• School Adds Ice Cream After Nutritional Lunches Don't Sell
    143 replies, posted
[QUOTE=Swebonny;47278773]Is that normal in the US? Swedish prison food looks way better than that.[/QUOTE] Yeah, it is. That spaghetti doesn't look too bad, but the rest of the shit on that tray I wouldn't touch with a ten foot fork. [QUOTE=woolio1;47278766]I've never understood school lunches, honestly. It's not hard or expensive to make healthy, good, appealing food, and yet they always fall back on the same bland garbage. It just doesn't make any sort of sense. Yeah, I get the "some kids are picky" thing, but when the alternative is that school lunches rarely have any nutritional value outside of piles of fat, you would think someone would try to change it. I mean, hell, I went to a tiny private high school, and our lunch lady was able to put together healthy, delicious lunches for $3 a person, sold 'em for $4. It's my understanding that that's the average cost of a school lunch to produce, so you have to wonder why the public system doesn't do similarly.[/QUOTE] Size of the school plays into it. My high school had 1,700 students in it when I got there. When I graduated 4 years later they were up to 2,100 kids. Even at $4 a person lunch was RIDICULOUSLY expensive to produce for that school. The faculty often ate it, too, and they didn't have any rules about kids getting another helping if they were willing to pay a little extra. They did charge us...$1.50 for 'lunch', which was an entree, one veggie and a carton of milk. That could be pizza, fries, or it could be a taco and fries, or it could be a burger and fries, or it could be one of two entree options they cooked up that day and one of two veggie options cooked up. Or any combination thereof, if you'd rather eat fries with your beef stroganoff. They also had an ala-carte store with better quality stuff in it. My usual HS lunch was a pizza/fries/milk from the main line, then from the store I'd grab a burger(Either spicy chicken or double bacon cheeseburger), a big thing of curly fries and a pepperoni pizza hotpocket(Not an immitation one, either, legit brand name hot pockets!). It wasn't healthy, but hey, it tasted good and it filled me up. Which is all I wanted. [QUOTE=meppers;47278543]Everyone here is acting like bringing homemade lunches to school is impossible[/QUOTE] If schools could do so they probably would ban home-brought lunches. [QUOTE=FunnyStarRunner;47278278]I absolutely [I]loved[/I] eating those breadtangles of pizza back in 6th grade.[/QUOTE] I got those in high school too. They were pretty good when they weren't burnt to a crisp. I'd usually have that, a milk, a small thing of fries, then from the 'ala carte' store a hotpocket, spicy chicken burger or double bacon cheeseburger, and a big thing of curly fries. Yum. [QUOTE=orgornot;47278776]Wait, so American children really have to pay for their school lunch every day? Wouldn't it be better to ditch the whole paying daily for packaged food and just get proper food courts where different food is served every day to all students for free like in most civilized countries...[/QUOTE] Problem with that: In my high school you'da been spending around 10,000 dollars each day on food. That's gotta come from [i]somewhere[/i] [QUOTE=Mattk50;47280078]you know, you don't have to eat a lunch, two slightly bigger meals a day works fine. This was my strategy throughout grade school, worked great, could do hw during lunches and ended up with lots of free time. unless you have some specific medical condition it's worth a try as a time saving and school lunch slop avoidance method. If your used to 3 it will probably take some time adjusting though.[/QUOTE] I tried that in high school. Not out of choice, mind, but I did. Every time I went without lunch I inevitably ended up conking out in third block at some point, if I didn't I was so groggy and in-a-daze I couldn't concentrate.[QUOTE=The Aussie;47280228]I'm sorry, why is this a good thing? Excuse my Australianess, but schools providing lunches like this is a really weird and alien idea. You bring your own and sometimes get food at the canteen (Usually pretty good).[/quote] That's not really how things work over here. School lunch has been a thing for pretty much the entire 20th century. Ever since we moved out of one-room schoolhouses and into large, centralized schools we've had a school lunchroom that served enough food for the entire student body. [quote] So why would putting ice cream back into the menu in a primary school in a country with serious obesity problems be a good thing?[/quote] 1: The dollop's too small to be a problem. 2: It's better for the kids to have [i]something[/i] in their bellies than it is to give them 'healthy' food that they just won't eat and end up with them being hungry, cranky and rowdy. They're more likely to sit down, shut up and pay attention to their material if they've had a burger and fries than they are if you force them to buy a salad that just hits the trash can. [quote] Why are packed lunches so bad?[/QUOTE] Inconvenient, mostly. Eating a packed lunch means someone has to prepare something that'll A: keep for the first half of the day B: Still be tasty, C: There's no guarantee it won't be a box of junk food anyway. And one of the kid's parents has to pack the damned thing in the morning, which often isn't an option. If my experience as a kid was anything close to normal, mommy and daddy have to get to work so early in the morning that prepping a lunch isn't really an option. I was up and out of the house around 5:30 at the latest, my parents would drop me off at a daycare to wait the next two hours out. I was never able to carry my own lunch to school until I was old enough to make my own damn sandwich, even then I only really did it when I didn't have enough money to buy a slab of pizza and a burger from the high school cafeteria. Oh, and some school systems are banning packed lunches because of food allergies within the school population. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are ridiculously common in packed school lunches, and they'll trigger peanut allergies.
[QUOTE=TestECull;47281245] Oh, and some school systems are banning packed lunches because of food allergies within the school population. Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches are ridiculously common in packed school lunches, and they'll trigger peanut allergies.[/QUOTE] How about don't share your lunch?
I got all this for 5 dollars the day before thanksgiving. I don't know about america but my school is rolling in the cash from our lunch program. [url]https://twitter.com/that1guyyousee/status/520597123591839744?s=09[/url]
[QUOTE=ironman17;47281155]Well, if there's a place just down the road from your college which sells things cheaper on average than anything in the campus cafeterias, then the contractors DO in fact have competition. They just don't recognize it.[/QUOTE] If it's like my uni where first year students who live on campus have $3000 on a food card that they have to use on campus or else they lose that money at the end of the year, no they don't have competition in that regard.
[QUOTE=TheTalon;47277207]That's a lunch? That's a snack. When I was in high school we had these rectangular slices of pizza every. single. day. Along with other stuff, but I ate the pizza because they were actually good. Not only that, I'd get two, lay one face down on the other, and make a god damn amazing sandwich out of it[/QUOTE] Hey, did you know, YOU CAN BUY THIS SHIT: [url]http://schwans.force.com/tonys/products_by_category?subcat=tonys_sheeted_4x6__pizza[/url]
[QUOTE=leontodd;47277210]Same shit happened in my school. The lunches suck, are too small and are expensive, so everyone goes to the chicken shop down the road instead where 3 wings, chips and a drink is about £1.50 (~$2.20).[/QUOTE] £1.80 will just about get you chips and a 330ml can where i am wtf
Now that I think of it, the breakfast they served at my HS was [I]miles[/I] better than what they had for lunch. You could either get a breakfast biscuit, french toast sticks + syrup, or (actual brand name) cereal in a mini bowl with 2 milks. Although the orange juice container was 2 fucking ounces, like that's suppose to even nearly hydrate you.
[QUOTE=ironman17;47281155]Well, if there's a place just down the road from your college which sells things cheaper on average than anything in the campus cafeterias, then the contractors DO in fact have competition. They just don't recognize it.[/QUOTE] There's also the mandatory meal plan for all freshmen and on-campus students. Every student is required to buy $500-1000 in "dining dollars" per semester, which are only redeemable at on-campus restaurants. With a freshman class of 40k, and a student body of 300k, that effectively negates any competition outside restaurants would impose on the system.
Yeesh, that's some dirty underhanded shit. It's disgusting when "competitors" pull this kind of shit. If you're gonna be on the market you either provide a better product or you go extinct, those are the laws of nature. There's making things more convenient for the consumer, and then there's making students have to pay up-front for meals that could easily turn out like shit. Is the meal plan REALLY mandatory? As in if you refuse to buy $1k of Dinner Dollars you're off the course? Or is it simply that you can't buy anything from the restaurants otherwise? Either way is sickeningly anti-consumer and anti-competitive.
[QUOTE=ironman17;47282190]Yeesh, that's some dirty underhanded shit. It's disgusting when "competitors" pull this kind of shit. If you're gonna be on the market you either provide a better product or you go extinct, those are the laws of nature. There's making things more convenient for the consumer, and then there's making students have to pay up-front for meals that could easily turn out like shit. Is the meal plan REALLY mandatory? As in if you refuse to buy $1k of Dinner Dollars you're off the course? Or is it simply that you can't buy anything from the restaurants otherwise? Either way is sickeningly anti-consumer and anti-competitive.[/QUOTE] No, you don't get a choice as to whether you buy it or not. It's just purchased for you. If you can't pay for it, you get a hold and can't pass the term, the same way campus housing or maintenance fees work. Doesn't help that tuition's about $5000 a semester before housing or the dining plan, so an average student ends up paying about $25k a semester for dorms, food, tuition and books. I have no idea how half these students end up surviving here. (Aramark, the same contract agency that handles food and payment services on campus also sponsors the construction of new dorms, which coincidentally don't have any sort of food preparation areas at all. The rooms don't even have fridges or microwaves, but they've got some very nice, very expensive restaurants. It's shady as shit.)
And yet not one of the contractors is in chains. Truly a shameful display. Iin general most unis in England cost £9k a year. Thank god I dropped out when I couldn't take the pressure, so I only had to pay £2250 for what was a general waste of my time, both the month I commuted there and the years it probably shaved off my already short life.
Some of you people, even the others in the us, are quite lucky In our cafeteria, we get things that are barely edible. The pizza is like brown and green at the same time they sometimes give you these cheese sticks (which actually have no cheese, its a hollow shell of fried bread) that goes with this yellow stuff called cheese I can turn the liquid cheese container upside down and it wont move. Some guy managed to light his on fire with a cigarette lighter a while back. A kid once suggested to simply replace all our food with 100% animal fat oil. She got detention for saying it.
I'm glad my school food isn't shit, I don't particularly want to walk to any of the restaurants around it and I'm not bringing my lunch. Instead, we have multiple school-owned "restaurants" that serve separate types of food. We have a deli, a place that serves Chinese, a place that serves Italian, etc. It's really nice. We don't even have a cafeteria, we have two commons areas, multiple areas with couches just sitting around with TVs on the walls, and there's some seating outside if you enjoy the weather. My school can be really fucking dumb and ghetto in some cases, but we're far above par on food situations.
[QUOTE=FunnyStarRunner;47277252]My high school had this weird policy wherein you must have a piece of fruit to complete your lunch. Of course the fruit usually ended up abandoned, tossed around, or mushed. And the pizza there tasted like vegetarian garbage.[/QUOTE] we suffered this my senior year "TAKE A PIECE OF FRUIT"
I'm both surprised and not that most people don't realize how crappy most U.S. students' school lunches are. I mean, couldn't the school staff just make a weekly run to the grocer's, cook fresh meals each day, and serve the kids meals that are not only healthy, but aren't pre-packaged garbage that tastes like sawdust?
My guess is that would require an actual cook, which would require actual money and actual resources, and god knows ain't nobody got time for that when they could be pushing kids through a fucking meat grinder, and possibly through Father Zeke's office for additional funding.
[QUOTE=bitches;47277658]great except how overpriced as fuck it is[/QUOTE] Well, it is $5 in Canadian dollars which is pretty shit right now. It's about $4 US dollars when converted. And everything in Canada costs more. It's always been like this for the most part. Now I'm in college, food here is kinda painfully expensive.
[QUOTE=Mingebox;47277236]I said this in another thread, but there must have been a whole other world of rectangular pizza slices I never saw, because the ones they had at my school every day tasted like saltines with cooking spray. Wouldn't feed them to my dog.[/QUOTE] That sounds terrible. The ones we had were great. I wish I knew who supplied them because they're better than any microwavable pizza you can get at the store [editline]8th March 2015[/editline] [QUOTE=J!NX;47277562]not in Hamburg, where you get a square of pizza, or you could get a chicken patty, spaghetti, sloppy joes, etc. a SNACK? hello, fat person here a corndog, mac-n-cheese and peas are a snack to you? that's a light meal but it's no snack how much do you eat? :v:[/QUOTE] Quite a bit, but I still only weigh 140lbs (10 stone) I watch them calories and keep it just under 2k a day
I never understood why schools push for healthy eating 24/7, my school did a similar turn around in my last 1-2 years where they charged a lot extra for stuff like burgers and pushed more and more fruit and veg onto the menu Dont get me wrong, I dont mind fruit and veg, as well as healthy meals, but the way how the school pushes out meals like that are a little disgusting, the food tastes like shit and their is no effort into making it either. Once you hit college however, everything just becomes sugar. Seriously my canteen at college is just sugar, and they always tell you to just eat loadsa shit if you are feeling tired or anything since it drives you a little more.
[QUOTE=Michael haxz;47280378]So when you throw a pile of garbage together for lunch, kids stop buying it. Who would of fucking guessed?[/QUOTE] The food has always been low quality (there are exceptions), our schools have shit funding and shit budget regulations. The type of food has just changed. And no surprise, ultra-cheap vegetables are less appealing than ultra-cheap pizza.
[QUOTE=itisjuly;47281290]How about don't share your lunch?[/QUOTE] Sound logic that I'm fine with, but there's the most miniscule chance that someone so ridiculously alergic to peanuts that simply being in the same room as a peanut product will set off their allergy could be in that lunchroom, so some school districts overreact. I'm with you, honestly, but that's the logic that the school systems that ban packed lunches hide behind. [QUOTE=ScriptKitt3h;47282875]I'm both surprised and not that most people don't realize how crappy most U.S. students' school lunches are. I mean, couldn't the school staff just make a weekly run to the grocer's, cook fresh meals each day, and serve the kids meals that are not only healthy, but aren't pre-packaged garbage that tastes like sawdust?[/QUOTE] Not really an option in the typical US school. A [i]tiny[/i] US elementary school is in the neighborhood of 300-400 students. A typical one? Twice that. High schools have it even worse, since there's usually only one or two high schools in each county. All the students graduating from those elementary schools have to pile into a single high school. In my county that meant betwen 1700 and 2100 students in the same building every day, as we had just one high school that fed in from about six elementary and middle schools in the area. That's a metric fuckton of food and a metric fuckton of money spent on food/the prep thereof, even when it's just the crap that they're serving. No grocer in the land is gonna have enough fresh food in stock to feed just one school, nevermind all of them.
Yeah, well at my high school we don't really have a cafeteria, just little carts that show up and serve food, and they try to make the stuff that they serve look like stuff the students would like to eat, except they forcefully attempt to make it healthy. An example of this would be you could buy a small bottle of Gatorade, but it's the shitty low calorie kind. Or that they serve pizza that they say it comes from some chain pizza place, but it tastes like whole grain health pizza. They practically do this to all of the food they serve, but at least it's not like OP's pic.
I see all of these healthy food struggles and think of how lucky I am to be Scottish. Had one of those things on the top here. Every day. For a while, maybe half a year. [IMG]http://pugwash.cat5.org/articles/pizza/deep-fried-pizza-480-3.jpg[/IMG] For those who don't know what that is, it's a quarter of a pizza deep fried in batter. I had that and a side of a pint carton of milk every day at school. Best part about it? £1 for both of those parts. And I got £2.50 a day to spend on lunch, sweetie/candy heaven.
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