. Microwavable or similarly low/zero-prep food products. Microwaving corn on the cob is pretty much as low effort as it gets.
  - MattLaroche 14y ago
    Corn is a grain, not a vegetable. Dietarily, Americans do like to treat corn as a vegetable, but it should be more thought as as a starch.
  - hack_edu 14y ago
    Someone has to remove the husk, de-hair it first, and chop it to size, not to mention dress it with butter or etc. Each single one. Compare that to the amount of effort it takes to microwave a 20lb bag of creamed corn that is already dressed, and ready to be scooped onto a plate. Go inside a small kitchen at 4pm or so and watch the amount of effort it takes to even chop onions in preparation for dinner service.
    - mkr-hn 14y ago
      You can buy cobs of corn that are already processed in bulk.
    - tjpick 14y ago
      No you don't. You take the whole thing, with the husk on, and microwave it. Then you give it to the kid, and they pull the husk off, eat it, and throw the husk and cob into the compost bucket. If you are worried about healthy meals, you probably don't put butter on it at all.
- hencq 14y ago
  Very true. It's definitely easier to make packaged food cheap than to make fresh food cheap. Regarding labour costs however, there's also a chance that the people currently pressing the microwave buttons, would actually be able to (and perhaps even enjoy to) cook real meals. In that case these costs need not necessarily be much higher.
- leot 14y ago
  Given the success of various "healthy fast-food" restaurants, it seems nearly everyone can be taught to cook the simple stuff. But I was thinking, here, of quinoa prepared in a rice cooker (comparable in difficulty to microwaving a burrito), salad, and pre-made vegetarian chili. There's no way the total cost of this is higher than calorie-equivalent microwave mexican fare. E.g., Costco organic quinoa is about 700 kCalories/USD (plus 25g protein, 15g dietary fibre). Given a big enough rice cooker, I could teach any minimum wage employee how to spend 30 minutes and prepare quinoa enough to feed a school of 6000 for around a dollar per student. With another 30 minutes I could even make it palatable.
  - rquantz 14y ago
    I don't want to undermine your basic point here -- I hope that you're right. Quinoa in particular might be a problem though, since it's already increasing in price due short supply. Mass adoption by America's schools would probably result in making it unsustainable both for the schools themselves and for South American communities that rely on it. http://www.newser.com/story/114536/in-bolivia-a-quinoa-quandary.html http://www.newser.com/story/114536/in-bolivia-a-quinoa-quand...
    - leot 14y ago
      It doesn't look like quinoa can only be cultivated in particular regions, but rather that it takes time to get good crops going. The price should come down in a few years.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
- kaybe 14y ago
  Deep-frozen vegetables are even cheaper than fresh ones and still have nearly all the nutrients, plus they usually come cleaned and preprocessed. Put it in some boiling salty water, wait a few minutes and you're good to go. How much easier can it get?
  - vacri 14y ago
    Mmm mmm. I remember as a kid, my favourite food was plain boiled vegetables. Like all kids, I just couldn't get enough of them. How I'd pester mum again and again to boil up some vegies. Yummy!

dusing 14y ago

You should watch Jamie Oliver's show he spends a great deal of time talking about budgets. Healthier food doesn't need to be more expensive, he has proved it a bunch of times.

markkanof 14y ago
He talks about budgets only after publicly embarrassing school district representatives and performing some outrageous stunts (ie. filling a school bus with sugar). I just don't think his approach was the best way to get people on his side. But of course a different more subtle approach wouldn't make for entertaining television.
olliesaunders 14y ago
Yeah I’ve seen him devise recipes to fit within budgetary constraints. He found it very challenging because the budget is like 40p per meal or something ridiculous like that. So he’s well aware of the problem. I think one of the things he campaigns for is more funding.
kamaal 14y ago
>>Healthier food doesn't need to be more expensive Healthier food isn't tasty either. But our brain perceives anything non tasty as unhealthy. That's where things get messed up. Healthy + tasty food is actually expensive.

ktizo 14y ago

Doesn't really matter how much extra money you can spend on the teaching if the kids are all sugar crashing and can't concentrate.

jdietrich 14y ago

If your political system doesn't see child nutrition as a priority, your political system needs to be burned to the ground. Are we honestly expected to believe that a first world nation can't find room in the budget to give children vegetables? I cannot imagine a future in which they do not look back and think "Food was cheaper in their age than at any point before or since, but they fed their children worse than cattle. How could a school have computers but no fruit?".

mvzink 14y ago
That first sentence isn't quite right. I agree, personally, that every political system should be burned to the ground but, as usual, some Marx might give a slightly saner perspective here: the problem is precisely that there is a political system, which separates political personhood from private, civil personhood. Today, a group of people acts in social cooperation primarily through a political system. They may have an important social goal, like improving child nutrition, but the political system has already leeched the social power necessary for its achievement. Thus, any other social goals being worked out through the political system, such as economic growth, national security, even personal liberty, are at odds with the social goal you're concerned with, simply by nature of having to work through a defined, singular system. You can only push and pull a lever in so many directions, no matter how complicated and multi-axial it is. And as a sidenote, the political system itself doesn't have goals, even if its initial creation did have specific goals. They inform the system, but are not properties of it. The intent of communism (esp. with the abolition of the state) is not, contrary to many views, some evil dictatorial master plan, but simply to put social power back into the hands of the people, allowing the existence and implementation of real social priorities, such as child nutrition.
- fennecfoxen 14y ago
  "the problem is precisely that there is a political system, which separates political personhood from private, civil personhood." I don't know about that! I have plenty of Politics in my life without it needing every fibre of my life to be infused with it, thank you very much. Rather, I shall go into the office tomorrow and go about business with Ron Paul supporters and Occupy SF supporters alike, and sip espresso with them in the afternoon, and I think there's something fundamentally humanizing about being able to do that. But then, I guess that's a classic divide, as I recently saw evidenced in this opinion piece: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304371504577406670699090132.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405270230437150457740... on the fundamental differences in the outlook on life as evidenced by commencement speeches delivered by Barack Obama and by Mitt Romney.

Splines 14y ago

Growing up in central Canada I never had a school that provided meals. Now that I'm in the US I find it odd that schools (of all ages) can provide lunch for students. My son now gets his food at school - while it's nice that we don't need to prepare his lunch beforehand, I'd much much rather have my school district's food-related costs be used towards teachers and learning. I have prepared lunch for my son when he was in elementary, it is not a hard thing to do.

malnourish 14y ago
The biggest thing with this is that there are some parents who are unable to prepare food for their child due to financial costs. For some kids, a school meal might be the only thing they eat, or the largest meal of the day.
- sopooneo 14y ago
  There are many families where it is an issue of finance and time preventing them from making their kids healthy lunches. There are also a great many families where it is an issue of broken culture and defeated people that actually could provide nutritious meals. Of course if it's only one kid in a poor school that comes every day with simple cheap home-made food, that child risks serious ostracism.
  - ekianjo 14y ago
    Well if you don't even expect parents to care about what their children eat, how can you expect parents to care about education ? It boils down to the same thing. Besides, I hear this argument often but I don't buy in the "finance" issue to get good food. Getting veggies/rice is cheap enough and can be cooked pretty fast. You don't need meat 3 times a day to be healthy. Just 60 years ago, people were eating 10 times less meat than now and they had no issue becoming smart (and probably smarter than now, seeing the extremely poor achievements of school education nowadays). Basically lunches in School is an extension of the School system: you ensure people have to rely on you, everyday. This is toxic in so many ways. Kids never learn what it takes to prepare food, because they never see their Mom/Dad prepare food for them. It makes them value food as a commodity. It also "breaks" another link between parents and children, since you rely on a separate organization to feed your own kids, on which you have little knowledge and control. Seriously, providing lunches at school is just a broken solution to the broken culture problem you mention. It does not fix anything, and provides comfort that it's OK to be part of that "broken culture". It just makes things worse in the end.

bootload 14y ago

"... The UK has the highest rate of childhood obesity in Europe, with 25% of young people being classified as obese or overweight. The Government’s Foresight report suggests this will only get worse, with 40% of Britons expected to be obese by 2025 ...." [0] Are these constraints factoring in the long term health benefits & lower health costs? [0] "Why is school food important?" ~ http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/ http://www.jamieoliver.com/school-dinners/

gouranga 14y ago
it's not school food making them fat. It's parent spending money on highly taxed cigarettes, sports clothes and lottery tickets then moaning that all they can feed their kids is processed shit. Ban cigarettes entirely, stop the lottery and give benefit claimants vouchers rather than cash and health problems will decline instantly. This comes from experience working in schools (I do part time reading with primary school children). The unhealthy kids with poor education smell of cigarettes and are on benefits WITHOUT EXCEPTION.
- ChrisAnn 14y ago
  Not sure about the vouchers idea. You can already get milk vouchers and I've seen people exchange them for things other than milk.
  - gouranga 14y ago
    If you look at the supermarkets in the UK, they issue "e-vouchers" which can only be used against certain people. These people are identified by a non-photographic ID card (ClubCard/Nectar). They can easily be replaced with a benefits card with a photo that does the same.

ekianjo 14y ago

Just a question but is School Lunch free in Scotland ? If everything is subsidized you can't seriously complain about the quality of food, imo. If you were paying for it (and I don't mean through other taxes, but paying directly for it) and still got something as poor as this, certainly you could complain. It's the eternal debate between leaving your responsibility as a parent to feed your child and taking the matters in your hands. In Japan there are still a fairly high percentage of mothers (even working ones) who prepare meals for their kids going to school. That's caring.