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.
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.