For perspective: I come from a country where “cafeteria” food at school is good and affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food), but it’s not an obligation for everyone since it’s up to the student if they want to buy something or bring their own lunch.
The “cafeteria” in my school isn’t a typical American one, rather it’s closer to a canteen where they sell food you can purchase from cup noodles, fried stuff, sandwiches, baked goods, etc. also appliances like a kettle or microwave are available in the dining hall for students to heat up left overs if they wanted.
The thing I tend to notice from American schools (according to US movies, there’s bias whether it’s true or false) is that they tend to depict kids always heading for the cafeteria for recess or lunch picking up whats available instead of bringing their own food from home (left overs from dinner), why is that the case?
Unfortunately, not all kids that go to school can afford to pay for food. In some cases the meal they get at school is the only one they get.
Source: Worked with public schools
There’s also the meal prep time, which many families, particularly poor ones, can’t afford either.
My mom prepped my lunch for the week on Sunday. One pot of white rice, one can of SPAM, sliced and pan fried, and packets of ketchup lifted from restaurants. Lunch was rice, one slice of SPAM and a packet of rice. Prep was quick.
Still, free school lunch like those shown in movies looked luxurious.
Yeah, making lunch can be quick. But I also think its easy to overlook how scarce of a resource time can be when you’re struggling to make ends meet. I say this as someone who has been fortunate for most of life; it didn’t really occur to me until it was pointed out.
From experience, it was usually gross and either over or undercooked.
But it was enough to fill an empty stomach :/
Except my senior year of highschool in which they only were allowed to offer a single slice of bread with peanut butter on it and a tiny Dixie cup of water. If you had allergies, fuck you, starve.
I have warm memories of shitty school and cafe pizza from my childhood, when it hasn’t yet become a fashionable food around here and we weren’t collectively spoiled by choice of proper pizza. A thick but small slab of yeasty-as-fuck dough over- and undercooked at the same time; oddly sweet red liquid called ketchup which we’re told includes tomatoes and burnt where it dripped onto the tray; obscenely cheap and suspicious sausage and a generous helping of pickles, topped with a pitiful smattering of crappy local cheese that didn’t bother melting. I have such a vivid taste of it in my memories from the days when “time felt like a thick jelly” that I’ve looked up YouTube videos with recipes and am planning to make it sometime. It’s imperative to bungle it in all the right ways.
This is a special case but we learned my partner has AFRID on top of food restrictions. So it can be especially harder for children with special needs to be able to eat
I realize you only made a typo, but for anyone looking for more information the abbreviation is ARFID
Can confirm, while my parents never let my sister and I go without something for dinner, sometimes they didn’t eat and often it was sandwiches.
School lunch was both the biggest meal I usually got and the only one my family didn’t have to pay for. (my school had subsidized and free lunches depending on financial situation)
And thanks to republicunts in my area, most local schools are prohibited by local laws from offering free lunches now. As a result, the school I went to now has 1 cent lunches since it HAS to be paid for, and they leave a jar of pennies by the register so you can take one and hand it to them. And the MAGAts pat themselves on the back for taking food from literal children.
Which is why the school lunch should be funded by tax money, like in some sane countries.
And no, just because its funded by tax money, it doesnt have to be some cheap slop, you can make laws and regulations that govern what sort of quality the food has to be. Just like in some sane countries.
Some US states already do this. It’s mainly unpopular in red states, though, because their ‘protect the children’ rhetoric ends when it stops being synonymous with harming women.
Not to overly repeat myself, but as discussed in the book “dying of whiteness”, there’s a lot of people that would rather their kid go hungry than a black kid get a meal.
Or if like my family they DID make enough money but they used it in addition to starving me at home when being punished for who the hell knows what. So I got a job and paid for that lunch. It was the only meal I would eat many days. Summers were not good.