All praise to the lunch ladies
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This is a fun walkthrough of the lunches in school every 10 years since 1900.
The 70s-00s were wild!
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.
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?
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!
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.
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.
This is a well written piece about how government regulations driven by budgets and less lobbies have enshitified school lunches.
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.
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.