That’s what I like about working at high school Chick-fil-a’s. I get fatter, they pay the same wage.
Alright alright alright.
–slow clap gif—
At one time my daughters high school had a pizza place and a Taco Bell I think. Of course both only offered a couple items. I am not sure either are there now.
But I don’t see that as a problem. Five miles away on the Fresno State campus you can eat at any of a half dozen fast food places on campus.
A lot of this started because cafeteria food was so bad, unhealthy and unpalatable (think government cheese nacho salad) a lot of schools in the 80s and 90s let their students off campus at lunch to eat … wherever. This also saved the school system from having to spend money to improve their cafeteria.
I think i spent one day in the Cafeteria during high school, for some kind of suspension that i can’t even remember what i did, and it was so horribly depressing, empty and such prison food it made certain from experience what everybody understood from inference. Doritos and Cokes would have been an upgrade in quality.
At some point schools convince themselves that since they don’t have any money, cant raise taxes to get money, and the cafeteria is already an empty shell, and everyone is eating Taco Bell off campus anyway, may as well bring them on campus.
I bounced around a lot, but I recall one cafeteria where all the kids joked about how awful the food was. We’d occasionally hold contests to see whose bowl of glop would drop first if held upside down. The standard practice for the pizza was to get multiple paper towels to lay on top of it, siphoning off some of the grease. They’d get soggy as heck very quickly, but at least then we could taste the terrible cheese-on-cardboard (they said there was crust, but I’m still sure they just cut up boxes and pretended). Once, in a fit of pique over the absurdity of being served such horrors, I threw my pizza up at the high, vaulted ceiling.
splat!
It never came down. When I mean never, I mean it was there throughout the school year (as good fortune would have it, I never returned to see if it made it through the summer).
But I remember that every time I see a school levy on the ballot. Unerringly, I vote “yes.”
Ah, the odor of deep fried fat.
The idealist in me wonders why there isn’t a drive to actually serve healthy food in schools.
I am naively wondering where all the money goes.
I worked at McDonald’s in high school. I enjoyed the cooking, but hated working with the customers. One day, while goofing off, I shot some Big Mac sauce at someone at it hit the wall. It was in an out of the way location, so it didn’t get cleaned up. I spotted it months later and it was still there, but had slid slightly downward after taking all the paint off the wall behind it. I’ve never eaten a Big Mac since.
Michelle Obama did back such a drive. It got a lot of pushback from the Fox News crowd though. People in this part of the country really hated her after that, trying to control what their kids eat.
There were also a lot of claims that the kids just took those healthy meals and threw them in the trash. I’m not sure I fully believe that claim.
For generations kids have hated the food produced in school cafeterias. Remember these are kids that won’t eat their mom’s food half the time. I actually think it makes more sense to give them something they will eat, with some nutritional content, than to insist they eat whatever you put in front of them.
I work evenings in a place with a cafeteria. It serves adults. The food is generally considered to be terrible. It is kind of the rule with cafeterias. Maybe they can do a burger and fries, but other than that most food is beyond their ability to make it and make it edible.
That’s a great way to lose weight! Bravo!
I was kind of spoiled, cafeteria-wise. I went to college in Fall of 1991. The food in the cafeteria was terrible, just like all the cliches about cafeteria food.
And then in 1992, they made a big deal about choosing the new contractor to do cafeterias. The old contract was running out, and firms were competing to get the new contract. And so finally in Fall of 1992, we got the new guys. And oh my god, the food was so good after that. What’s funny is that the whole cliche of “Cafeteria food sucks” never went away on campus. It has a life of its own. When I asked people what particularly did they not like about the broccoli dish that day, or if they didn’t like the Salisbury Steak or if there was something wrong with the ingredients at the excellent salad bar or the Nacho bar, they didn’t have any criticisms, but they all still continued with the whole “pffft, cafeteria food, am I right?”
A lot of it is a problem of scale as well. When you have to cook food for several hundred people every day, quality is going to suffer in most cases.
Of course with ingredients that are generally all freeze dried shit or come in giant paint cans, you can only work so much magic anyway.
All that said, for the most part I liked the food when I was at school. A few things were terrible and inedible to me, top of the list being nearly any pasta, but especially the spaghetti. The horrific sauce, the noodles chopped so short. It was like baby food from hell.
I understand what you’re saying, but restaurants routinely manage it, and manage it well.
Less uniformly, military establishments can do large scale food well.
The mess hall in Bastion was lovely :).
There is. My kids’ school has had a lot of good programs in place and the menu typically has wheat rolls, healthier options as the standard for the menu that day, etc. It’s not all doom and gloom.
Apparently, you do want your kids to go to school somewhere other than the deep south though, as what I’ve seen from people posting here and the recent stuff coming out of Oklahoma as examples, not all public schooling is remotely the same.
Well as most physicians will tell you, kids don’t really let themselves starve if food is available. So hungry kids will eat their apples, but if you have kids who have other choices or they’re not hungry, sure they’ll toss it.
I suspect the kids who don’t have food at home, at their meals. The other kids knew they could get something else.
It often does, but it doesn’t have to. The cafeterias at my work each serve hundreds (in one case, probably several thousand) every day and the food is very good.
Well, there’s the fact that there isn’t very much money going into it (a little south of $14b yearly to feed 30,000,000 kids).
Deep in the article, they go into some actual production-vs-reimbursement stats from 2005-6. The average cost to produce a lunch was about $2.90, while the federal reimbursement for Free Lunches (students whose family income qualified them to receive all meals completely free) was only $2.45. AKA, for those students, the school’s routinely lost money. . . on a full serving of food and drink that cost under $3 to produce.
I understand that scale can massively reduce costs, and it’s not like lunchladies are the highest paid profession in the world, but realistically, schools are struggling to produce quality in part because they are paid a pittance to do so (the free lunch reimbursement rate is now up to $3.23. That’s basically perfectly in line with food inflation over the same timespan, so presumably, schools are continuing to lose money on food production unless they’ve cut even more corners.
How much do you pay (or your work subsidize) each meal though? I’d wager it’s a lot more than school cafeterias get per meal.