10 ms·

All praise to the lunch ladies

276 points by gmays 1y ago

lighttower 1y ago
This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.
- mc32 1y ago
  A big sarcastic thank you to G Dubbya for taking us down that road to perdition..
  - cpursley 1y ago
    American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.
jimbokun 1y ago
Indeed. 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.
- Animats 1y ago
  The view from the other side: NeverSeconds.[1] 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
  - jancsika 1y ago
    Wikipedia: "number of hairs" You: "number of hairs and insects" Citation, please?
    - theoreticalmal 1y ago
      Cmon dude
  - dpark 1y ago
    So this is interesting but I would hardly call it “the other side”. This isn’t a battle between lunch ladies and students. Even here the girl was not asking for them to stop serving the food. Rather she said they should serve more and also improve it. > She added: “I'd like them to serve more, and maybe let some people have seconds if they want to ... and not serve stuff that's a wee bit disgusting.” https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9256454/Girls-school-dinner-blog-becomes-internet-hit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.teleg...
    - gusgus01 1y ago
      I think this girl has a better understanding of lunch time dynamics than you. It's almost an objective, base point that any food is better than no food, which is why she would advocate for serving more and also improving it. A huge emphasis on improving it.
  - lelandbatey 1y ago
    The blog in question, right when posting seemed to pick up: https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/ https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/
    - zdc1 1y ago
      The comparison school lunch from Finland looks lovely. It's a shame that many school lunches are meals that we wouldn't pick for ourselves. It's a simple test: would I want that for my lunch? For most of the photos, it's a no.
- Coffeewine 1y ago
  Pertaining to that observation, I really liked this section: > 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.
  - tstrimple 1y ago
    Imagine the conservative backlash to the concept of libraries if they hadn’t grown up with them. The panic and hysteria they would generate over the idea that people could access books without paying for them! Communism! You’re making authors into slaves!
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      Or, some goofball centrist would say "Good idea, but why shouldn't we charge people and make them profitable?? Government should be run like a business!"
  - michaelrpeskin 1y ago
    We did "free" lunch for all here a couple of years ago. The idea is great, execution is terrible. You can't get a la carte free, only the full "FDA approved" lunch is free. So if you forget a drink, or just want to add a snack to your own packed lunch, you go get the whole thing and throw everything else away. 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.
- ryandrake 1y ago
  "Someone somewhere might be given something they don't need." Sad and incredible how much of US politics is summed up with just that one statement.
  - babyshake 1y ago
    The rhetoric you see in some places about how social assistance is used on hair weaves says something about the underlying reasons for much of this concern.
    - krapp 1y ago
      Remember the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s and the government wanted to undermine the political and propaganda power the Black Panthers had gained through that and other social programs. So the government created its own, then Reagan underfunded it.
      - opo 1y ago
        No, that is not true. The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946. That has since been updated several times: the Child Nutrition Act in 1966, the Child Care Food Program in 1975, etc.
        komali2 1y ago
        What you're saying doesn't contradict the argument that the goal was do outdo the black panther lunch programs. Certainly I'd like to read more about the idea before I buy into it, but it does make a lot of sense - schools in black neighborhoods are chronically underfunded and the black panthers were first and foremost a direct action and mutual aid group, and furthermore the USA government viewed them as a huge threat to government authority and did many things to attempt to undermine the black panthers... Including outright assassination.
- rkomorn 1y ago
  > Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch. Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias. My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food. IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) were just higher and harder to meet. I don't think that was the case.
  - dpark 1y ago
    The quality of food is probably extremely variable across schools even in the same general region. I’ve seen some pictures of really appealing lunches plucked from European schools. But how many different schools are there in Europe?
    - rkomorn 1y ago
      I'm guessing a bigger consideration is whether what appears online is subject to selection bias (especially when the context is "look how much better the food in European schools is"). Maybe it's also changed a lot. My anecdata is admittedly not recent since I am also "not recent."
    - bittercynic 1y ago
      Absolutely. I work at a school where the food is OK, but just, and the school across the street has very good food. One of our students used to sneak into the other school in the mornings for breakfast. He made the mistake of bringing the food back to our school where people asked questions, and pretty soon the other school knew he wasn't their student and banned him. Something seems really off to me about different kids within a couple hundred feet of each other getting drastically different quality of food.
  - em500 1y ago
    In the Netherlands no elementary schools have any cafeteria, kitchen or lunch area at all. Kids bring their own lunchbox, with usually some sandwiches, fruit and water, and eat inside the classroom.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- no_wizard 1y ago
  Truly American affliction, a crippling fear that the government does something for its citizens that doesn’t have any strings attached
- thunky 1y ago
  > These lunch ladies are the ones > getting ham strung Nice.
mikeyinternews 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI
- ge96 1y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M this lady's laugh
bluedino 1y ago
It was a while ago but all of our lunch ladies were laid off and "eligible for re-hire" with SodexoMAGIC when they took over the cafeteria contracts for our district.
cpursley 1y ago
Having a school lunch in a "poor" former eastern block country as a guest was really eye opening. It was actually good, fresh made borscht, veg dishes that tasted good (wasn't steamed)! Like, I would order and enjoy it at a restaurant level no-bad. Who knew that was even possible? From what I can tell, a non-crappy school lunch is the norm all over Europe. Why can't America have that?
- klooney 1y ago
  You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.
  - jplrssn 1y ago
    "can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.
    - mrguyorama 1y ago
      And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.
- bgnn 1y ago
  Unfortunately it's far from the norm in Europe. In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.
  - cpursley 1y ago
    fwiw, bread and cheese in the Netherlands kicks the crap out of what is often called "cheese" in the US. However, the situation has at least improved over the past decade if your budget allows it.
Baeocystin 1y ago
I used to get the poor kid's meal when I was very young. They made us stand as a group aside in a line and let all the other kids get their full-sized meals first, then would give us our half-sized shitty sandwich after everyone else walked passed and stared at us. Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty. That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.
- gausswho 1y ago
  Whoa that is very different than my experience decades ago. Whether your lunch was free, discounted, or full price, that happened at the cashier. Everyone waited in the same line. Your experience is way too early to introduce kids to how bad capitalism. Let them dream!
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Implementation of free and reduced-cost lunches varies considerably across the US states. In many places, it's discreet and private, but also in many places, the process is deliberately designed to 1. call attention to and shame people, and 2. make it difficult to use and easy to be denied. And yes, you can probably easily guess which kinds of places focus on the cruelty, and which kinds of places focus on the helping.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  It reminds me of a similar discussion here around overdue lunch fees, graduation, and how ridiculously small the amount ends up being for an entire school at the end of the year (I think the article was about the person just walking in and paying it all).
ilamont 1y ago
Growing up near Boston, my public elementary school built in the 1920s didn't have a proper kitchen or even a cafeteria because kids at one time always brought meals from home and ate at their desks. Indeed, we did too, bringing metal lunchboxes or brown bags, until the mid-1970s. At that point, something changed and we all ate together in a repurposed room in the basement, eating the same unhealthy and unappetizing meals that were heated from frozen tinfoil platters in a towering steamer that a few harried lunch ladies managed. One particularly gross option was the "pizza burger," literally a rectangular cheese pizza with a tired looking hamburger patty on top. There were no fresh vegetables. Everything hot came out of a can or freezer. We did get apples, but they were mealy Red Delicious or Macs that most kids threw away. Around the same time, we began to get free milk in the mornings. I know this because we would hang out at the loading dock in the morning and beg the delivery driver for small boxes of chocolate milk. There might have been some sort of breakfast item too, like a pastry or small box of cereal. If I were to hazard a guess at what was happening, someone correctly determined that many kids weren't eating healthy food or had unequal access to food. Subsidies were granted for providing free healthy meals, and children were forbidden from bringing meals from home. The problem was the school and the staff didn't know how to provide such meals, and the city had a mix of schools ranging between 10 and 70 years old, mostly with limited kitchen and cafeteria facilities. I believe they took the easiest way out - put it out for bid, and chose the cheapest and easiest option to implement: little red cartons of milk in the morning, frozen and canned food for lunch or maybe a sandwich, and a checkmark on a government compliance form. My kids attended the same school system starting in the 2000s. They had gotten rid of elementary school lunches for everyone. My spouse who comes from another country insisted on better quality lunches, which we would heat up and place in a thermos or bento box-type thing. Families who needed help with lunch were still provided with them I believe through SNAP or a similar program.
- brians 1y ago
  And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.
- 1y ago
mauvehaus 1y ago
Just want to note that The Bitter Southerner ran two seasons of an absolutely outstanding podcast that sadly went defunct in 2020. Truly it's one of the best podcasts I've listened to, and I'm bummed that they quit making it.
watersb 1y ago
I didn't consciously notice the source URL, yet I thought "This would be a great article for The Bitter Southerner". I strongly suspect I actually read the source location. Whatever. The point is that "The Bitter Southerner" is a fantastic magazine. They sell subscriptions. This is where I grew up but it's a different planet for my kids. "Let Everybody Sing" https://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing https://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing Just looking through past Hacker News submissions is worth your time.
onecommentman 1y ago
Embarrassed by the HN comments here. Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get. Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. Such commenters should be forced to prepare and serve lunches for hundreds of hungry children while also being forced to listen to screaming political rants through taped-on headphones. The lower middle class, my native land, gets too little applause for their contributions.
- giraffe_lady 1y ago
  My whole family was working poor at best and I was (at best) most of my life too. I've always liked this Barbara Ehrenreich quote about the dynamic. “When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
  - UncleSlacky 1y ago
    > The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. Hence the title of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr...
- JuniperMesos 1y ago
  > Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. The sentence "Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get" is itself an attempt to score poltical points for a poltical faction. As is calling them "heroes". Specifically, this is a leftist poltical argument associated with the Democratic party in the united states, suggesting that it is good for the government to be in charge of running civic institutions that are legally obligated to serve all citizens in exactly the same way, in order to dissuade people from spending their money on services they prefer which might be better than those poorer people can afford; and also that the government employees who do the frontline labor at these institutions are laudable and morally superior people. There are ideological associations here with official Soviet propaganda lauding the worker in the abstract. Someone who didn't like their public school experience or the way the lunch lady there did their job might resonably grow up to take political stances that reject the idea that low-status government workers are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get.
jandrewrogers 1y ago
It varies so widely across the US. I went to school in several States, and it ran the gamut from unhealthy corporate slop (e.g. multiple schools in California) to delicious food prepared daily from fresh ingredients by local grannies (Nebraska). The latter was amazing and wasn't even generic American food, it reflected the predominant ethnicity of the people that lived in that locale (because grannies doing home-cooking). This was decades ago and the area has hollowed out, so I don't know if it is still a thing there.
bellboy_tech 1y ago
School Bus drivers should be one of the highest paying jobs. Start there. Everything is so upside down. The children's caregivers, teachers, etc. should be the best people society can produce. From there greatness will be incubated.
- thaumasiotes 1y ago
  Well, if we had much better school bus drivers than we have now, what benefits would we realize from the change?
  - komali2 1y ago
    We'd have more since it was a higher paying job. Man districts lack enough drivers resulting in longer routes, which takes time away from the kids to have a life outside school. Also we'd have happier kids and drivers which is great. The driver is part of the social worker aspect of a school, breaking up post school fights or noticing if a kid gets out to walk into a dangerously degraded housing situation. Would be nice to have very well paid, well trained people doing that job.
- Auracle 1y ago
  Why? My mom drove school bus. It allowed her to work a part time job and stay at home with us kids when we were young. The drivers seemed split between people like her and older people that probably already had the right license, and it was a nice part time job for them too. I don’t disagree we should have better teachers by paying them more to widen the potential pool but that would need to go hand in hand with actually being able to fire poor performers.
  - zamadatix 1y ago
    It varies by region, but a lot of areas have a difficult shortage which results in really long routes or troubles when a bus breaks down/several drivers are out. Different states/areas also have different laws on when that means bus service just isn't available. There is, of course, a floor for the requirements of a driver, which drives these to get worse when salary (and therefore job interest) is lower. Half a lifetime ago now, my bus route in high school took 1.5-2 hours to get me ~4 miles from the school after some route consolidations (I got stuck on the end of the combined route where they were about to return to the bus depot - depending on the year that meant either getting up really early or getting home really late). If the weather was good I could just bike it, but that certainly wasn't always the case in Michigan.
AstroNutt 1y ago
Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years. She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too. She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Michell Obama implemented, "Let's Move". They wasted lots and lots of food because the kids wouldn't eat it. She specifically mentioned the whole wheat Mac and cheese with no salt. I've tasted the food the kids eat there and it's really good, compared to the nasty stuff I had to eat at my schools. It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in young developing brains and bodies. These are the kids that will be taking care of us all one day.
- Auracle 1y ago
  I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
  - speed_spread 1y ago
    Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
    - poink 1y ago
      It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
      - sevg 1y ago
        > the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.) That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.
suchoudh 1y ago
Almost all schools in Indore, MadhyaPradesh, India have breakfast and lunch provided by school. The food is really well cooked and nutritious. Most other cities in India the bf and tiffin needs to be given by parents which makes mornings very busy.
jsmo 1y ago
What about the dinner ladies of the UK?
constantcrying 1y ago
The modern bourgeois obsession with valorizing the easiest unskilled jobs, done by people with zero abilities and ambition, is so bizarre. No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well rewarded. I don't fault people for doing jobs like this, it obviously pays and you can go home and do something else after it. But praising them for it seems utterly ridiculous.
- UncleMeat 1y ago
  I work at Google. One of the top things people ask me about working there is the lunches. There is a glowing video on youtube about the cafeteria staff and the process of serving healthy, tasty, and varied food to thousand and thousands of people every day. These jobs are recognized as skilled and valuable. Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision. For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.
  - constantcrying 1y ago
    I do not work at Google. The cantina workers at my company are lazy, provide poor food and try to gouge me on price, by debating how many scoops of some particular food I have put on my plate and whether the scoop was a "normal" scoop or too much. If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.
- seec 1y ago
  It's the leftist typical obsession of appearing virtuous and "empathic" by constantly praising those who are lower than them and end up in the lower strata of society. Of course even those people are not really duped and they generally hate them while still keeping appearance. It always seems very clownish to me. I have worked in restaurant kitchens (more on the higher end) and know very well that it can be hard work. But this is not at all the kind of work the "lunch ladies" are doing. In fact they have easy, predictable schedule, with a captive "clientele", low standard and very little skill or innovation involved. The people who end up there are just too bad to do anything else and in my experience they tend to be quite despicable actually. In elementary school I had two extremely unpleasant lunch ladies who were vile and unsanitary. The "cooking" was just opening some canned or frozen food and reheating it. As anecdata, when they were serving ready-made "crepes", they would throw it in your plate from the cart that was rolling in the middle ailes, because that was less effort. If you were at the end of the table which was quite long (3-4 meters) you had better watch out for the reception if you wanted to actually be able to eat the damned thing. Out of the 4 schools I frequented after, there was only one that had decent food and it was at dinner because it was a boarding school with a low headcount and the cook (a young friendly man) had more time to actually make some palatable things. My experience is that most of the women working in those kitchen were very low effort people and often display some kind of low key evil in how they behave towards students. The food is bad because even if you were to give them the raw ingredients and tooling they would just make a mess of it. They are definitely not praise worthy.
chris_wot 1y ago
So Trump literally took food away from children. Those funds are already allocated, and were being spent on locally produced food. But, tariffs, ya know!
mensetmanusman 1y ago
This is a fun walkthrough of the lunches in school every 10 years since 1900. The 70s-00s were wild! https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw
mythrwy 1y ago
When I was in elementary school in the early 1970s I went to a very rural school in a remote community in the Western USA that had 2 rooms, 3 grades for each room. The whole school might have had 40 or 50 kids tops. The building was built in the 1800s and even had the bell at the top. Anyway it was the best lunch program ever. Everything was made from scratch and there was an old lady soup Nazi that ran the kitchen. One of the things that made it really special is the older kids did all the work under the supervision of old battle axe soup nazi. You would have assigned days to work the cafeteria and wash dishes etc. And let me tell you, that lady made sure things were done to food safety standards and this was before corporeal punishment and grabbing a kid by the ear was prohibited. Working the cafeteria was actually one of the most educational things I got from that school. I learned how to really wash dishes properly and fast and that lesson has served me well over the years.
paradox460 1y ago
When I was a kid in Los Alamos (relevant later), my school didn't have a de facto school lunch program. So we brought our own lunches. Eventually I learned of a local lady that would come in and make hot lunches, and told my parents about her. She was a local librarian, and charged something like $2 a day. Switched to her for lunch, and got a nice steady diet of things like baked potatoes, chili, lasagna, all homemade, all delicious. A year after I discovered her, some bright soul in the school board decided to piggyback on the LANL concessions contact, and we started getting Aramark provided lunch. She was told by school she couldn't provide the homemade lunches. The quality of food dropped immediately, with the nadir being Lunchable cheese and crackers on Wednesday (the short day). So back to bag lunch, sandwiches and thermoses full of soup

276 points by gmays 1y ago

This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.

mc32 1y ago
A big sarcastic thank you to G Dubbya for taking us down that road to perdition..
- cpursley 1y ago
  American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.

jimbokun 1y ago

Indeed. 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.

Animats 1y ago
The view from the other side: NeverSeconds.[1] 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. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeverSeconds
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
- jancsika 1y ago
  Wikipedia: "number of hairs" You: "number of hairs and insects" Citation, please?
  - theoreticalmal 1y ago
    Cmon dude
- dpark 1y ago
  So this is interesting but I would hardly call it “the other side”. This isn’t a battle between lunch ladies and students. Even here the girl was not asking for them to stop serving the food. Rather she said they should serve more and also improve it. > She added: “I'd like them to serve more, and maybe let some people have seconds if they want to ... and not serve stuff that's a wee bit disgusting.” https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/education/educationnews/9256454/Girls-school-dinner-blog-becomes-internet-hit.html https://web.archive.org/web/20240418175610/https://www.teleg...
  - gusgus01 1y ago
    I think this girl has a better understanding of lunch time dynamics than you. It's almost an objective, base point that any food is better than no food, which is why she would advocate for serving more and also improving it. A huge emphasis on improving it.
- lelandbatey 1y ago
  The blog in question, right when posting seemed to pick up: https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/ https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/
  - zdc1 1y ago
    The comparison school lunch from Finland looks lovely. It's a shame that many school lunches are meals that we wouldn't pick for ourselves. It's a simple test: would I want that for my lunch? For most of the photos, it's a no.
Coffeewine 1y ago
Pertaining to that observation, I really liked this section: > 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.
- tstrimple 1y ago
  Imagine the conservative backlash to the concept of libraries if they hadn’t grown up with them. The panic and hysteria they would generate over the idea that people could access books without paying for them! Communism! You’re making authors into slaves!
  - ryandrake 1y ago
    Or, some goofball centrist would say "Good idea, but why shouldn't we charge people and make them profitable?? Government should be run like a business!"
- michaelrpeskin 1y ago
  We did "free" lunch for all here a couple of years ago. The idea is great, execution is terrible. You can't get a la carte free, only the full "FDA approved" lunch is free. So if you forget a drink, or just want to add a snack to your own packed lunch, you go get the whole thing and throw everything else away. 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.
ryandrake 1y ago
"Someone somewhere might be given something they don't need." Sad and incredible how much of US politics is summed up with just that one statement.
- babyshake 1y ago
  The rhetoric you see in some places about how social assistance is used on hair weaves says something about the underlying reasons for much of this concern.
  - krapp 1y ago
    Remember the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s and the government wanted to undermine the political and propaganda power the Black Panthers had gained through that and other social programs. So the government created its own, then Reagan underfunded it.
    - opo 1y ago
      No, that is not true. The first school lunch programs started with private initiatives in the 1890s. The first major federal program for student lunches was the National School Lunch Program enacted in 1946. That has since been updated several times: the Child Nutrition Act in 1966, the Child Care Food Program in 1975, etc.
      - komali2 1y ago
        What you're saying doesn't contradict the argument that the goal was do outdo the black panther lunch programs. Certainly I'd like to read more about the idea before I buy into it, but it does make a lot of sense - schools in black neighborhoods are chronically underfunded and the black panthers were first and foremost a direct action and mutual aid group, and furthermore the USA government viewed them as a huge threat to government authority and did many things to attempt to undermine the black panthers... Including outright assassination.
rkomorn 1y ago
> Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch. Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias. My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food. IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) were just higher and harder to meet. I don't think that was the case.
- dpark 1y ago
  The quality of food is probably extremely variable across schools even in the same general region. I’ve seen some pictures of really appealing lunches plucked from European schools. But how many different schools are there in Europe?
  - rkomorn 1y ago
    I'm guessing a bigger consideration is whether what appears online is subject to selection bias (especially when the context is "look how much better the food in European schools is"). Maybe it's also changed a lot. My anecdata is admittedly not recent since I am also "not recent."
  - bittercynic 1y ago
    Absolutely. I work at a school where the food is OK, but just, and the school across the street has very good food. One of our students used to sneak into the other school in the mornings for breakfast. He made the mistake of bringing the food back to our school where people asked questions, and pretty soon the other school knew he wasn't their student and banned him. Something seems really off to me about different kids within a couple hundred feet of each other getting drastically different quality of food.
- em500 1y ago
  In the Netherlands no elementary schools have any cafeteria, kitchen or lunch area at all. Kids bring their own lunchbox, with usually some sandwiches, fruit and water, and eat inside the classroom.
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no_wizard 1y ago
Truly American affliction, a crippling fear that the government does something for its citizens that doesn’t have any strings attached
thunky 1y ago
> These lunch ladies are the ones > getting ham strung Nice.

mikeyinternews 1y ago

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI

ge96 1y ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M this lady's laugh

bluedino 1y ago

It was a while ago but all of our lunch ladies were laid off and "eligible for re-hire" with SodexoMAGIC when they took over the cafeteria contracts for our district.

cpursley 1y ago

Having a school lunch in a "poor" former eastern block country as a guest was really eye opening. It was actually good, fresh made borscht, veg dishes that tasted good (wasn't steamed)! Like, I would order and enjoy it at a restaurant level no-bad. Who knew that was even possible? From what I can tell, a non-crappy school lunch is the norm all over Europe. Why can't America have that?

klooney 1y ago
You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.
- jplrssn 1y ago
  "can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.
  - mrguyorama 1y ago
    And despite spending basically nothing on that lunch, we still charge kids for it The public blamed the "lazy" lunch ladies of course but the public was the one voting down the school budget to actually pay them to cook. The actual people doing food service have as much agency over the menu as the teen behind the counter at mcdonalds. Those exact same women WERE cooking real food a decade ago. That's how long they had been doing that job.
bgnn 1y ago
Unfortunately it's far from the norm in Europe. In the Netherlands there's no school lunch available. Families need to provide it to their children. The norm is just bread and cheese sandwich and milk, doesn't matter how rich you are. That's what most adults eat for lunch too.
- cpursley 1y ago
  fwiw, bread and cheese in the Netherlands kicks the crap out of what is often called "cheese" in the US. However, the situation has at least improved over the past decade if your budget allows it.

Baeocystin 1y ago

I used to get the poor kid's meal when I was very young. They made us stand as a group aside in a line and let all the other kids get their full-sized meals first, then would give us our half-sized shitty sandwich after everyone else walked passed and stared at us. Fuck every single adult involved in that kind of cruelty. That being said- the bit of light in this story is the lunch ladies who went out of their ways to sneak us extra when it was available, even though I know they got in trouble for it. I managed to give one a hug once, and the strength she hugged me back, I knew she meant it. I have nothing but love and gratitude for those women.

gausswho 1y ago
Whoa that is very different than my experience decades ago. Whether your lunch was free, discounted, or full price, that happened at the cashier. Everyone waited in the same line. Your experience is way too early to introduce kids to how bad capitalism. Let them dream!
- ryandrake 1y ago
  Implementation of free and reduced-cost lunches varies considerably across the US states. In many places, it's discreet and private, but also in many places, the process is deliberately designed to 1. call attention to and shame people, and 2. make it difficult to use and easy to be denied. And yes, you can probably easily guess which kinds of places focus on the cruelty, and which kinds of places focus on the helping.
zamadatix 1y ago
It reminds me of a similar discussion here around overdue lunch fees, graduation, and how ridiculously small the amount ends up being for an entire school at the end of the year (I think the article was about the person just walking in and paying it all).

ilamont 1y ago

Growing up near Boston, my public elementary school built in the 1920s didn't have a proper kitchen or even a cafeteria because kids at one time always brought meals from home and ate at their desks. Indeed, we did too, bringing metal lunchboxes or brown bags, until the mid-1970s. At that point, something changed and we all ate together in a repurposed room in the basement, eating the same unhealthy and unappetizing meals that were heated from frozen tinfoil platters in a towering steamer that a few harried lunch ladies managed. One particularly gross option was the "pizza burger," literally a rectangular cheese pizza with a tired looking hamburger patty on top. There were no fresh vegetables. Everything hot came out of a can or freezer. We did get apples, but they were mealy Red Delicious or Macs that most kids threw away. Around the same time, we began to get free milk in the mornings. I know this because we would hang out at the loading dock in the morning and beg the delivery driver for small boxes of chocolate milk. There might have been some sort of breakfast item too, like a pastry or small box of cereal. If I were to hazard a guess at what was happening, someone correctly determined that many kids weren't eating healthy food or had unequal access to food. Subsidies were granted for providing free healthy meals, and children were forbidden from bringing meals from home. The problem was the school and the staff didn't know how to provide such meals, and the city had a mix of schools ranging between 10 and 70 years old, mostly with limited kitchen and cafeteria facilities. I believe they took the easiest way out - put it out for bid, and chose the cheapest and easiest option to implement: little red cartons of milk in the morning, frozen and canned food for lunch or maybe a sandwich, and a checkmark on a government compliance form. My kids attended the same school system starting in the 2000s. They had gotten rid of elementary school lunches for everyone. My spouse who comes from another country insisted on better quality lunches, which we would heat up and place in a thermos or bento box-type thing. Families who needed help with lunch were still provided with them I believe through SNAP or a similar program.

brians 1y ago
And now every kid in Massachusetts gets free lunch—funded through the millionaire’s tax. Unfortunately, the food is in general pretty gross. It has to conform to Federal guidelines, which means low fat, low sodium, high sugar to hit calorie targets.
1y ago

mauvehaus 1y ago

Just want to note that The Bitter Southerner ran two seasons of an absolutely outstanding podcast that sadly went defunct in 2020. Truly it's one of the best podcasts I've listened to, and I'm bummed that they quit making it.

watersb 1y ago

I didn't consciously notice the source URL, yet I thought "This would be a great article for The Bitter Southerner". I strongly suspect I actually read the source location. Whatever. The point is that "The Bitter Southerner" is a fantastic magazine. They sell subscriptions. This is where I grew up but it's a different planet for my kids. "Let Everybody Sing" https://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing https://bittersoutherner.com/sacred-harp-let-everybody-sing Just looking through past Hacker News submissions is worth your time.

onecommentman 1y ago

Embarrassed by the HN comments here. Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get. Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. Such commenters should be forced to prepare and serve lunches for hundreds of hungry children while also being forced to listen to screaming political rants through taped-on headphones. The lower middle class, my native land, gets too little applause for their contributions.

giraffe_lady 1y ago
My whole family was working poor at best and I was (at best) most of my life too. I've always liked this Barbara Ehrenreich quote about the dynamic. “When someone works for less pay than she can live on — when, for example, she goes hungry so that you can eat more cheaply and conveniently — then she has made a great sacrifice for you, she has made you a gift of some part of her abilities, her health, and her life. The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. They neglect their own children so that the children of others will be cared for; they live in substandard housing so that other homes will be shiny and perfect; they endure privation so that inflation will be low and stock prices high. To be a member of the working poor is to be an anonymous donor, a nameless benefactor, to everyone else.”
- UncleSlacky 1y ago
  > The 'working poor,' as they are approvingly termed, are in fact the major philanthropists of our society. Hence the title of this book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthropists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ragged-Trousered_Philanthr...
JuniperMesos 1y ago
> Co-opting the warranted praise for these heroes to attempt to score political points for any side is pathetic. The sentence "Lunch ladies, along with other low-status government workers, are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get" is itself an attempt to score poltical points for a poltical faction. As is calling them "heroes". Specifically, this is a leftist poltical argument associated with the Democratic party in the united states, suggesting that it is good for the government to be in charge of running civic institutions that are legally obligated to serve all citizens in exactly the same way, in order to dissuade people from spending their money on services they prefer which might be better than those poorer people can afford; and also that the government employees who do the frontline labor at these institutions are laudable and morally superior people. There are ideological associations here with official Soviet propaganda lauding the worker in the abstract. Someone who didn't like their public school experience or the way the lunch lady there did their job might resonably grow up to take political stances that reject the idea that low-status government workers are as close to an Absolute Good as you can get.

jandrewrogers 1y ago

It varies so widely across the US. I went to school in several States, and it ran the gamut from unhealthy corporate slop (e.g. multiple schools in California) to delicious food prepared daily from fresh ingredients by local grannies (Nebraska). The latter was amazing and wasn't even generic American food, it reflected the predominant ethnicity of the people that lived in that locale (because grannies doing home-cooking). This was decades ago and the area has hollowed out, so I don't know if it is still a thing there.

bellboy_tech 1y ago

School Bus drivers should be one of the highest paying jobs. Start there. Everything is so upside down. The children's caregivers, teachers, etc. should be the best people society can produce. From there greatness will be incubated.

thaumasiotes 1y ago
Well, if we had much better school bus drivers than we have now, what benefits would we realize from the change?
- komali2 1y ago
  We'd have more since it was a higher paying job. Man districts lack enough drivers resulting in longer routes, which takes time away from the kids to have a life outside school. Also we'd have happier kids and drivers which is great. The driver is part of the social worker aspect of a school, breaking up post school fights or noticing if a kid gets out to walk into a dangerously degraded housing situation. Would be nice to have very well paid, well trained people doing that job.
Auracle 1y ago
Why? My mom drove school bus. It allowed her to work a part time job and stay at home with us kids when we were young. The drivers seemed split between people like her and older people that probably already had the right license, and it was a nice part time job for them too. I don’t disagree we should have better teachers by paying them more to widen the potential pool but that would need to go hand in hand with actually being able to fire poor performers.
- zamadatix 1y ago
  It varies by region, but a lot of areas have a difficult shortage which results in really long routes or troubles when a bus breaks down/several drivers are out. Different states/areas also have different laws on when that means bus service just isn't available. There is, of course, a floor for the requirements of a driver, which drives these to get worse when salary (and therefore job interest) is lower. Half a lifetime ago now, my bus route in high school took 1.5-2 hours to get me ~4 miles from the school after some route consolidations (I got stuck on the end of the combined route where they were about to return to the bus depot - depending on the year that meant either getting up really early or getting home really late). If the weather was good I could just bike it, but that certainly wasn't always the case in Michigan.

AstroNutt 1y ago

Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years. She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too. She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Michell Obama implemented, "Let's Move". They wasted lots and lots of food because the kids wouldn't eat it. She specifically mentioned the whole wheat Mac and cheese with no salt. I've tasted the food the kids eat there and it's really good, compared to the nasty stuff I had to eat at my schools. It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in young developing brains and bodies. These are the kids that will be taking care of us all one day.

Auracle 1y ago
I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
- speed_spread 1y ago
  Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
  - poink 1y ago
    It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
    - sevg 1y ago
      > the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.) That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.

suchoudh 1y ago

Almost all schools in Indore, MadhyaPradesh, India have breakfast and lunch provided by school. The food is really well cooked and nutritious. Most other cities in India the bf and tiffin needs to be given by parents which makes mornings very busy.

jsmo 1y ago

What about the dinner ladies of the UK?

constantcrying 1y ago

The modern bourgeois obsession with valorizing the easiest unskilled jobs, done by people with zero abilities and ambition, is so bizarre. No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well rewarded. I don't fault people for doing jobs like this, it obviously pays and you can go home and do something else after it. But praising them for it seems utterly ridiculous.

UncleMeat 1y ago
I work at Google. One of the top things people ask me about working there is the lunches. There is a glowing video on youtube about the cafeteria staff and the process of serving healthy, tasty, and varied food to thousand and thousands of people every day. These jobs are recognized as skilled and valuable. Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision. For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.
- constantcrying 1y ago
  I do not work at Google. The cantina workers at my company are lazy, provide poor food and try to gouge me on price, by debating how many scoops of some particular food I have put on my plate and whether the scoop was a "normal" scoop or too much. If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.
seec 1y ago
It's the leftist typical obsession of appearing virtuous and "empathic" by constantly praising those who are lower than them and end up in the lower strata of society. Of course even those people are not really duped and they generally hate them while still keeping appearance. It always seems very clownish to me. I have worked in restaurant kitchens (more on the higher end) and know very well that it can be hard work. But this is not at all the kind of work the "lunch ladies" are doing. In fact they have easy, predictable schedule, with a captive "clientele", low standard and very little skill or innovation involved. The people who end up there are just too bad to do anything else and in my experience they tend to be quite despicable actually. In elementary school I had two extremely unpleasant lunch ladies who were vile and unsanitary. The "cooking" was just opening some canned or frozen food and reheating it. As anecdata, when they were serving ready-made "crepes", they would throw it in your plate from the cart that was rolling in the middle ailes, because that was less effort. If you were at the end of the table which was quite long (3-4 meters) you had better watch out for the reception if you wanted to actually be able to eat the damned thing. Out of the 4 schools I frequented after, there was only one that had decent food and it was at dinner because it was a boarding school with a low headcount and the cook (a young friendly man) had more time to actually make some palatable things. My experience is that most of the women working in those kitchen were very low effort people and often display some kind of low key evil in how they behave towards students. The food is bad because even if you were to give them the raw ingredients and tooling they would just make a mess of it. They are definitely not praise worthy.

chris_wot 1y ago

So Trump literally took food away from children. Those funds are already allocated, and were being spent on locally produced food. But, tariffs, ya know!

mensetmanusman 1y ago

This is a fun walkthrough of the lunches in school every 10 years since 1900. The 70s-00s were wild! https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw

mythrwy 1y ago

When I was in elementary school in the early 1970s I went to a very rural school in a remote community in the Western USA that had 2 rooms, 3 grades for each room. The whole school might have had 40 or 50 kids tops. The building was built in the 1800s and even had the bell at the top. Anyway it was the best lunch program ever. Everything was made from scratch and there was an old lady soup Nazi that ran the kitchen. One of the things that made it really special is the older kids did all the work under the supervision of old battle axe soup nazi. You would have assigned days to work the cafeteria and wash dishes etc. And let me tell you, that lady made sure things were done to food safety standards and this was before corporeal punishment and grabbing a kid by the ear was prohibited. Working the cafeteria was actually one of the most educational things I got from that school. I learned how to really wash dishes properly and fast and that lesson has served me well over the years.

paradox460 1y ago

When I was a kid in Los Alamos (relevant later), my school didn't have a de facto school lunch program. So we brought our own lunches. Eventually I learned of a local lady that would come in and make hot lunches, and told my parents about her. She was a local librarian, and charged something like $2 a day. Switched to her for lunch, and got a nice steady diet of things like baked potatoes, chili, lasagna, all homemade, all delicious. A year after I discovered her, some bright soul in the school board decided to piggyback on the LANL concessions contact, and we started getting Aramark provided lunch. She was told by school she couldn't provide the homemade lunches. The quality of food dropped immediately, with the nadir being Lunchable cheese and crackers on Wednesday (the short day). So back to bag lunch, sandwiches and thermoses full of soup