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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [Original, emphasis added]: 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
> [Response, emphasis added]: 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
Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?
Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.
> 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
> 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
How does the existence of a food program in the 1890s, or 1946, automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation of the food programs into 2025 is due to the efforts of the black panthers? Similarly, one could attribute gun control laws in California to the black panthers focus on arming black neighborhoods, rather than some kind of liberal anti-gun attitude.
> automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation
Goes the other way around too? Regardless government continuing doing what they were already doing for the past half century seems reasonable. Without any additional evidence that seems like an inherently much more valid argument that attributing it to the Black Panthers. So equating them seems disingenuous...
If the political process gives unnecessarily, then it has also taken something from someone unnecessarily. So while it is a very accurate description of politics it doesn't really surface why that is at the root. The whole question being debated is what is necessary. That is what people are arguing over - are the wealth transfers actually required.
Eg, "oh no, the billionaires might get enormous handouts that they don't need!" is a rallying cry that should get people moving. If the option is there they will take it. If the idea that there doesn't need to be an accounting of why takes hold that is exactly where the US Congress will take it. And, in fairness, that mindset did take hold and the handouts to the wealthy is what then happened.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Same in Germany, and not just for elementary schools but also secondary schools. At least that's how it was decades ago when I was a student, maybe it's different now.
My relatives live in Germany and in all schools their kids were in school gave out lunches. They were not packing own luch and did not considered sandwitch as a proper lunch.
Cheese sandwich and a glass of milk sounds genuinely better than extremely overcooked, watery pasta with watery slices of pork.
If you solely looked at my schools' menus on paper (or arguably even in pictures), sure, it would've seemed good.
Side note: I lived in the Netherlands (but went to school in Belgium, so I have zero experience with school meals) as a young kid. I do remember chocolate sprinkles on toast being a thing, though!
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.
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.
If you wouldn’t mind sharing, what school district was this?
I’m curious to research and learn more! What accounts for the budget overrun? Are there stats on how many free meals were taken per student (especially if this was broken down on a per-day basis, this could back up the “pizza” explanation)?
I mean this is the nanny state at its best. Getting in the way of progress because you refuse to meet people, in this case kids, where they actually are. The challenge should be minimizing the amount of waste—cook literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then try to nudge toward healthier options while keeping your waste % low. Let them take any subset of the lunch as they please, prune dishes kids either don't take or leave behind until you have a menu.
Mind boggling how getting the kids actually fed is lower on the priority list than making sure they eat the "right" things.
Not exactly easy. The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety. I can't imagine developing it for far more numerous school children is going to be any easier.
If you want a successful lunch program (and rations if you have a to-go bag) look no further than the US Navy's sub program.
Given the environment and danger (and having a bunch of humans in close proximity, deep under the ocean, with nowhere to go, hangry, is not going to inspire unit cohesion) they get really, really good food. Which is probably not a bad thing to give people tooling around with enough firepower to take out a few dozen cities.
Whenever I watch a video about American military nutrition, the only takeaway I have is "are these people incompetent?"
Sailors in the USA navy get fat after their first deployment, common knowledge. Why? Because half the time their food is frozen chicken nuggets, frozen tater tots, etc, chucked into the oven, served bulk at mess.
2025's most well funded army, that's the best they came up with? Why not just freeze non deep fried chicken breast? Why not use lentils for carbs? Why not fast-freeze dry vegetables?
In any case I don't see the relevance for schools. Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
>Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
Who's going to pay for all of that? Not the American taxpayer, who would consider it theft and waste, and not the poor kids who actually need school lunches, and probably not their parents.
You'll wind up with a Macdonald's kiosk in every school cafeteria, and vending machines full of Monster energy drinks.
I found a twitter thread years ago that talked about how the author had gone to school with a lot of (US) mafia children, and the school had unsurprisingly provided lunch via a local vendor with mob connections. Presumably some of the money wound up going to the mob.
But, the thread pointed out, since high-level mafia officials sent their children to that school, they had no interest in skimping on the lunches. And the lunches were excellent. After a big FBI bust, the mob-affiliated vendor was replaced with a major interstate school lunch vendor, and the quality of the food was rock-bottom.
I've tried to find the thread again, but I can't. If anyone else wants to dedicate an unreasonable amount of time to it, I'm pretty sure I originally found it through a links post on Marginal Revolution.
> The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety.
Why? That's not even a real concept. If you want everyone to like everything they have, you can't do that without letting them trade away the stuff they hate.
>The CMNR reviewed many of these studies when they were initially completed and noticed that underconsumption of the ration appeared to be a consistent problem. Typically, soldiers did not consume sufficient calories to meet energy expenditure and consequently lost body weight. The energy deficit has been in the range of 700 to 1,000 kcal/d and thus raises concern about the influence of such a deficit on physical and cognitive performance, particularly over a period of extended use. Anecdotal reports from Operation Desert Storm, for example, indicated that some units may have used MREs as their sole source of food for 50 to 60 days—far longer than the original intent when the MRE was initially field tested.
>
>There have been successive modifications of the MRE since 1981. These modifications in type of food items, diversity of meals, packaging, and food quality have produced small improvements in total consumption but have not significantly reduced the energy deficit that occurs when MREs are consumed. This problem continues in spite of positive hedonic ratings of the MRE ration items in laboratory and field tests. The suboptimal intake of operational rations thus remains a major issue that needs to be evaluated.
Or to summarize it; soldiers weren't eating the full MRE's in Desert Storm, and it a widespread problem. Soldiers that weren't meeting their caloric intake requirements were suffering cognitive issues while in combat operations. Bit of an issue when you've got two groups of people trying to kill each other and not their own side.
So they figured the best option to get the soldiers to eat their rations was to keep improving and updating until soldiers were more inclined to eat the whole damn thing. I don't know if they've succeeded per say but they have been updating the menus pretty consistently since the 90's. I think only the beef stew and a few other meal items have stayed consistent over the last 30 years of MRE's.
Agreed, though the term makes for a funny metaphor in this case— a good nanny would likely take the same approach you describe here: meeting the kids where they're at and trying to encourage them to eat better along the way instead of making food just for it to be thrown away.
> literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then
Feeding kids sugar and hen nudging them to eat slightly less sugar while still providing inherently unhealthy meals seems suboptimal. Them cleaning their plates is not an inherently a good thing. Rather the opposite.
> making sure they eat the "right" things.
Certainly better than feeding them the wrong things? though.
It's not like starvation or malnourishment is the main issue when a significant proportion of children are overweight. Them eating crap is...
It's always a treat when the exact problem I'm describing shows up in the replies. Yes feed them sugar. Children have a significantly heightened sweet tooth until adolescence where it slowly declines and they develop more complex tastes and a tolerance for "adult" flavors. When I bake for kids I have to make it cloyingly sweet to an adult palate and it gets snarfed down. And it's also why Funfetti cake doesn't hit like it did as a kid because your tastes have changed. Trying to impose adult standards on kids is native at best and futile in aggregate—you can only serve it, you can't make them eat it and they won't.
You understand how moronic it sounds to prepare and serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right? Plus free lunch programs are to deal with malnourishment and to make sure kids get at least one full meal a day.
My elementary school, which was a private school and so wasn't beholden to any government meddling, followed this formula and it worked out great. Every meal was carbs, protein, and sugar, and everything was sweet. It wasn't an apple, it was fruit cocktail in syrup, the pizza had sweetened bread and sauce, vegetables were sweat peas, carrots, and corn. Every student was put on a rotation to clean trays so I got to see first hand what the waste situation was. And it wasn't zero but you didn't see a tray full of food minus pizza coming back.
> serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right?
Not hope as such. Ideally they eat it eventually. If they are not allowed to eat unhealthy foods they won't have much of an option. Even the most obstinate ones will change their mind after spending a couple of days being hungry.
This really does keep getting worse, first you were just wasting money for your ideals now you're suggesting we purposely let kids go hungry until they behave in the way
you want. We're beyond they just don't happen to like what's being served but you're trying territory and into they're going to eat it and like it or they don't get lunch. Please don't ever
run for your local school board.
And no we didn't all turn out overweight, it's been a minute but I think in my grade there were three "fat kids," two girls and one boy. I really don't understand why you take being overweight as the natural consequence of this. Kids crave sweets because it's calories and they're growing. In my early teens the size of my meals were on the order of two Chipotle burritos or the
entire taco twelve pack and I was a perfectly normal weight. I mean I was a girl in high school so I didn't exactly think that back then but I was fine. It wasn't until I was
post college and had depression that I put any kind of significant weight.
I find this attitude super weird. Adults are responsible for what kids eat and problem of kids taking multiple lunches can be solved by allowing them to go only once.
What is weird is that American kids seems to be taught to refuse "healthy" food. Somehow the problem of kids refusing fruits and real food is something that happens only once in a while with few kids elsewhere, but is apparently epidemic in america.
Yes we are responsible for what kids eat, it's why it's all
the more maddening we have adults who come up with a menu of how they wished kids ate, made it policy, and take literally no responsibility for the (I think very predictable) outcome.
As an American if I paid the same taxes but the half that's spent on building -b2 bombers- fine, substitute for "devices used to kill people I'll never meet in countries I'll never see," instead went to giving kids so much food they threw half of it away, I would be ecstatic with this change in the distribution of my taxes.
Today, libraries are more amazing and more necessary than ever.
With online services constantly changing what is or isn't available, having a library with physical media, books, and even their own services for borrowing audio books and other online media, can be a real asset when trying to watch a specific movie or TV show or listen to a particular song the streamers decided to stop offering, or moved to a different service you're not subscribed to, etc.
For getting media made inaccessible, you could just do what all those many countries around the world without good public libraries do: pirate it. Talk to anyone serious about cinema as an art form in Eastern Europe or the developing world, and Bittorrent was their school, not a library or a paid streaming platform.
In any event, I agree that public libraries are good, but it is easy to see that momentum in the USA for sustaining them has slowed: on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
Don't get where you are coming from. I'm american and everywhere I've ever gone into a library its been great. Everyone I know with kids (including myself) visits the library all the time, often daily, at least weekly.
The university I went to did start restricting hours (requiring student IDs for more of them than it used to) during my time there, apparently to try to divert some homeless people away at night.
But I've never actually been to a library that didn't feel safe, clean, and comfortable when I was there, including that one. I certainly never saw any signs of drug use, or anyone browsing pornography.
I also want to add that being homeless isn't the same thing as being disorderly, frightening, unfriendly, or smelly.
Over the years, I've had friends who were homeless (depending on the person, before or during the times that I've known them). Sometimes they have a lot of difficulty getting bank accounts, jobs, or apartments in part because of documentation issues or bureaucratic tasks that they need internet access to solve. Libraries are a lifeline that helps homeless people rebuild stable lives.
Libraries should be sanctuaries and feel safe for everyone, including the most precarious people in society.
You should stop believing that you can learn what America is like by reading about it online or in the media. Homeless scum making libraries unusable is extremely rare in America, if in fact it ever happens at all. I regularly visit libraries everywhere I go and only a few times did I ever see anything even like that and it was limited to one or two street people wandering around in the lobby or hidden off in some corner. Even in Seattle where the number of street junkies sprawled out on sidewalks was far too high for my standards of decency, the public library downtown was absolutely pristine. You might sometimes see a bum in the ground floor going for the toilets, but that's it. They otherwise avoid the library, it has nothing for them. Porn? They have phones I guess, I've never once seen a computer room overflowing with street coomers. I'm not saying it never happened somewhere at some time, but it's not a regular thing.
Also, I don't just visit big flagship libraries in big cities. Libraries in metro suburb areas and also libraries in small rural working class towns are places I've been to many times without seeming anything like what you've described. All across America, libraries are clean and designed to be safe and inviting places for families of all ages.
Of course what I've written is just a other online account which you shouldn't blindly believe. You shouldn't have beliefs one way or the other about American libraries unless you've actually visited American libraries yourself. If you aren't even American, then the status of American libraries shouldn't be something you pretend to be informed about. It shouldn't even be something you pretend to have an opinion about. It's like my opinion on Luxemburg supermarkets; I have none! I've never been in one and they're far from my life so I can't just walk into one. I have no opinion on them, have no reason to pretend to have an opinion, have no reason to believe I can form meaningful opinions about them by reading about them online. Somehow people can't manage this when it comes to America.
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
I think this says far more about your specific forum bubbles than anything else, to be honest.
At worst I see a perception that libraries are for children.
If you do a DDG search site:news.ycombinator.com "libraries" "homeless", you find some such discussions from this very site. But as I said, you can also find this across the internet when forums are dominated by Americans and it’s certainly not limited to obscure and dodgy venues.
I suppose it is the big-city Americans who are complaining about the social problems. But it’s also common to see from small-town Americans that opening hours at their local library have been slashed, which also speaks to declining support for them.
I’m reading a book from my county library right now.
They also have a library of things, which means I can borrow e.g. a sewing machine or laminator, as well as an area where we can use a laser cutter, 3D printer and soon, a micro mill, all for free. (You bring your own materials.)
Whenever I’m in there it’s packed with adults and students. They also have a terrific lecture series, the most recent of which was by a local homebuilder describing new bioconcretes she’s been using.
It seems odd to me that anyone would need an argument in favor of free school lunch. School is mandatory between certain ages and it's free. Let's just make meals free as well.
And I'm not sure how school buses are out of step with "the modern world." What are you proposing? Uber or something?
For the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we sure seem to spend a lot of time discussing why we shouldn't spend money on social causes.
In California where I live there's no school buses. You're on your own to get to school, fortunately there are so many neighborhood schools that almost everyone can walk.
I love that my tax dollars are being used to feed kids at school.
As someone who lives near a school I can say school buses are very much a necessity and they are getting modernized. I see an electric one consistently going through the neighborhood. And I much prefer them to hundreds more cars or pedestrians going through the neighborhood (people drive like maniacs through the residential streets here).
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!
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!"
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.
I'd have eaten way more salad as a kid if my mum didn't treat salt as if it were the devil itself. There is nothing enticing about raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate.
A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
> raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate
Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.
We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
What made you go without salt? Have you seen any major health benefits?
We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.
Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
Low-salt was a fad for a while in defining what “healthy food” is, much like low fat, low saturated fat, and high-carb were for quite a while, and “plant based” still largely is.
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.
Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt
Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland.
They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
> They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary.
Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia.
Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.
> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.
Define "much".
> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.
> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.
For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum.
Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].
2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture.
The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position?
If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.
Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march.
The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock?
But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.
In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals.
Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.
I did some more research. The Romans actually had dedicated hunting units attached to their armies, called venatores. They hunted wild game for food and also captured animals to return to the city for entertainment (venationes) and public executions (damnatio ad bestias).
So not only did they hunt, they made it a formal part of their military, not merely an opportunistic food source.
I have to say, I don't appreciate that you would take such an obstinate stance without doing any research of your own. It's intellectually lazy.
This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters.
Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant):
Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other.
It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt...
It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt.
So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service.
But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do.
> his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.
All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this. Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived. That salt was held in high esteem by the ancients, is evident from the Salarian Way, so named from the fact that, by agreement, the Sabini carried all their salt by that road. King Ancus Martius gave six hundred modii of salt as a largess to the people, and was the first to establish salt-works.
The rewards of successful warfare, including salt, bestowed on soldiers. That is payment! King Ancus Martius also used salt as payment.
An enormous amount of traditional food from around the world has a lot of salt in it. Salt is not a modern invention.
For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
High salt intake is only an issue on a high-carb diet or with inadequate hydration. Otherwise, consuming adequate salt/electrolytes can actually be a bit of a chore. Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water.
I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes.
Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
The idea came from linking salt to heart failure, but last I checked the link was a confounding variable - e.g. bad diet leads to problems that themselves lead to high cholesterol. It was not the salt in the food but the quality of the nutrition itself.
However blaming salt was quick and easy so that’s what the people with money did.
Historically speaking salt has been such a scarce and valuable resource. I have read accounts how in the balkans people would resort to selling kids to slavery just so the family could have enough salt to survive (sacrificing one kid to save the rest).
When I started reading about how salt was bad for you it never made any sense.
Yikes. It's so disappointing to see public health agencies pushing medical misinformation but that's nothing new for the NHS, I guess. In reality if you look at this from an evidence-based medicine perspective what really matters is not the quantity but rather the osmolality. And the optimal level depends on multiple factors including genetics and activity level.
Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World observes that even in relentlessly noncommercialized societies, robust markets existed in two commodities: iron and salt. They were traded on the market within villages that otherwise had little use for markets, and they would make their way by international trade routes to even the most isolated cultures.
For iron, that trade would have mostly been in tools. For salt the only reason is that salt is a vital nutrient and if you can't get enough of it, you die. (Though I think it's worth observing that iron is a vital nutrient too.)
> Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
The history actually runs in the other direction - step one was that someone decided that salt was bad, and step two was that a bunch of dietary standards were created to express the revealed truth that salt was bad. The demonization is the beginning of the process and was done for its own sake.
Natural olives contain a chemical called oleuropein[0] which has a strong nasty bitter taste that renders them inedible. Soaking olives in a strong brine removes the oleuropein from the olive, turning them into the edible olive people love.
Most people don't know this. It is a common prank to convince people that don't know better to eat the fruit off the tree. As the other poster said, don't do that.
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
> It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here.
My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
> My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
Your implication is that high salt in meals causes these health problems. It does not. You might as well say high vitamin, high nurrient meal.
Don't conflate the effects of eating ultraprocessed foods with the effects of eating salt just because one often contains the other. What you're doing is complaining about the health effects of water, having observed that soda is mostly water.
Nice strawman. I didn’t mention ultra-processed foods :)
If anyone else is reading this and wants to do their own reading about the effects of salt, I can point you to the WHO, the NHS, the FDA, one of many highly cited studies, and wikipedia:
The best chefs in the world generally don’t make healthy food, they make food that tastes good. High end restaurants usually use a lot of salt and butter.
Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.
It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find it.
Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
It’s hard. Salt is kind of magical. My night time snack is some vegetable, air fried with some salt, olive oil and some lemon. It’s not too much salt but I would have a hard time eating it without the salt.
> It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in ...
True. OTOH,
- You could expand that "Nutrition plays such a huge role..." logic into saying that schools should also provide broad medical coverage for the students, and clothing, and de facto parenting, and ... In practice - meals are a limited remit, it's relatively obvious if it's being done poorly, kids eating together is socialization (obviously part of a school's job), and "hungry children" pushes enough emotional buttons that subsidized school lunches are relatively well accepted.
Though I've seen quite a few stories about modern-day public school teachers being quietly expected to serve (suffer) as "whatever it takes" unpaid social workers / therapists / family counselors for their students - basically because "somebody needs to", and teachers are convenient victims for social pressures and non-classroom problems.
- There is far too little connection between "money goes to schools" and "schools are competently managed". Modern education attracts way too many well-intended ignorant ideologues (Mrs. Obama was merely one of an endless host), "consultants", "experts", grifters, and worse.
Vs. interest in competent oversight of schools seems nearly non-existent. When was the last time you saw detailed local press coverage of how well a school board was managing the students-and-teachers basics of education?
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
Elementary schools without any kitchen or cafeteria, kids bringing meals (bagged sandwiches) from home and eating at their desks, is still the standard in probably 95%+ of the elementary schools in the Netherlands in 2025.
It's not clear to me if there is any problem to be solved here.
The problem to be solved in the US is that a disturbing percentage of school-aged children's parents are too poor, too busy or too incompetent to pack a lunch for their kids.
In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.
Regardless of what you think of the parents, it's certainly not the kids fault their parents failed to provide them food, for whatever reason. I don't care if the reason their parents couldn't afford the time or money to pack a lunch is because they spend it all on collecting nazi memorabilia and kicking orphaned puppies. I still want their children to be appropriately fed.
You are right it's not the kid's fault, and that they should be properly fed by the state since their parents are bad parents, but that doesn't mean you can't blame and call out the parents.
I refuse to indulge in the false fantasy that a household where each parent(s) works multiple minimum wage jobs is “lazy” for not preparing homemade lunches for their children. Also, in the US, many lower-income households are in “food deserts”, where there is a lack of grocery stores selling fresh food and a preponderance of convenience stores selling processed foods. In a country where the top 1% of households possess a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 50% of households only possess 2.5%, poverty, malnourishment, and undereducation are choices made for the poor by the rich ruling class.
USA is the richest country in the world, people there, even the ones at the bottom of the work ladder, have access to riches that for most of the people on the planet are only dreams. You have no idea what it is to be poor or to live next to actual poverty (even I have no idea, and I live in a country that's poorer, and that when I was younger much poorer than the USA).
94% of adult Americans drive a car. Anyone there can go to a store that sells vegetables and raw meat, buy it, and prepare a proper meal that's cheaper than some deep-fried, frozen processed crap.
Enough with the performative virtue signaling. It's all so tiresome. Nobody in the USA goes hungry unless they really choose too at every single step in their lives.
Please explain to me how advocating for material policies for the poor, funded by taxes that come out of my pocket, is "performative virtue signaling." Does this phrase just mean "any kindness whatsoever" at this point?
The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort.
Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.
Good news. I also donate an enormous amount of money to the poor personally, with a goal of donating 100% of my net income in the not too distant future. Is that virtue signaling too?
The school I attended as a child not too far from Boston was rather unusual in that they chose to get the government-issue ingredients (government cheese, powdered eggs, etc) and pay cooks to cook scratch meals with it rather than using their funding to pay a food service company for heat-and-serve things like the hockey puck pizzas. Place was a redneck hellhole aside from that but the lunches were actually pretty nice. There were some garbage of course... like when the brownies went stale, they'd just douse them in cheap chocolate syrup. Fresh baked hot rolls every day, though. Glad I didn't go to high school there.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction.
The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.
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.
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.
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.”
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Hah, this is great to read even now. It’s nice that these little bits of the internet are still up 11 years later for me to enjoy.
The blog in question, right when posting seemed to pick up: https://neverseconds.blogspot.com/2012/05/
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.
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.teleg...
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.
Wikipedia: "number of hairs"
You: "number of hairs and insects"
Citation, please?
Cmon dude
"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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> [Original, emphasis added]: 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
> [Response, emphasis added]: 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
Are you saying that the government started trying to one-up the Black Panther school lunches 30 years before the Black Panthers started offering them?
Is it possible that the people in charge of school lunches in the 1970s viewed the Black Panther program as some kind of competition? Sure. Was the 1970s Black Panther program "the only reason" the US started a national school lunch program in the 1940s? I don't see how that would be possible.
> 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
> 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
How does the existence of a food program in the 1890s, or 1946, automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation of the food programs into 2025 is due to the efforts of the black panthers? Similarly, one could attribute gun control laws in California to the black panthers focus on arming black neighborhoods, rather than some kind of liberal anti-gun attitude.
> automatically invalidate the notion that the promulgation
Goes the other way around too? Regardless government continuing doing what they were already doing for the past half century seems reasonable. Without any additional evidence that seems like an inherently much more valid argument that attributing it to the Black Panthers. So equating them seems disingenuous...
Where do these weird conspiracy theories come from?
even sadder, it's often not "don't need" but "don't deserve"
If the political process gives unnecessarily, then it has also taken something from someone unnecessarily. So while it is a very accurate description of politics it doesn't really surface why that is at the root. The whole question being debated is what is necessary. That is what people are arguing over - are the wealth transfers actually required.
Eg, "oh no, the billionaires might get enormous handouts that they don't need!" is a rallying cry that should get people moving. If the option is there they will take it. If the idea that there doesn't need to be an accounting of why takes hold that is exactly where the US Congress will take it. And, in fairness, that mindset did take hold and the handouts to the wealthy is what then happened.
> 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.
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?
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.
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."
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.
Same in Germany, and not just for elementary schools but also secondary schools. At least that's how it was decades ago when I was a student, maybe it's different now.
My relatives live in Germany and in all schools their kids were in school gave out lunches. They were not packing own luch and did not considered sandwitch as a proper lunch.
Is a sandwitch made with Salemi?
(Sorry.)
In the Netherlands we eat bread for lunch. Many Southern Europeans have been brought to tears when they were invited "for lunch".
The classic cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. So remember it can always get worse.
Cheese sandwich and a glass of milk sounds genuinely better than extremely overcooked, watery pasta with watery slices of pork.
If you solely looked at my schools' menus on paper (or arguably even in pictures), sure, it would've seemed good.
Side note: I lived in the Netherlands (but went to school in Belgium, so I have zero experience with school meals) as a young kid. I do remember chocolate sprinkles on toast being a thing, though!
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.
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.
If you wouldn’t mind sharing, what school district was this?
I’m curious to research and learn more! What accounts for the budget overrun? Are there stats on how many free meals were taken per student (especially if this was broken down on a per-day basis, this could back up the “pizza” explanation)?
I mean this is the nanny state at its best. Getting in the way of progress because you refuse to meet people, in this case kids, where they actually are. The challenge should be minimizing the amount of waste—cook literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then try to nudge toward healthier options while keeping your waste % low. Let them take any subset of the lunch as they please, prune dishes kids either don't take or leave behind until you have a menu.
Mind boggling how getting the kids actually fed is lower on the priority list than making sure they eat the "right" things.
Not exactly easy. The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety. I can't imagine developing it for far more numerous school children is going to be any easier.
faint sound of fading laughter from a US SSBN
If you want a successful lunch program (and rations if you have a to-go bag) look no further than the US Navy's sub program.
Given the environment and danger (and having a bunch of humans in close proximity, deep under the ocean, with nowhere to go, hangry, is not going to inspire unit cohesion) they get really, really good food. Which is probably not a bad thing to give people tooling around with enough firepower to take out a few dozen cities.
The sub nukies I know would disagree with this. The few weeks before they would get back to port they just eat whatever they can find.
Storage is a big deal on a sub.
Ah didn't know that, thanks!
Whenever I watch a video about American military nutrition, the only takeaway I have is "are these people incompetent?"
Sailors in the USA navy get fat after their first deployment, common knowledge. Why? Because half the time their food is frozen chicken nuggets, frozen tater tots, etc, chucked into the oven, served bulk at mess.
2025's most well funded army, that's the best they came up with? Why not just freeze non deep fried chicken breast? Why not use lentils for carbs? Why not fast-freeze dry vegetables?
In any case I don't see the relevance for schools. Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
>Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals.
Who's going to pay for all of that? Not the American taxpayer, who would consider it theft and waste, and not the poor kids who actually need school lunches, and probably not their parents.
You'll wind up with a Macdonald's kiosk in every school cafeteria, and vending machines full of Monster energy drinks.
The ladies discussed in this article.
I found a twitter thread years ago that talked about how the author had gone to school with a lot of (US) mafia children, and the school had unsurprisingly provided lunch via a local vendor with mob connections. Presumably some of the money wound up going to the mob.
But, the thread pointed out, since high-level mafia officials sent their children to that school, they had no interest in skimping on the lunches. And the lunches were excellent. After a big FBI bust, the mob-affiliated vendor was replaced with a major interstate school lunch vendor, and the quality of the food was rock-bottom.
I've tried to find the thread again, but I can't. If anyone else wants to dedicate an unreasonable amount of time to it, I'm pretty sure I originally found it through a links post on Marginal Revolution.
> The US military (hell just about every army on the planet) spends a lot of money and effort into developing field rations that are palatable enough for infantry sections on the move to eat in it's entirety.
Why? That's not even a real concept. If you want everyone to like everything they have, you can't do that without letting them trade away the stuff they hate.
From the horse's mouth?
>The CMNR reviewed many of these studies when they were initially completed and noticed that underconsumption of the ration appeared to be a consistent problem. Typically, soldiers did not consume sufficient calories to meet energy expenditure and consequently lost body weight. The energy deficit has been in the range of 700 to 1,000 kcal/d and thus raises concern about the influence of such a deficit on physical and cognitive performance, particularly over a period of extended use. Anecdotal reports from Operation Desert Storm, for example, indicated that some units may have used MREs as their sole source of food for 50 to 60 days—far longer than the original intent when the MRE was initially field tested. > >There have been successive modifications of the MRE since 1981. These modifications in type of food items, diversity of meals, packaging, and food quality have produced small improvements in total consumption but have not significantly reduced the energy deficit that occurs when MREs are consumed. This problem continues in spite of positive hedonic ratings of the MRE ration items in laboratory and field tests. The suboptimal intake of operational rations thus remains a major issue that needs to be evaluated.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/25121269/
Or to summarize it; soldiers weren't eating the full MRE's in Desert Storm, and it a widespread problem. Soldiers that weren't meeting their caloric intake requirements were suffering cognitive issues while in combat operations. Bit of an issue when you've got two groups of people trying to kill each other and not their own side.
So they figured the best option to get the soldiers to eat their rations was to keep improving and updating until soldiers were more inclined to eat the whole damn thing. I don't know if they've succeeded per say but they have been updating the menus pretty consistently since the 90's. I think only the beef stew and a few other meal items have stayed consistent over the last 30 years of MRE's.
> Why?
You don’t want the dude trading away everything for desserts kapooting midway mission because his bowels are in uprising.
So what? If you think that problem exists in the first place, you still have no choice but to address it by doing something that is possible to do.
> address it by doing something that is possible
Yes, a military study was conducted that found it unproductive to do the impossible…
Hey, the U.N. recently wrote a report that most U.N. Reports aren’t read. It happens.
Agreed, though the term makes for a funny metaphor in this case— a good nanny would likely take the same approach you describe here: meeting the kids where they're at and trying to encourage them to eat better along the way instead of making food just for it to be thrown away.
> literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then
Feeding kids sugar and hen nudging them to eat slightly less sugar while still providing inherently unhealthy meals seems suboptimal. Them cleaning their plates is not an inherently a good thing. Rather the opposite.
> making sure they eat the "right" things.
Certainly better than feeding them the wrong things? though.
It's not like starvation or malnourishment is the main issue when a significant proportion of children are overweight. Them eating crap is...
It's always a treat when the exact problem I'm describing shows up in the replies. Yes feed them sugar. Children have a significantly heightened sweet tooth until adolescence where it slowly declines and they develop more complex tastes and a tolerance for "adult" flavors. When I bake for kids I have to make it cloyingly sweet to an adult palate and it gets snarfed down. And it's also why Funfetti cake doesn't hit like it did as a kid because your tastes have changed. Trying to impose adult standards on kids is native at best and futile in aggregate—you can only serve it, you can't make them eat it and they won't.
You understand how moronic it sounds to prepare and serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right? Plus free lunch programs are to deal with malnourishment and to make sure kids get at least one full meal a day.
My elementary school, which was a private school and so wasn't beholden to any government meddling, followed this formula and it worked out great. Every meal was carbs, protein, and sugar, and everything was sweet. It wasn't an apple, it was fruit cocktail in syrup, the pizza had sweetened bread and sauce, vegetables were sweat peas, carrots, and corn. Every student was put on a rotation to clean trays so I got to see first hand what the waste situation was. And it wasn't zero but you didn't see a tray full of food minus pizza coming back.
> serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right?
Not hope as such. Ideally they eat it eventually. If they are not allowed to eat unhealthy foods they won't have much of an option. Even the most obstinate ones will change their mind after spending a couple of days being hungry.
> followed this formula and it worked out great
And they didn't end up being overweight?
This really does keep getting worse, first you were just wasting money for your ideals now you're suggesting we purposely let kids go hungry until they behave in the way you want. We're beyond they just don't happen to like what's being served but you're trying territory and into they're going to eat it and like it or they don't get lunch. Please don't ever run for your local school board.
And no we didn't all turn out overweight, it's been a minute but I think in my grade there were three "fat kids," two girls and one boy. I really don't understand why you take being overweight as the natural consequence of this. Kids crave sweets because it's calories and they're growing. In my early teens the size of my meals were on the order of two Chipotle burritos or the entire taco twelve pack and I was a perfectly normal weight. I mean I was a girl in high school so I didn't exactly think that back then but I was fine. It wasn't until I was post college and had depression that I put any kind of significant weight.
I find this attitude super weird. Adults are responsible for what kids eat and problem of kids taking multiple lunches can be solved by allowing them to go only once.
What is weird is that American kids seems to be taught to refuse "healthy" food. Somehow the problem of kids refusing fruits and real food is something that happens only once in a while with few kids elsewhere, but is apparently epidemic in america.
Yes we are responsible for what kids eat, it's why it's all the more maddening we have adults who come up with a menu of how they wished kids ate, made it policy, and take literally no responsibility for the (I think very predictable) outcome.
As an American if I paid the same taxes but the half that's spent on building -b2 bombers- fine, substitute for "devices used to kill people I'll never meet in countries I'll never see," instead went to giving kids so much food they threw half of it away, I would be ecstatic with this change in the distribution of my taxes.
They stopped building B2 bombers 25 years ago.
And now we build B21s
Today, libraries are more amazing and more necessary than ever.
With online services constantly changing what is or isn't available, having a library with physical media, books, and even their own services for borrowing audio books and other online media, can be a real asset when trying to watch a specific movie or TV show or listen to a particular song the streamers decided to stop offering, or moved to a different service you're not subscribed to, etc.
For getting media made inaccessible, you could just do what all those many countries around the world without good public libraries do: pirate it. Talk to anyone serious about cinema as an art form in Eastern Europe or the developing world, and Bittorrent was their school, not a library or a paid streaming platform.
In any event, I agree that public libraries are good, but it is easy to see that momentum in the USA for sustaining them has slowed: on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
Don't get where you are coming from. I'm american and everywhere I've ever gone into a library its been great. Everyone I know with kids (including myself) visits the library all the time, often daily, at least weekly.
The university I went to did start restricting hours (requiring student IDs for more of them than it used to) during my time there, apparently to try to divert some homeless people away at night.
But I've never actually been to a library that didn't feel safe, clean, and comfortable when I was there, including that one. I certainly never saw any signs of drug use, or anyone browsing pornography.
I also want to add that being homeless isn't the same thing as being disorderly, frightening, unfriendly, or smelly.
Over the years, I've had friends who were homeless (depending on the person, before or during the times that I've known them). Sometimes they have a lot of difficulty getting bank accounts, jobs, or apartments in part because of documentation issues or bureaucratic tasks that they need internet access to solve. Libraries are a lifeline that helps homeless people rebuild stable lives.
Libraries should be sanctuaries and feel safe for everyone, including the most precarious people in society.
You should stop believing that you can learn what America is like by reading about it online or in the media. Homeless scum making libraries unusable is extremely rare in America, if in fact it ever happens at all. I regularly visit libraries everywhere I go and only a few times did I ever see anything even like that and it was limited to one or two street people wandering around in the lobby or hidden off in some corner. Even in Seattle where the number of street junkies sprawled out on sidewalks was far too high for my standards of decency, the public library downtown was absolutely pristine. You might sometimes see a bum in the ground floor going for the toilets, but that's it. They otherwise avoid the library, it has nothing for them. Porn? They have phones I guess, I've never once seen a computer room overflowing with street coomers. I'm not saying it never happened somewhere at some time, but it's not a regular thing.
Also, I don't just visit big flagship libraries in big cities. Libraries in metro suburb areas and also libraries in small rural working class towns are places I've been to many times without seeming anything like what you've described. All across America, libraries are clean and designed to be safe and inviting places for families of all ages.
Of course what I've written is just a other online account which you shouldn't blindly believe. You shouldn't have beliefs one way or the other about American libraries unless you've actually visited American libraries yourself. If you aren't even American, then the status of American libraries shouldn't be something you pretend to be informed about. It shouldn't even be something you pretend to have an opinion about. It's like my opinion on Luxemburg supermarkets; I have none! I've never been in one and they're far from my life so I can't just walk into one. I have no opinion on them, have no reason to pretend to have an opinion, have no reason to believe I can form meaningful opinions about them by reading about them online. Somehow people can't manage this when it comes to America.
> on American-dominated forums people often view public libraries nowadays as a place for the smelly homeless to hang out, look at porn, and possibly shoot up.
I think this says far more about your specific forum bubbles than anything else, to be honest.
At worst I see a perception that libraries are for children.
If you do a DDG search site:news.ycombinator.com "libraries" "homeless", you find some such discussions from this very site. But as I said, you can also find this across the internet when forums are dominated by Americans and it’s certainly not limited to obscure and dodgy venues.
I suppose it is the big-city Americans who are complaining about the social problems. But it’s also common to see from small-town Americans that opening hours at their local library have been slashed, which also speaks to declining support for them.
> school busses are like libraries
I’m reading a book from my county library right now.
They also have a library of things, which means I can borrow e.g. a sewing machine or laminator, as well as an area where we can use a laser cutter, 3D printer and soon, a micro mill, all for free. (You bring your own materials.)
Whenever I’m in there it’s packed with adults and students. They also have a terrific lecture series, the most recent of which was by a local homebuilder describing new bioconcretes she’s been using.
It seems odd to me that anyone would need an argument in favor of free school lunch. School is mandatory between certain ages and it's free. Let's just make meals free as well.
And I'm not sure how school buses are out of step with "the modern world." What are you proposing? Uber or something?
For the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we sure seem to spend a lot of time discussing why we shouldn't spend money on social causes.
The argument would be that parents have an obligation to feed their children. That's the least you could expect of them.
Awesome. And as for the ones who are not able to for some reason that you apparently can't comprehend, what do you propose?
What happens in reality in those cases?
In California where I live there's no school buses. You're on your own to get to school, fortunately there are so many neighborhood schools that almost everyone can walk.
I love that my tax dollars are being used to feed kids at school.
As someone who lives near a school I can say school buses are very much a necessity and they are getting modernized. I see an electric one consistently going through the neighborhood. And I much prefer them to hundreds more cars or pedestrians going through the neighborhood (people drive like maniacs through the residential streets here).
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!
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!"
> These lunch ladies are the ones > getting ham strung
Nice.
Truly American affliction, a crippling fear that the government does something for its citizens that doesn’t have any strings attached
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.
I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
I'd have eaten way more salad as a kid if my mum didn't treat salt as if it were the devil itself. There is nothing enticing about raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate.
A pinch of salt and pepper, small amount of olive oil, oregano and lemon? Now we're talking.
> raw cucumber, lettuce and tomatoes on the side of a plate
Jeepers, I love a plain salad - no salt, no vinegar, nothing at all added is fine. Maybe a little olive oil but no problem without it. It's all about what you're used to.
We (self, wife, children) stopped adding salt to our cooking years ago - pasta, rice, potatoes are cooked without salt and they taste fine. As you might expect, when some people eat at our place I stare in impolite amazement as they empty the salt shaker onto their plate and, on the other hand, when I eat elsewhere the food is sometimes so salty as to be barely palatable for me.
What made you go without salt? Have you seen any major health benefits?
We don't have the best-tasting product here in this part of north west Europe unfortunately, so things do taste pretty bland. And if you're trying to get your kid to eat more veg, a tiny bit of dressing is worth the trade off.
Even the Italians and French love dressing salads despite much better tasting produce. I tend not to disagree with what the Italian and French do when it comes to food :-)
Low-salt was a fad for a while in defining what “healthy food” is, much like low fat, low saturated fat, and high-carb were for quite a while, and “plant based” still largely is.
low-salt was a sign of poverty in roman times...
"The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_salt
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.
Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt
Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland.
They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary. Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is life.
Are those the same chefs that say everything needs to be bathed in butter and then deepfried with copious amount of oil?
> They used to pay soldiers in salt. That’s the origin of the word salary.
Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.
That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's also important to note that prior to the invention of refrigeration, salt was vital as a preservative for meats. Soldiers on the march were perfectly capable of hunting any game they came across but the meat would spoil if they had no salt to preserve it. Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia.
Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.
> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.
Define "much".
> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.
> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.
Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency
No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence.
Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature)
Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?
You are not making much of a case.
For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining spread out over the countryside and of ranging around without incurring the risk of running into a superior number of enemy soldiers.
We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum.
Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].
[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...
2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture.
The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position?
If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.
Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march.
The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock?
But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.
In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals.
Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.
I did some more research. The Romans actually had dedicated hunting units attached to their armies, called venatores. They hunted wild game for food and also captured animals to return to the city for entertainment (venationes) and public executions (damnatio ad bestias).
So not only did they hunt, they made it a formal part of their military, not merely an opportunistic food source.
I have to say, I don't appreciate that you would take such an obstinate stance without doing any research of your own. It's intellectually lazy.
This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters.
Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant):
Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other.
It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt...
https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor...
It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt.
So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service.
But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do.
> his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.
And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.
Try a different translation [1]:
All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this. Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived. That salt was held in high esteem by the ancients, is evident from the Salarian Way, so named from the fact that, by agreement, the Sabini carried all their salt by that road. King Ancus Martius gave six hundred modii of salt as a largess to the people, and was the first to establish salt-works.
The rewards of successful warfare, including salt, bestowed on soldiers. That is payment! King Ancus Martius also used salt as payment.
[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...
An enormous amount of traditional food from around the world has a lot of salt in it. Salt is not a modern invention.
For example, humans have been eating olives for tens of thousands of years. Olives contain and require prodigious amounts of salt to taste good, usually in the form of seawater.
High salt intake is only an issue on a high-carb diet or with inadequate hydration. Otherwise, consuming adequate salt/electrolytes can actually be a bit of a chore. Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
Salt pills were a thing for people working in hot climates. The military requires electrolyte augmentation in such conditions. These days we use fancier electrolyte blends but it is still largely salt. If you are on a multi-day fast it is the primary thing you need to replenish aside from water.
I do some pretty serious backcountry trekking in the summer. You can feel when your electrolytes are low after several hours, the signs aren’t particularly subtle. Fortunately, you can slam a few grams of electrolytes and you’re back to normal in a matter of minutes.
Our bodies can handle it, humans largely developed in regions where electrolyte depletion was a risk. The amount of salt you have to consume to regulate your electrolytes in environments with high electrolyte loss dwarf what you are going to consume in typical food, processed or not. The idea that the average human is hyper-sensitive to consuming too much salt is preposterous. Even animals gravitate toward salt licks.
The idea came from linking salt to heart failure, but last I checked the link was a confounding variable - e.g. bad diet leads to problems that themselves lead to high cholesterol. It was not the salt in the food but the quality of the nutrition itself.
However blaming salt was quick and easy so that’s what the people with money did.
Historically speaking salt has been such a scarce and valuable resource. I have read accounts how in the balkans people would resort to selling kids to slavery just so the family could have enough salt to survive (sacrificing one kid to save the rest).
When I started reading about how salt was bad for you it never made any sense.
No, excessive salt causes high blood pressure. It is definitely a problem. Limit your intake to 6g a day or less. That's plenty for flavour.
Source: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
Yikes. It's so disappointing to see public health agencies pushing medical misinformation but that's nothing new for the NHS, I guess. In reality if you look at this from an evidence-based medicine perspective what really matters is not the quantity but rather the osmolality. And the optimal level depends on multiple factors including genetics and activity level.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jch.13374
Agreed. The idea that salt is merely a flavoring with negative side effects has always struck me as indicative of an unhealthy relationship with food. It aligns with a broader Calvinistic tendency to view pleasure and harm as inherently linked, which is fortunately at odds with reality.
Pre-Industrial Societies: Anatomy of the Pre-Modern World observes that even in relentlessly noncommercialized societies, robust markets existed in two commodities: iron and salt. They were traded on the market within villages that otherwise had little use for markets, and they would make their way by international trade routes to even the most isolated cultures.
For iron, that trade would have mostly been in tools. For salt the only reason is that salt is a vital nutrient and if you can't get enough of it, you die. (Though I think it's worth observing that iron is a vital nutrient too.)
> Like saturated fat, salt has been incorrectly demonized in the course of propping up ill-conceived modern dietary standards.
The history actually runs in the other direction - step one was that someone decided that salt was bad, and step two was that a bunch of dietary standards were created to express the revealed truth that salt was bad. The demonization is the beginning of the process and was done for its own sake.
OMG I ate an olive off a tree once in Italy because I was stupid. Never, never do that.
I'm intrigued. Please share more details!
Natural olives contain a chemical called oleuropein[0] which has a strong nasty bitter taste that renders them inedible. Soaking olives in a strong brine removes the oleuropein from the olive, turning them into the edible olive people love.
Most people don't know this. It is a common prank to convince people that don't know better to eat the fruit off the tree. As the other poster said, don't do that.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oleuropein
I had no idea! Thank you!
Olives are extremely bitter until they’re brined. My wife still can’t handle the brined ones she says it tastes terribly bitter.
This reminds me of lupins which also need quite a bit of preparation before being consumable.
I'm always kind of bemused by the "necessity is the mother of invention" aspect that gave us various food preps and conservation methods.
It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
> 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.
Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing?
It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem
To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)
> It feels like you’re using “industrial food” as a pejorative, but the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt
Your first comment that kicked off this sub-thread missed the context. We’re talking about school food kids eat every day, not occasional restaurant meals. So the appeal to authority of “best chefs in the world” doesn’t make sense here.
My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
> My point wasn’t that taste is bad, it’s that when you optimize solely for taste like restaurants do (using high salt, high fat etc without disclosure), you can create health problems when consumed daily.
Your implication is that high salt in meals causes these health problems. It does not. You might as well say high vitamin, high nurrient meal.
Don't conflate the effects of eating ultraprocessed foods with the effects of eating salt just because one often contains the other. What you're doing is complaining about the health effects of water, having observed that soda is mostly water.
Nice strawman. I didn’t mention ultra-processed foods :)
If anyone else is reading this and wants to do their own reading about the effects of salt, I can point you to the WHO, the NHS, the FDA, one of many highly cited studies, and wikipedia:
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/sodium-redu...
https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...
https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-food-labeling-and-critica...
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/267338249_Global_so...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_salt
Though, margalabargala, if you don’t believe in science then I can’t help you :)
You're right, it was someone else mentioning ultraprocessed foods, I didn't track usernames.
Are you aware that you are being a condescending asshole with the way you wrote that comment?
> unsalted mac & cheese
Cheese already contains loads of salt.
Look at the graph of life expectancy vs. average sodium intake by country, and you may be surprised.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33351135/ Correlated with life expectancy
Thank you, that's a newer study but the same conclusions.
Read this and you may be surprised: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Correlation_does_not_imply_cau...
That's exactly what I'm implying.
The best chefs in the world generally don’t make healthy food, they make food that tastes good. High end restaurants usually use a lot of salt and butter.
Ideally it should taste good. But elementary school lunch isn't exactly fine dining. Some shortcuts are taken and kids are often picky eaters. Salted vegetables are a step up from dinosaur shaped nuggets and pizza, so it's a better middle ground than unsalted food that goes straight to the trash.
What most people don't get is that if you're salting food during the cooking phase it requires a crap ton.
If you just sprinkle it on after it's cooked, it's so much spicier and takes so much less. Cake and eat it.
It takes something like a week to acclimate to lower salt intake. Not hard at all, it's like coming down on caffeine or weed. Salt is very important in pasta to keep the shape of the noodle. Whole wheat pasta alone is a giant step up in health outcomes, especially considering school kid's famous preference for McD's, which has a ton of sodium. I also want to link the John Stewart rant about Olive Garden not salting the pasta, but can't find it.
Ever wondered why hospital food tastes bad? It's cooked en masse without salt so that people with a sodium restriction (heart healthy) can eat the same meat as everyone else. The sodium denaturizes the meat and affects flavor greatly.
> Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.
- Good
- Low salt
- Cheap
Pick two.
(For the most part. There are exceptions, but not many, especially when it comes to school lunch food.)
It’s hard. Salt is kind of magical. My night time snack is some vegetable, air fried with some salt, olive oil and some lemon. It’s not too much salt but I would have a hard time eating it without the salt.
> It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.
"Low salt" was a fad in the 2010's, it cropped up everywhere. It's not particularly her fault for going with the mainstream of the time.
If people develop a taste for it as kids, they have trouble dialing it back later when they do have hypertensive issues.
> It really pisses me off that schools don't get more government funding. Nutrition plays such a huge role in ...
True. OTOH,
- You could expand that "Nutrition plays such a huge role..." logic into saying that schools should also provide broad medical coverage for the students, and clothing, and de facto parenting, and ... In practice - meals are a limited remit, it's relatively obvious if it's being done poorly, kids eating together is socialization (obviously part of a school's job), and "hungry children" pushes enough emotional buttons that subsidized school lunches are relatively well accepted.
Though I've seen quite a few stories about modern-day public school teachers being quietly expected to serve (suffer) as "whatever it takes" unpaid social workers / therapists / family counselors for their students - basically because "somebody needs to", and teachers are convenient victims for social pressures and non-classroom problems.
- There is far too little connection between "money goes to schools" and "schools are competently managed". Modern education attracts way too many well-intended ignorant ideologues (Mrs. Obama was merely one of an endless host), "consultants", "experts", grifters, and worse.
Vs. interest in competent oversight of schools seems nearly non-existent. When was the last time you saw detailed local press coverage of how well a school board was managing the students-and-teachers basics of education?
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.
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!
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.
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).
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.
Elementary schools without any kitchen or cafeteria, kids bringing meals (bagged sandwiches) from home and eating at their desks, is still the standard in probably 95%+ of the elementary schools in the Netherlands in 2025.
It's not clear to me if there is any problem to be solved here.
The problem to be solved in the US is that a disturbing percentage of school-aged children's parents are too poor, too busy or too incompetent to pack a lunch for their kids.
In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.
Alternate theory: their parents are too lazy to actually prepare proper food for them.
Healthy food actually costs less than pre processed crap. But it does take a lot more time and effort to prepare.
Regardless of whatever hypothesis you want to use, the point is the kids don’t have food.
And here we are, back to the poor people are lazy argument. That didn't take long.
Well, some of us refuse to indulge in this permanent complete lack of accountability for one’s choices and actions, that people like you try to push.
Regardless of what you think of the parents, it's certainly not the kids fault their parents failed to provide them food, for whatever reason. I don't care if the reason their parents couldn't afford the time or money to pack a lunch is because they spend it all on collecting nazi memorabilia and kicking orphaned puppies. I still want their children to be appropriately fed.
You are right it's not the kid's fault, and that they should be properly fed by the state since their parents are bad parents, but that doesn't mean you can't blame and call out the parents.
I refuse to indulge in the false fantasy that a household where each parent(s) works multiple minimum wage jobs is “lazy” for not preparing homemade lunches for their children. Also, in the US, many lower-income households are in “food deserts”, where there is a lack of grocery stores selling fresh food and a preponderance of convenience stores selling processed foods. In a country where the top 1% of households possess a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 50% of households only possess 2.5%, poverty, malnourishment, and undereducation are choices made for the poor by the rich ruling class.
There we go again.
USA is the richest country in the world, people there, even the ones at the bottom of the work ladder, have access to riches that for most of the people on the planet are only dreams. You have no idea what it is to be poor or to live next to actual poverty (even I have no idea, and I live in a country that's poorer, and that when I was younger much poorer than the USA).
94% of adult Americans drive a car. Anyone there can go to a store that sells vegetables and raw meat, buy it, and prepare a proper meal that's cheaper than some deep-fried, frozen processed crap.
Enough with the performative virtue signaling. It's all so tiresome. Nobody in the USA goes hungry unless they really choose too at every single step in their lives.
Please explain to me how advocating for material policies for the poor, funded by taxes that come out of my pocket, is "performative virtue signaling." Does this phrase just mean "any kindness whatsoever" at this point?
The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort.
Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.
Good news. I also donate an enormous amount of money to the poor personally, with a goal of donating 100% of my net income in the not too distant future. Is that virtue signaling too?
When you go around advertising it, it’s a bit, yeah.
Time isn't free.
The school I attended as a child not too far from Boston was rather unusual in that they chose to get the government-issue ingredients (government cheese, powdered eggs, etc) and pay cooks to cook scratch meals with it rather than using their funding to pay a food service company for heat-and-serve things like the hockey puck pizzas. Place was a redneck hellhole aside from that but the lunches were actually pretty nice. There were some garbage of course... like when the brownies went stale, they'd just douse them in cheap chocolate syrup. Fresh baked hot rolls every day, though. Glad I didn't go to high school there.
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.
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
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.
Well, if we had much better school bus drivers than we have now, what benefits would we realize from the change?
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.
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.
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.
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
Just looking through past Hacker News submissions is worth your time.
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.
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?
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.
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.
The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction.
The median household income in Poland is a quarter that of the US.
The labor costs more because other assets cost more — namely, housing, food, clothing.
Indeed. And wet roads cause rain.
You can't afford to have people cook food here, just reheat it.
"can't afford" in this case is a choice to spend the absolute minimum possible on school lunches.
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.
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.
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.”
> 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_Philanthr...
> 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.
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.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY14zcUM9SI
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v97Z17qxK9M this lady's laugh
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.
This is a fun walkthrough of the lunches in school every 10 years since 1900.
The 70s-00s were wild!
https://youtu.be/uiLUDJjQrhw
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.
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!
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.
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.
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.
This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.
A big sarcastic thank you to G Dubbya for taking us down that road to perdition..
American school lunches were big-ag industrial complex garbage well before Dubbya was in office.
What about the dinner ladies of the UK?
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.