Importance of school lunches & how politics effects our students

i find the whole school provided lunch thing rather weird. when i went to school the only times in grade school we had lunch provided was on special PTA fundraiser hotdog or pizza days (and of course you paid for that), or just brought your own anyway). other than that lunch was provided by the parents. although in my early years the school did have milk that parents paid for and the only time we got anything other than your choice of homo or 2% white milk were special occasions in which we got a treat of chocolate milk. in high school we did have a lunch counter where if you wanted to you could buy your lunch, which of course had several different foods you could select from. with quality pretty much being like burgers and other foods you pick up at a place like a 7-11. but many kids just went to local restaurants to buy lunch which was better. we had a few pizza places and burger places to choose from close to the school.

the biggest problem with things like school lunches and quality is the same as any time you have to feed many people all at once. just like military food services, camp food, or airline food. the more you feed the crappier the food seems to be since everything is made bulk. and seriously you can take your grandmother's best recopies that could win awards at fairs and still end up with unappetising looking and poor quality foods as soon as you take that recipe made for 6 people and make food for 300 with it all at once. and i have seen the difference personally. i have eaten the exact same recipes made for a family or friend get together, made by the exact same people who did the camp cooking. and the home diners were awesome, where the camp food was rather blah. even the best chefs would be hard pressed to make good food when you are expected to serve a couple hundred people in one shot. instead of maybe a hundred people in a few hours. and there is no way schools can afford the best chefs. in fact most people who run school cafeterias are part timers with no real cooking qualifications. who really just heat up premade food and serve it. just think of all those "catered" type dinners you get at things like conferences and weddings where you may have a couple hundred people eating all at once. no matter how good the cooks the food is never really all that good. and those are skilled people in the main using quality ingredients. yet the having to prepare so many at once tends to kill it. and it is the cooks' skill that makes the food at least generally edible, even though it is likely lukewarm because of having to serve so many people at once. seriously it takes a great deal of skill to prepare a meal for even forty people, forget about a few hundred school kids all at once.

and that was the biggest problem with the awful Obama lunches. they decided autocratically what students could and could not eat, and expected people with no clue to make and serve it. and that was on top of the already problematic bulk cooking. seriously bulk cooking makes food that most people like, such as pizza and hamburgers and turns it into blah. so how do you expect the same bulk batch cooking to produce stuff people would want to eat when making stuff mast kids wouldn't want to eat even when prepared by the finest chef in a made to order meal? and add on top of that the extra cost of the ingredients needed to stick to the insane standards they wanted, in schools that can not even afford to properly pay teachers and buy school supplies. it's really no wonder kids did not get enough to eat, even IF they actually ate the crap they ended up being served. if the Obamas really cared they would have insured that the schools were provided the extra money the schools needed not only to buy those more expensive foods and ingredients. but to upgrade the school kitchens to actually be able to make decent food, and not just to heat prepared stuff up as they were designed for. as well as to have provided funding to hire people who actually could cook at least decent food in the quantities needed. and to cook it in such a way that kids might eat it (and with Obama's mandated foods, that would take a LOT of skill). as well as to hire more people to do that cooking.

the reality is that you are probably far better off having the parents send lunches to school with their kids. things that the parents know the kids will eat. one kid may eat peanut butter sandwiches, where another kid prefers summer sausage, another kid egg sandwiches, and another tomato soup. that way the kid gets what they will eat, as well as enough to eat according to the parent's and kid's preferences.