Christ empowered his followers to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and tend to the sick. For some reason American Christians have decided that these explicit dictates should he ignored, much like the reminder that it is not their role to judge, so that they can instead focus on bigotry.
The corrupt nature of the Church as an institution exists to take advantage of the naive humanitarianism of its fellowship.
People, by and large, do want to help their neighbors and provide for the young and the elderly. Modern prosperity gospel Christianity and historical Catholicism/Protestantism hasn't change human nature. People in the church still pursue benevolent goals. It only pollutes human perception and education, by misallocating resources intended to improve society.
No, it isn’t. For most of history most Christians were taking care of those around them. It is with industrialism and Calvinism that we see people move away from this.
The infuriating part is a different beared Jewish guy tried to put into practice these ideals and the USA fought to stop it everywhere.
Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train
Constantine ended the institutional persecution of monotheists within the Roman empire. The apostolic church had been groving along well before that.
The end to formalized persecution gave Christians an opportunity to begin organizing openly - leading to the Ecumenical Councils that would define the church as an institution for the next two millennium. But the foundations were all in place well beforehand.
And thus Christian imperialism, conquest, subjugation, and terror has marched along ever since.
The Church, as a military power, has always been mediocre at best. Rome itself was gutted during the transfer of the court to Byzantium. And this laid the seeds for the Roman Orthodox split, which divides the church to this day.
The Western empire dissolved into feudal states, with Catholicism and the Church operating as a kind of diplomatic corps and patronage network for European aristocrats.
It wasn't until the emergence of Protestantism, following the failure by the Hapsbirgs to consolidate power during the 30 Years War, that capitalist expansion began to produce imperialism in the modern sense.
The conquest and subjection that followed was in pursuit of economic growth via slavery and plunder. The church existed to help rationalize these economic pursuits, but the priesthood was secondary to the merchant classes in actually executing it.
Dude, a guy named Constantine literally started this modern Christiandom train rolling with his “Hey guys, I just met Jesus, and he told me I should be in charge now. So, I’m king, ordained by heaven, and we’ll enforce this new order with lots of violence.”
Constantinus was the Emperor of Rome before he converted the Empire. He did not create the notion of the Divine Right to Rule. His conversion was entirely politically motivated as it happens near his death.
Calvin is the one that promotes the notion that wealth is a sign of God’s love which is the opposite of what Jesus taught.
Why did you reply authoritatively if your understanding of this subject is so poor?
You need to brush up on your history then. The church's history is largely violently forcing others to convert and using the Bible to persecute those they don't like.
That is entirely unrelated to the fact that most Christian communities did in fact try to clothe, feed and tend those that needed it. Most humans will try to ease the suffering of those they know in their communities if they can because most aren’t so cold hearted
a few hundred years ago homeless people and veteran carried tokens that enabled them to be given free food and help at churches.
Paster Damian died of leprosy after 11 years of helping others with the sickness, tending their wounds, sharing food and digging graves. He kept doing so while he was sick.
The catholic church as an institution absolutely is evil but that does not automatically make believers or individual priests so.
History is Littered with proof of this. Science denying is not the answer to religious bigotry.
The fact is for most of history you wouldnt have left your county so you actually were more inclined to be closer with people you might not have loved because of expediency. You aren’t going to chow down on seconds if you know your neighbor is starving unless you are a psychopath and most humans aren’t.
No, because the point that all the bigots are missing is that religious people are generally no different than other people. If you see a starving kid you aren't going tosit in front of them chowing down. You will, presuming you aren't on the ASPD spectrum or starving yourself, feed that kid.
Most humans did this . Most humans do this. You have to raise them to believe helping others is wrong and that enters Protestant Christianity through Calvinism.
Are you so prejudiced that ypu think most people would not give food to their neighbors if they were starving? Are the people around you that horrible?
Every movement in history has hypocrites that follow it, and give the movement a bad name. Lumping "American Christians" together and then judging them based on the worst people who adopt that title is creating a straw man.
All American Christians that I know try and follow what you pointed out in your first sentence.
The statement on judging however is a bit misguided, Jesus didn't say to never judge, but to be careful to avoid hypocrisy and to judge with love.
At this point a substantial portion of self identified Christians in America are supporting some ideologies and programs that are the opposite if Christ’s teachings. It isn’t a small part. It might even be close to the majority.
Yeah, that's true and it's very upsetting that so many hypocrites would exist within the wider church. I'd argue that someone that doesn't follow the teachings of Christ isn't a Christian at all since that's literally what the word means.
State doesn't pay for kid's lunch. If parent can't afford kid's lunch, state takes child and places them in a foster home. State pays foster home many many times the cost of lunch to take kid.
Tell me what the goal of this system is so I can call someone else a conspiracy theorist for a change.
This is EXACTLY what they want. They sell the cute ones (check the protective services website, they have them listed for placement like a weird dating service or pet adoption site). They will prison to pipeline the rest while working them in "skill camps".
CPS is a dystopian hell. I advocated for a child for a while, they would fuck up absolutely basic things, would not find out about things like hospitalization or legal trouble for weeks. When I brought up several months of basically no mental health care, they insinuated that I might be abusing the child.
They won’t take action on actual abuse. It’s Kafkaesque.
To justify their budget, they must find "clients" to put in their system. Getting clients means finding just the right parent(s) that they can bully, intimidate, and exaggerate charges against.
Child services no longer operates in good faith. They won't even allow you to record their conversations because they are so apt to lie.
The foster system is just as bad. Putting people on payroll to take care of kids that no one knows the location of.
23,160 foster kids were reported missing or unaccounted for in 2024. These were just the ones REPORTED. Where is the politician rage over this?
The foster care system is complicit in child trafficking, and the politicians are in on it. I recall a news story where a politician was "helping" pregnant women with visas and trafficking them and the babies.
And for good measure, the vast majority of homeless people were children who aged out of the foster care system. Foster care is a gift that keeps on giving.
My states DHS has the wrong number for a large county’s police force. They have been leaving voicemails with children’s personal information, as well as preventing cases that are supposed to be reported to the police from actually being reported - because they’re in some random guys voicemail!
I noticed this more than a month ago, have made hundreds of phone calls and emails to state agencies and politicians. They don’t care.
I spent two years as a CASA. I loved that kid. That entire experience crushed me as a human being.
Kids go to public school during lunchtime. Public school feeds the children lunch (something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating). Kids do not pay for this.
That's it. There should be no further discussion here. If you disagree with this I want to put my thumb into your eye socket in the worst way.
It's so fucked up this is even a topic of discussion.
There are other countries where kids bring their own lunch. We always make sandwiches and a snack for our kids to bring to school.
I do think school-provided lunches are a great idea and if done right, would guarantee every kid equal access to healthy nutrition. Unfortunately we don't have that in NL, and clearly the powers that be don't want it in the US either.
But punishing kids for lunch debt is nuts. That's absolutely a symptom of the US wanting everybody to live in debt.
Wasn't it last year schools were throwing kid's bagged lunches away? So then they force the kids to eat a school lunch or starve, then blame the parents. This is just the next illogical step of the grift.
Throwing kids' lunch away should be illegal. What if s kid has special dietary requirements? But if a school does throw it away, they have an obligation to provide a free lunch that's at least as good.
Trump’s new spending bill is providing $3.6 trillion tax cut for the richest among us. They already pay only 8% on average, but they own the politicians and are demanding to pay even less.
How are we supposed to pay for that if we don’t rob children of their school lunches?!
Spending less money bombing children in other places would give us more than enough funds, but that helps funnel money to the aforementioned richest among us, so that's not going to happen.
Yep that’s right, $8 billion in the new bill for Israel to continue massacring children and stealing their ancestral land.
Israel First policy is an American notion I’ll never understand. Israel is the biggest terrorist nation-state in the world right now, nobody commits war crimes and other high crimes against humanity at the rate Israel does. It’s so sad to see them dog walking American leaders every day but here we are.
How dare you invest in the future? Our potential future tax base needs to learn how to starve or go into debt - those are the most important lessons in the good old US of fucking A.
I agree with that kids should be fed, but what's wrong with homemade sandwiches? That's what is the norm in NL and if kids don't have them theaters notice it and will work on fixing it while given them food.
The shit we had at most schools I went to was well kinda unhealthy crap.
Nothing wrong. Bring it and eat it. But if you're kid and you don't, school should feed you.
In the US kids are legally required to attend school. Forcing someone to be somewhere and not providing sustenance is not allowed in war or prison, damn well should not be allowed in schools.
"You might be giving your kids a terrible childhood, so we're going to ensure they have a terrible life starting in our first-class foster care system"
Do the schools actually have the authority to do that or is it like all those other empty threats I use to get? It's insane, but not surprising that the schools would threaten that. The sort of family who has to skip on paying lunch debts also doesn't have means to talk to a lawyer.
edit:
Luzerne County's manager and child welfare agency director have written the superintendent, insisting the district stop making what they call false claims.
So you (the district) agree that right exists? Either you're not providing food and thus you're doing the neglecting and also they don't owe you anything, or you are required to provide food regardless of payment because you're in loco parentis during the school hours. And the $450 could very likely have been used to provide food and other necessities for those kids before and after school.
If you want to charge them with neglect, you have to prove they neglected their child, not just your budget.
Starve your kid or lose them. That's quite a choice for a poor parent to make.
My late father grew up in an orphanage because my grandfather was too poor to care for 5 kids and a sick wife. My grandparents were able to take the kids home on Sundays though, so it wasn't a situation where they yielded full custody. I'm not saying an orphanage was ideal, but it's a shame that these days there is not the same kind of middle ground where kids can be cared for but still stay connected to their family. I guess that is too much of a social safety net for conservatives to tolerate.
So it's too expensive to provide school lunch, but not too expensive to completely take over the care of the children entirely. More and more, I understand what people mean when they say the cruelty is the point. This makes zero goddamned sense.
I want to add something because I want to add a glimmer of positivity. I mean, this is all anecdotal but I'm housing one of my daughter's friends right now.
I'm still learning her history because I have absolutely zero guardianship over her and I don't pry because she's been through so much and she shares when she's ready. Her mother passed about two years ago and her dad is in the wind. Her grandma has guardianship but treated her as a burden.
I play nice with Grandma so my new daughter stays by me. I'm not sure if CPS was ever called on either her mother or grandmother or if it was just because mother passed but 'daughter' has weekly therapy and a social worker who got her into a very decent state university.
She's about to go visit for a tour and I'm so worried but also excited because she has a full ride from the state for a two or four year depending on what she wants. I've looked into the school and it's pretty great. It's going to be hard for my ex and I to pull off the same for our daughter.
The state of affairs are abysmal these last few decades but there are still good people trying to do good things. The Man isn't out to get you if you're lucky enough to get the right government employee. Or maybe you just have to suffer enough.
I know the young lady I'm talking about deserves this chance and I'm ecstatic that she has the opportunity. It makes me feel a little guilty that I'm going to miss her, but in a good way.
I wish every kid and every parent didn't have to worry so much about getting into trouble because they're already struggling. The horrors I'm learning this child has gone through shouldn't be the bar by which we set as deserving of a higher education.
I have barely anything to offer but even just feeding her and teaching her to cook and do laundry and taxes and set up a bank account makes me some sort of goddess in her eyes and I'd love to take credit but it's just too tragic to me that a child considers this little bit I have to offer as some sort of gift. What I have to offer as a 'gift' is not. It's what any child should be entitled to. I'm happy that she finally feels comfortable enough to add things she wants to the grocery list without worrying too much that she's putting me out in some way.
It may not seem like much to you, but to her it's making a world of difference. I'm reminded of a quote I got from an otherwise kind of silly movie:
"Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children."
It's a slightly changed version of a quote from William Thackeray, apparently. Whatever the case, I think it applies here. The gods and goddesses of this child's life let her down, and you may not think much of yourself or what you do, but you've chosen to be a good goddess, and that's a wonderful thing. You've blessed not only the child you've taken in, but your own, as well, by showing her how to treat others the right way.
If you want the name of the person standing behind the letter,
Wyoming Valley West's lawyer, Charles Coslett, said he did not consider the letters to be threatening.
"Hopefully, that gets their attention and it certainly did, didn't it? I mean, if you think about it, you're here this morning because some parents cried foul because he or she doesn't want to pay a debt attributed to feeding their kids. How shameful," Coslett told WYOU-TV.
I'm having a hard time confirming it, but it looks like an Irvin DeRemer was the super while this occurred, but was replaced in the 2025 election.
It's also an empty threat,
Luzerne County's manager and child welfare agency director have written the superintendent, insisting the district stop making what they call false claims.
Also. The majority of long term homeless individuals are people that aged out of the foster care system. The moment they turn 18 they are out on their ass with only the clothing on their back and no life skills because foster care in America is little better than prison.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit on the behalf of all foster children (past and present) against the US government. It would almost be impossible for any other modern country to do a worse job.
Chritians also love "adopting"/occasionally accidentally kidnapping the children they've helped to render desperate. The Mormons are big on this and have a whole complex system built around it. Don't take my word for it, here's a highlighted portion from a Mormon bishop's handbook:
Add that to the mile long list as to why the Mormons are a bunch of profligates deserving of butchering. Missouri was right to try to exterminate the Mormons.
Well if it makes it any worse I ain't from Utah, I'm from the Inland Empire here in SoCal. I just think the Mormon church is probably the most destructively influencial group of the last two centuries here in the Western US. Though I do like at least one (dead) Mormon, that being John Moses Browning.
Just a reminder that the same people who are against free school lunches for children are the ones who stand in front of abortion clinics screaming about how abortion is murder.
There's no contradiction for these people. All fetuses have a right to life and children should suffer if they don't have enough money. Shoulda worked harder at the bootstraps factory if they didn't want to eat shit their entire lives.
They max out at a 4 on Kohlberg's morality scale, ie the laws are immutable and nothing can change them. The law says that everyone should live and our system is perfect because it's our system.
Sprinkle some smug self-satisifaction on top of this and it's a real good portrait of the Christian right. Religion is a narotic for these folks who spend their days judging others. They believe in the correct God™ and His prosperity gospel. Anyone who is poor or those who "sin" deserve their lot in life. And how are kids to learn self-reliance when they're coddled with free food? We're so weak to let our kids live in such decadent times! What's next, they won't have to pay for healthcare after they made the bad decision to get hurt or sick?
They ask how we can be so wasteful as a society while they clutch their imitation pearl necklace. Meanwhile the public's share of wealth shrinks and everyone is left to fight for the scraps. When the situation is so dire, it's easy to fight with each other than to question big business, Wall Street or the financial sector.
I highly doubt that image represents the food US kids get in school. It's too healthy and good looking (not saying it looks good, just better than it actually would be).
Eh, not just America sadly. Half the world seems brainwashed into thinking that feeding children is controversial. The BBC did an article the other day about 500,000 extra kids getting them, and it got 9000 comments, split equally between "fair enough" and "but what about my tax money? 😢"
They should give the Libertarian nutcases a large enclave, and all the people who moan about their taxes being spent on other people should be forced to go and live there.
Oh, there's a pothole on your road? Hope one of the residents can afford to have it fixed. You were burgled? Can you afford to pay the police company to look into it? No streetlights, sorry. That's a waste. You carry a torch and light your own way. Pensions? Didn't you save enough?
Stop worrying about the tax bills of billionaires, for fucks sake. They can get by with less.
"The Wyoming Valley West School District Board of Directors sincerely apologises for the tone of the letter that was sent regarding lunch debt. It wasn't the intention of the district to harm or inconvenience any of the families of our school district," the school said in an "apology letter" on its website.
The fact that they refused to accept the donations before the public backlash says everything. I guess people don't like it when you mess with their orphan-crushing machine?
Earlier this week Bernie Sanders called for an end to "school lunch debt".
The senator, and one of the Democrat candidates for president, tweeted that it "should not exist in the wealthiest country in the history of the world" and pledged to "provide year-round, free universal school meals" if he won the White House.
LOL, imagine thinking Democrats would nominate someone standing on a "let's feed poor people's kids" platform. Was never going to happen.
I got kicked off free lunch when my mom married a rich guy. I didn’t eat lunch, or breakfast from 6-11th grade. I’d start to feel sick during the last couple hours of class.
It’s not something any child should experience. It was not something I had power over, other than digging quarters out machines to get like a Vitamin Water or something.
My baby brother was born in 91 and when he eventually got into kindergarten one of his teachers flagged him for his speech impediment. He'd pronounce his P's as B's.
He was 5 and talked a mile a minute before he was two. He just couldn't quite get the hang of that one part.
My parents weren't worried. We were all helping him. My other brother and I were 6 years older than him and we we're latchkey kids by the time I was 10.
My parents worked second/third jobs and second/third shifts rotating to make everything work for us. We barely saw them both at the same time.
I remember my Ma, and even Pops, being pissed as fuck and our chores and cleaning day was ramped up for a month or two, and all us kids had individual therapy sessions where they grilled us with questions we didn't understand because the school call CPS on them because they wouldn't (read: couldn't) make after school speech therapy work with their schedules and they knew he'd learn on his own eventually anyway. They just made my parents lives that much more stressful in that time.
This was over 30 years ago now and I have my own kids, and bonus kids even! I have my own stories I could tell but this is the absolute worst because I saw how much it stressed out my overworked parents. My brother is a functioning member of society who got over his slight speech impediment within the year, with our help but mostly letting him develop on his own time.
Meanwhile, us kids just considered it a matter of course that we wrap up plates and Tupperware after each meal. One plate for Gertie our nextdoor neighbor and whatever was left went to Jorge's family two doors down. We also learned how to mow the lawn only so the Grandma and Grandpa Hass, our other next door neighbors wouldn't have to anymore. They weren't actual family but they were to us. Jorge's family got all my and my brothers' hand-me-down clothes for his younger siblings, too. We didn't quite understand why at the time. It's just what you do. But yeah, make a struggling family's life that much harder with your performative concern.
The original story i heard the school backed down for 2 reasons. 1 a local millionaire offered to pay the miss $26k and 2 the press was causing a lot of negative attention.
Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.
At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn't have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.
Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.
As a Swede i think your system in the Netherlands sounds so foreign. When I was in school we always had 2 hot meals to chose between and a 'salad bar's.
All paid for by the tax system. No one should ever be forced to go hungry imo.
Sounds like heaven! in Denmark we have to make our own rugbrød sandwich at home.. Every day.. From kindergarden until... Well some do it their entire life..
You can buy a hot meal in gymnasium but it is very expensive
In NL most people don't even eat hot lunches on a regular basis. Even at work people just bring sandwiches in most Dutch companies unless they are internationally focussed.
Nobody should go hungry, but I don't see the appeal or need for a centralised food system. Pretty sure there is less food waste if you just give your childeren food from home.
That can easily lead to "othering" those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.
Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.
Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.
Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won't spoil if he can't bring himself to eat.
From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:
Preparing food in bulk is a lot cheaper
Food can be fresh and thus encourage kids to eat it more readily
Nutritional outcomes can be targeted
Which is intersecting with:
America is a capitalist hellscape where no opportunity to profit of anyone, no matter how vulnerable, can be overlooked
There are multiple levels in the school lunch program where private companies can invade to engage in some rent seeking
Social pressure can be exerted to make sure families feel obligated to participate no matter how expensive or predatory the program
Never ever should a poor person be allowed to feel a modicum of support or relief, if that can be achieved by leveraging their children so much the better.
The thing is that something like sandwiches aren't cheaper to produce in bulk and a lot of the cafeteria's will have either a fair amount of food left over or they barely make enough for everybody to combat that.
I don't think the food in US school is really that fresh.
No person should go hungry period, but I rather fix the reason why most go hungry than fix the solution. And I have had mandatory lunches in school and generally there is just a choice between meat, fish or vegaterian and I often find myself picking the least bad option.
Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference.
I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering.
I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.
I understand the appeal of bringing a cold lunch, but from a nutritional perspective only few sandwiches really are healthy. Most breads have little to no whole grain part (I remember that ultra fluffy bread from the Netherlands exchange, it was amazing but definitely not nutritious), and at best you can fit in two slices of tomato and cucumber and a salad leaf. The greatest part is the fillers of usually "animal protein" which contain too many saturated fats.
Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely make a healthy sandwich with whole grain bread, homemade hummus, grated carrot, tomato, salad, cucumber, sprouts, quality cheese or seitan slices... But most people just don't do that. Most people take light bread with butter or cream cheese and deli meats and cheese on top.
I have been at a congress a couple of years back (I work in biomedical and nutrition science) and one presentation was by someone who gave dietary advice in clinics and reviewed some common tips and guidelines of dietetics. One of them was recommending adding bread as a whole grain source. The caveat was that people would not just eat the whole grain bread (if they were even to choose whole grain instead of white or light bread to begin with), but that - even when you substitute lets say a serving of white noodles with actual whole grain bread - you don't eat the bread alone. You put toppings on it, butter, deli meats, cheeses, which are all high calorie and not exactly healthy for you. Patients (especially the ones trying to lose weight) ended up increasing their calorie intake and their sat fat and salt intake by adding healthy bread to their diet.
I don't want to say that a cooked, warm lunch is automatically more healthy than a sandwich - but you have many more options here and more practical ones than with sandwiches. You can add so much more vegetables to it.
You have to get the volkoren (whole grain) bread which is actually nutritious and most Dutch people actually don't eat it enough. And it is generally considered to be better for you than most lunches people have. Like having Spaghetti for lunch like the stereotype for Italians.
I find it to be really impractical and expensive to eat hot lunches at work. I would skip my daily walk where I eat my sandwiches and I doubt ill be able to warm it up, clean the microwave or whatever I use to heat it and eat it in the span of half an hour. Especially if everybody needs to heat their food.
Every time when I have had good hot lunches (of going outside to a restaurant etc) it would have costed me 15-25 euro excluding drinks, but yeah that is somewhere else I understand that. Another issue is that I generally do not have enough appetite to eat food in the evening.
My sandwiches aren't the healtiest to start with because I don't eat margarine which we tradionally put on bread (it's not even actual butter anymore) and I generally put the same thing on it because well I am not even that much of a fan of sandwiches let alone creating them. I put deli ham on it and sandwichspread.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
You could absolutely do that, or cook dishes that are meant to be eaten cold to begin with. Onigiri, buddha bowls, gazpacho soup (with some volkoren bread ;) ), a salad with falafel balls, etc. A zucchini-egg-oats-ham-cheese slice from the oven is also a cool afternative, you can cut it up and freeze it and just let it thaw as you need - and eat it with one hand. Bring some baby tomatoes on your walk. Eating a cold lunch doesn't mean you need to choose between leftover cold spaghetti with meatballs and a sandwich.
I understand the value of taking a walk, but eating while walking is also not exactly the healthiest.
Last but not least - our little conversation here is actually off topic. The question is about school lunches. And while you might like your cold, unhealthy sandwich and a walk (all power to you) - school children who can't return back to class earlier if they eat faster do absolutely deserve a warm and nutritious lunch. Remember that in the US, a lot of people cannot afford to feed their children at home, let alone with a warm and healthy meal. Maybe a sandwich for lunch is fine if you then have a great breakfast at home and a big dinner, but imagine all you eat in a day is a white bread pb&j sandwich for lunch and then the same for dinner, breakfast skipped. This is the reality for many more people - many more children - than we can imagine. And children move more and they are growing and they have to concentrate at school, they need to be full and nourished.
This is why this is so important. Providing all children with a free or at least dirt cheap meal that is both tasty (as in, accepted by the children's freakishly picky palate) and nutritious is an incredible challenge, but it is possible. Yet it is treated as an afterthought at best and poor people shaming and punishment at worst. If a child gets a pb&j for dinner and no breakfast, it better have a goddamn delicious huge ass plate of wholegrain maccaroni with vegetables and chicken breast and a low fat joghurt with fruit salad for lunch. And a salad bar. Because salad bars rock. I'd prefer it not to be chicken, but I probably have the only kid that genuinely likes boiled tofu over meat.
You call sandwiches unhealthy while here they are considered healthy.
I might look into some other dishes, but I am not the biggest cooking fan.
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence. Which might not even fully fix the issue due to picky eather etc.
Also the waste is a lot more than if you just bring school lunch in a reusable container.
But as long as poverty isn’t fixed it is better for offer school lunches than let the kids get hungry of course, but it will not help push people to end poverty
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence.
I wholeheartedly agree here, but this would mean a huge ass systemic change. It would be infinitely better to treat the cause and not the symptom - but it would also be harder, take much more effort, more change, more willingness from politicians, more consistency. This is just not realistic in the short or even medium run. Providing free and healthy school lunches is already a very hard and difficult goal/job. However, it has the benefit of being very concrete. You have one task that you focus on with direct benefits. Improving the conditions so that parents can feed their children better is very vague and much more multifacetted. Where do you even start? Minimum wage, working conditions, daycare options, healthcare, boosting the economy, increasing social security... 100% you should do all that, but man, you'll wait a long time for this to become so much better as to have a measurable effect on "lunch performance".
Also, even at the end, parents can still make bad choices. As you mentioned, sandwiches are considered healthy even in the Netherlands. I do, indeed, work in nutrition science, and the ideal sandwich is healthy, but 99% of people eat severely unhealthy sandwiches. A friend of mine is a dietician and, my Lord, I've at least had the privilege of reading studies and not working with people because people are dumb. I can't believe that in 2025 you got to tell people that white bread and candy is not good for you or that you shouldn't drink sugared soda instead of water. People don't know that sugar makes you fat. People don't know what a calorie is. People don't know that you can't soak your salad in ranch dressing and put 15 fried chicken fingers on top and that's not "a healthy low calorie salad". You will always have negligent parents. You will always have parents with mental health issues or other struggles who cannot safely provide food. Especially in a socially rotten country like the US.
Last but not least, why not do both. You can absolutely both work on fixing the underlying issues and in the meantime work on providing free and healthy school lunches all over the country (or, for that matter, planet). Actually, you absolutely should do both. They don't exclude each other a bit.
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
My sibling in Christ, your grandparents smoked and drank whilst being pregnant with your mom and dad.
(This isn't supposed to be a diss, I'm just trying to point out that this might be some survivor bias and that our ideas of what is healthy or not change over time. Which is great, we always add knowledge. It's not so long ago we discovered vitamins. My former supervisor discovered the first biotin receptor. God, a couple of years ago keto was the new hot shit.)
(The Netherlands, moreover, does have a lot going on that plays into its citizens' health. Doesn't it? You seem like a solid social democracy and you got more bikes than people. Maybe it's that and not the cheese sandwiches :P)
In Germany it was pretty unusual to eat in school at all, you had breakfast at home (7AM-ish), school starts at 8 and finished at 2PM latest, usually 1.15PM. We all went home for lunch afterwards, and that was that.
Same here, I brought my own lunch, sandwiches mostly, all the time I was in school as a kid a long time ago whenever I wasn't going back home for lunch. I prepared lunches for my own kids all the time they were in school.
Punishing kids for lunch debt is evil, at least give them the right to vote if you are to play that game.
NL is the ISO standard abbreviation for The Netherlands and considering our history in the world (both good and bad) I assume most people understand where it is from....
Fair I understand it, I run into the same issue, but tying The Netherlands is pretty annoying especially with the amount I talk about it haha and a lot of people do understand what I am talking about.
Yep. Our high school had a cafeteria where you could buy snacks, but none of the schools I went to ever supplied lunches as such. It’s basically the parents and kids responsibility to feed themselves. As it should be.
Maybe Dutch parents (used to be) much more responsible than those elsewhere. 🤷♂️
I don't have or want kids, but I want ever child to grow up healtht and food secure. These are humans that can't work for themselves and have no means to protect themselves from food insecurity, and they will be my younger coworkers, and bankers and brokers and building my roads and and and.... I want them to be mentally and physically well.
I don't understand why our society builds sidewalks and playgrounds and funds schools to teach kids how to be humans, but feeding them is a bridge too far.... We already hold them captive in the middle of the day when one of the 3 meals is served anyways....
I agree. Kids should be fed. But that’s not the school’s job. It’s to teach.
The Netherlands has a robust social system. There’s welfare for people without jobs, there’s financial assistance for raising a child, there’s food banks, etc. Etc. And plenty of help getting into these assistance programs.
Basically, there is NO reason for a parent not to be able to feed their child. Even if they have zero money, there’s help. The only thing they (or the kid) needs to do is make some sandwiches to take with them for school lunch. That’s it.
I'm glad you live somewhere where this problem isn't even phathomable to you.
You can certainly argue that it isn't the schools job specifically, but it would be the most practical and efficient choice. Kids are all already gathered there at the right time, facilities usually exist or can be added to buildings....
But to say "just pack a sandwich." ...... I just wish I lived somewhere where that was it. That THAT was the barrier.
If you want to look at this situation from an economic point of view ..... what's cheaper?
Pay a kids lunch every day for about 12-14 years .... and for a growing kid, the price wouldn't be that much, especially if you are paying in bulk amounts for hundreds or thousands of kids.
or
Don't pay their lunch, let the parents go into debt, take the kids into foster care .... now you as the government have to pay for legal expenses to take the kid away, expenses to have police and social service workers to do the work, foster expenses to house the kid and care for them (now you are having to pay for every single meal for them for years), give up the kid once they become of age and go out on their own after foster care as a disillusioned, angry and frustrated young man or woman who will more than likely end up on the street dealing drugs, crime or prostitution ... who will then grow up causing or contributing to crime and increasing the costs of police, legal, emergency health care, security and penitentiary .... and chances are they will have children who will end up at school not being able to pay for their lunch
....
If you pay to help the kid when they are young, there is more of a chance they will grow up to be a contributing healthy member of society. If you don't they will become a lifelong burden on society and cause endless expenses that will be far more money than any school lunches you could have bought when they were ten years old.
If you pay to help the kid when they are young, there is more of a chance they will grow up to be a contributing healthy member of society.
Those in power do not want a contributing healthy member of society. They want malleable, docile workers that will do as they’re told and not challenge the system.
I disagree. What they want is to threaten those they see as inferior. It's a power trip borne from an ideological feedback loop. Sense and goals are secondary to "poor people need to take responsibility for feeding their children, I'm not paying for their decisions".
I don't even want to look at it from that perspective.
As civilized society we need to feed and educate children. All of them. Economics can be figured out for sure, but if this is a priority we can certainly make it happen.
My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I'm self employed with no benefits so she's been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.
They don't threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven't paid your debt in full. We're in Ohio.
"Fuck free healthcare, education, food quality standards, safety regulations,y right to own guns is more important than all that, and fuck them (school shooting) kids"
Mmmhmmmm... I actually live in one such country, if you want a gun you take a course, pass a test (and a background check), get a license, and you can then go buy a gun.
In the united shitholes of america, you find a guy on Craigslist and meet in a Walmart parking lot...
Infact virtually ALL the gun crimes committed in my country is because of guns being smuggled in from yours!
But hey, that's a real cool straw man you got there! Good luck with that!
I’m from this region of Pennsylvania. Abuse and bullying is protected by the culture of this region. The sheriff’s office has done mass murders against strikers in the coal fields. 1860’s I believe. This guy stepped down. But his sentiment carries far in the community. It’s a bigoted hate filled hole.
A literal gun cult is financing far right radicals into local politics. A hate group is trying to force schools to out children who say they are gay. And YouTube protects their account where they post hours of hate content.
I worked with the president of the group before. He was fired from his job because he was accused of stealing $15,000.
Unfortunately nothing new. I remember as a kid that if you didn’t have money in your lunch account, your lunch was taken away and if you were lucky they’d have a peanut butter sandwich for you.
If you were in a negative balance, such as if your parents were unable to pay, then you’d also be restricted from certain activities and pressured to make your parents pay what was owed.
I think school lunch should cost something, but very little, just so the kids can understand the value of money
like a dollar per lunch isnt that much at all
but it shouldn't place a large financial strain on poor families
edit: I honestly feel like a lot of you are simply looking at the upvote/downvotes ratio and basing your reaction off that rather than the content. If the lunch is cheap enough, everyone will be able to cover it, but I'm advocating for making it cost slightly more than zero
Now that we have that out of the way: Kids can learn the value of money without going hungry. Let them work in the garden or pick up a weekend job, let them buy something they really want for themselves and boom, they learn about it. but don't deny them fucking food because they can't pay for it.
If you're just going to assign an arbitrary token amount to charge for the food then how will that teach the kids the value of money? And since the kids themselves wouldn't be the ones actually paying for the meal it's still a disconnected symbolic gesture unlikely to impart any lifelong lessons. You're going to be spending more effort and potentially money in tracking and enforcing payments for the meals than what you're going to recoup by (under)charging for them. How about, since everyone is already paying taxes toward education, we just allocate some of those funds to providing food for every student/child if they are actually intended to be the future productive members and leaders of society?
I would think a better method to teach the value of money is to explain the economies of scale and couple that with showing how much planning and work goes into providing and preparing the "free" meals so they aren't taken for granted as just being manna from heaven.
I'm not sure you understand that anyone can afford to pay a small enough sum for food
the point isn't that the money will cover the cost
if lunch costs less than a dollar every single kid will be able to pay that and if they don't their teacher could easily provide because of how small a sum of money that is
Lunch debt? The fuck outta here with that dystopian nightmare shit
It's the first stop on the way to slave labor.
Wait until you learn about "vanlords" in Los Angeles.
Christ empowered his followers to clothe the naked, feed the hungry and tend to the sick. For some reason American Christians have decided that these explicit dictates should he ignored, much like the reminder that it is not their role to judge, so that they can instead focus on bigotry.
That's pretty much the entire history of Christianity.
It's really not.
The corrupt nature of the Church as an institution exists to take advantage of the naive humanitarianism of its fellowship.
People, by and large, do want to help their neighbors and provide for the young and the elderly. Modern prosperity gospel Christianity and historical Catholicism/Protestantism hasn't change human nature. People in the church still pursue benevolent goals. It only pollutes human perception and education, by misallocating resources intended to improve society.
I think they're using "Christianity" to refer to the institution.
No, it isn’t. For most of history most Christians were taking care of those around them. It is with industrialism and Calvinism that we see people move away from this.
The infuriating part is a different beared Jewish guy tried to put into practice these ideals and the USA fought to stop it everywhere.
Constantine ended the institutional persecution of monotheists within the Roman empire. The apostolic church had been groving along well before that.
The end to formalized persecution gave Christians an opportunity to begin organizing openly - leading to the Ecumenical Councils that would define the church as an institution for the next two millennium. But the foundations were all in place well beforehand.
The Church, as a military power, has always been mediocre at best. Rome itself was gutted during the transfer of the court to Byzantium. And this laid the seeds for the Roman Orthodox split, which divides the church to this day.
The Western empire dissolved into feudal states, with Catholicism and the Church operating as a kind of diplomatic corps and patronage network for European aristocrats.
It wasn't until the emergence of Protestantism, following the failure by the Hapsbirgs to consolidate power during the 30 Years War, that capitalist expansion began to produce imperialism in the modern sense.
The conquest and subjection that followed was in pursuit of economic growth via slavery and plunder. The church existed to help rationalize these economic pursuits, but the priesthood was secondary to the merchant classes in actually executing it.
Wait, what?
It’s sad how many downvotes you have while being correct while the other poster has a bunch if upvotes while being really off the mark.
Well Constantine convened the council of nicea to codify his rule and leave out a lot of the Bible, so there's that.
We'll also note that their supposed god claim never chimes in to distance himself from these people.
Constantinus was the Emperor of Rome before he converted the Empire. He did not create the notion of the Divine Right to Rule. His conversion was entirely politically motivated as it happens near his death.
Calvin is the one that promotes the notion that wealth is a sign of God’s love which is the opposite of what Jesus taught.
Why did you reply authoritatively if your understanding of this subject is so poor?
You need to brush up on your history then. The church's history is largely violently forcing others to convert and using the Bible to persecute those they don't like.
That is entirely unrelated to the fact that most Christian communities did in fact try to clothe, feed and tend those that needed it. Most humans will try to ease the suffering of those they know in their communities if they can because most aren’t so cold hearted
I dont understand why your down voted.
Christian institutions = \ = christian followers.
a few hundred years ago homeless people and veteran carried tokens that enabled them to be given free food and help at churches.
Paster Damian died of leprosy after 11 years of helping others with the sickness, tending their wounds, sharing food and digging graves. He kept doing so while he was sick.
The catholic church as an institution absolutely is evil but that does not automatically make believers or individual priests so.
History is Littered with proof of this. Science denying is not the answer to religious bigotry.
The fact is for most of history you wouldnt have left your county so you actually were more inclined to be closer with people you might not have loved because of expediency. You aren’t going to chow down on seconds if you know your neighbor is starving unless you are a psychopath and most humans aren’t.
No, because the point that all the bigots are missing is that religious people are generally no different than other people. If you see a starving kid you aren't going tosit in front of them chowing down. You will, presuming you aren't on the ASPD spectrum or starving yourself, feed that kid.
Most humans did this . Most humans do this. You have to raise them to believe helping others is wrong and that enters Protestant Christianity through Calvinism.
Your statements don't align with reality, which isn't surprising because religion doesn't align with reality.
Are you so prejudiced that ypu think most people would not give food to their neighbors if they were starving? Are the people around you that horrible?
I'm talking about Christians, not most people.
Yes what relevance does that have to the willingness of people to take care of their neighbors?
You keep trying to steer this to stuff I am not talking about at all, why?
Expecting Christianity to base their actions on Jesus is like expecting the Nestle corporation to base their actions on the Quik Bunny.
Every movement in history has hypocrites that follow it, and give the movement a bad name. Lumping "American Christians" together and then judging them based on the worst people who adopt that title is creating a straw man.
All American Christians that I know try and follow what you pointed out in your first sentence.
The statement on judging however is a bit misguided, Jesus didn't say to never judge, but to be careful to avoid hypocrisy and to judge with love.
At this point a substantial portion of self identified Christians in America are supporting some ideologies and programs that are the opposite if Christ’s teachings. It isn’t a small part. It might even be close to the majority.
Yeah, that's true and it's very upsetting that so many hypocrites would exist within the wider church. I'd argue that someone that doesn't follow the teachings of Christ isn't a Christian at all since that's literally what the word means.
The catch is for many of these their Churches are telling them thiscis the message of Christ
State doesn't pay for kid's lunch. If parent can't afford kid's lunch, state takes child and places them in a foster home. State pays foster home many many times the cost of lunch to take kid.
Tell me what the goal of this system is so I can call someone else a conspiracy theorist for a change.
May I introduce the Victorian concept of Children in Workhouses.
That's where you're heading.
This is EXACTLY what they want. They sell the cute ones (check the protective services website, they have them listed for placement like a weird dating service or pet adoption site). They will prison to pipeline the rest while working them in "skill camps".
CPS is a dystopian hell. I advocated for a child for a while, they would fuck up absolutely basic things, would not find out about things like hospitalization or legal trouble for weeks. When I brought up several months of basically no mental health care, they insinuated that I might be abusing the child.
They won’t take action on actual abuse. It’s Kafkaesque.
To justify their budget, they must find "clients" to put in their system. Getting clients means finding just the right parent(s) that they can bully, intimidate, and exaggerate charges against. Child services no longer operates in good faith. They won't even allow you to record their conversations because they are so apt to lie. The foster system is just as bad. Putting people on payroll to take care of kids that no one knows the location of. 23,160 foster kids were reported missing or unaccounted for in 2024. These were just the ones REPORTED. Where is the politician rage over this?
The foster care system is complicit in child trafficking, and the politicians are in on it. I recall a news story where a politician was "helping" pregnant women with visas and trafficking them and the babies.
And for good measure, the vast majority of homeless people were children who aged out of the foster care system. Foster care is a gift that keeps on giving.
My states DHS has the wrong number for a large county’s police force. They have been leaving voicemails with children’s personal information, as well as preventing cases that are supposed to be reported to the police from actually being reported - because they’re in some random guys voicemail!
I noticed this more than a month ago, have made hundreds of phone calls and emails to state agencies and politicians. They don’t care.
I spent two years as a CASA. I loved that kid. That entire experience crushed me as a human being.
Well that was a fucked up but very interesting read, thanks.
I'm betting it's a 'hungry kids yearn for the mines earlier' sort of thing
Original goal was probably to send kids to Epstein. Idk what current situation is, probably another hidden island that politicans visit.
👉👃
Kids go to public school during lunchtime. Public school feeds the children lunch (something with real nutritional value that we would all want our kids eating). Kids do not pay for this. That's it. There should be no further discussion here. If you disagree with this I want to put my thumb into your eye socket in the worst way. It's so fucked up this is even a topic of discussion.
They're the future of our country and society, and legally required to be there, but we won't feed them.
'cause 'merica you fucking commie.
There are other countries where kids bring their own lunch. We always make sandwiches and a snack for our kids to bring to school.
I do think school-provided lunches are a great idea and if done right, would guarantee every kid equal access to healthy nutrition. Unfortunately we don't have that in NL, and clearly the powers that be don't want it in the US either.
But punishing kids for lunch debt is nuts. That's absolutely a symptom of the US wanting everybody to live in debt.
Wasn't it last year schools were throwing kid's bagged lunches away? So then they force the kids to eat a school lunch or starve, then blame the parents. This is just the next illogical step of the grift.
Throwing kids' lunch away should be illegal. What if s kid has special dietary requirements? But if a school does throw it away, they have an obligation to provide a free lunch that's at least as good.
It should be illegal to throw someone else's property away without their permission, right? I mean, it's basically theft.
Trump’s new spending bill is providing $3.6 trillion tax cut for the richest among us. They already pay only 8% on average, but they own the politicians and are demanding to pay even less.
How are we supposed to pay for that if we don’t rob children of their school lunches?!
Spending less money bombing children in other places would give us more than enough funds, but that helps funnel money to the aforementioned richest among us, so that's not going to happen.
Yep that’s right, $8 billion in the new bill for Israel to continue massacring children and stealing their ancestral land.
Israel First policy is an American notion I’ll never understand. Israel is the biggest terrorist nation-state in the world right now, nobody commits war crimes and other high crimes against humanity at the rate Israel does. It’s so sad to see them dog walking American leaders every day but here we are.
They need them to breed the other terrorists they like to bomb.
How dare you invest in the future? Our potential future tax base needs to learn how to starve or go into debt - those are the most important lessons in the good old US of fucking A.
Invest in the future? But how will that affect today's profits?
This is unfair. You should want to put both thumbs into both eye sockets.
As long as you don't go all Jamie Oliver about it.
CHICKEN NUGGETS ARE DIRTY AND FOR THE POORS
/s
I agree with that kids should be fed, but what's wrong with homemade sandwiches? That's what is the norm in NL and if kids don't have them theaters notice it and will work on fixing it while given them food.
The shit we had at most schools I went to was well kinda unhealthy crap.
Nothing wrong. Bring it and eat it. But if you're kid and you don't, school should feed you. In the US kids are legally required to attend school. Forcing someone to be somewhere and not providing sustenance is not allowed in war or prison, damn well should not be allowed in schools.
"You might be giving your kids a terrible childhood, so we're going to ensure they have a terrible life starting in our first-class foster care system"
Punishing the poor for the crime of poverty.
How typically conservative.
Not pulling on those bootstraps hard enough
We should start calling them regressives
And for learning!
Do the schools actually have the authority to do that or is it like all those other empty threats I use to get? It's insane, but not surprising that the schools would threaten that. The sort of family who has to skip on paying lunch debts also doesn't have means to talk to a lawyer.
edit:
Yup, empty threats made to impoverish families.
" for neglecting your child's right to food"
So you (the district) agree that right exists? Either you're not providing food and thus you're doing the neglecting and also they don't owe you anything, or you are required to provide food regardless of payment because you're in loco parentis during the school hours. And the $450 could very likely have been used to provide food and other necessities for those kids before and after school.
If you want to charge them with neglect, you have to prove they neglected their child, not just your budget.
Carl's Jr. will "help"
Kids having lunch debt is the most American thing I've ever seen.
Starve your kid or lose them. That's quite a choice for a poor parent to make.
My late father grew up in an orphanage because my grandfather was too poor to care for 5 kids and a sick wife. My grandparents were able to take the kids home on Sundays though, so it wasn't a situation where they yielded full custody. I'm not saying an orphanage was ideal, but it's a shame that these days there is not the same kind of middle ground where kids can be cared for but still stay connected to their family. I guess that is too much of a social safety net for conservatives to tolerate.
So it's too expensive to provide school lunch, but not too expensive to completely take over the care of the children entirely. More and more, I understand what people mean when they say the cruelty is the point. This makes zero goddamned sense.
Orphan grinder...
I want to add something because I want to add a glimmer of positivity. I mean, this is all anecdotal but I'm housing one of my daughter's friends right now.
I'm still learning her history because I have absolutely zero guardianship over her and I don't pry because she's been through so much and she shares when she's ready. Her mother passed about two years ago and her dad is in the wind. Her grandma has guardianship but treated her as a burden.
I play nice with Grandma so my new daughter stays by me. I'm not sure if CPS was ever called on either her mother or grandmother or if it was just because mother passed but 'daughter' has weekly therapy and a social worker who got her into a very decent state university.
She's about to go visit for a tour and I'm so worried but also excited because she has a full ride from the state for a two or four year depending on what she wants. I've looked into the school and it's pretty great. It's going to be hard for my ex and I to pull off the same for our daughter.
The state of affairs are abysmal these last few decades but there are still good people trying to do good things. The Man isn't out to get you if you're lucky enough to get the right government employee. Or maybe you just have to suffer enough.
I know the young lady I'm talking about deserves this chance and I'm ecstatic that she has the opportunity. It makes me feel a little guilty that I'm going to miss her, but in a good way.
I wish every kid and every parent didn't have to worry so much about getting into trouble because they're already struggling. The horrors I'm learning this child has gone through shouldn't be the bar by which we set as deserving of a higher education.
I have barely anything to offer but even just feeding her and teaching her to cook and do laundry and taxes and set up a bank account makes me some sort of goddess in her eyes and I'd love to take credit but it's just too tragic to me that a child considers this little bit I have to offer as some sort of gift. What I have to offer as a 'gift' is not. It's what any child should be entitled to. I'm happy that she finally feels comfortable enough to add things she wants to the grocery list without worrying too much that she's putting me out in some way.
It may not seem like much to you, but to her it's making a world of difference. I'm reminded of a quote I got from an otherwise kind of silly movie:
"Mother is the name for God on the lips and hearts of all children."
It's a slightly changed version of a quote from William Thackeray, apparently. Whatever the case, I think it applies here. The gods and goddesses of this child's life let her down, and you may not think much of yourself or what you do, but you've chosen to be a good goddess, and that's a wonderful thing. You've blessed not only the child you've taken in, but your own, as well, by showing her how to treat others the right way.
Who made this warning?
I need a name
Because that has nothing to do with debt, putting kids in foster care wound only cost the state even more money
That is only about unbridled power and control
Absolutely delusional
Agreed. Name and shame. Whatever fucker came up with this deserves to be ostracised.
https://www.10tv.com/article/news/nation-world/kids-could-end-foster-care-over-lunch-debt-school-district-warns-parents-2019-jul/530-1952542e-0f2c-4b3a-b6f0-a32de5dbce58
The Wyoming Valley West School District.
If you want the name of the person standing behind the letter,
I'm having a hard time confirming it, but it looks like an Irvin DeRemer was the super while this occurred, but was replaced in the 2025 election.
It's also an empty threat,
Also. The majority of long term homeless individuals are people that aged out of the foster care system. The moment they turn 18 they are out on their ass with only the clothing on their back and no life skills because foster care in America is little better than prison.
Aka slavery. The stories of foster kids are often horrific.
I'm surprised there hasn't been a class action lawsuit on the behalf of all foster children (past and present) against the US government. It would almost be impossible for any other modern country to do a worse job.
I'd like to see that happen, with meaningful reparations and meaningful, systemic changes and better oversight.
Yes, but kids in foster care are easy to abuse, so your tax dollars might be worth it for some.
How the fuck is that supposed to fix anything? It's easily cheaper for the state to pay for their lunch.
Homeless people turn into cheap prison labor super easy. And foster kids become homeless so fast.
Well... Fast after they're adults. But if they're 8 years old, I wouldn't call a decade fast.
Besides the point though. You're correct, ruining people's lives is advantageous to them. Convenient scape goat for everything sucks, free labour
Chritians also love "adopting"/occasionally accidentally kidnapping the children they've helped to render desperate. The Mormons are big on this and have a whole complex system built around it. Don't take my word for it, here's a highlighted portion from a Mormon bishop's handbook:
Add that to the mile long list as to why the Mormons are a bunch of profligates deserving of butchering. Missouri was right to try to exterminate the Mormons.
I left Utah a year ago after 6 years there. I understand your anger all too well. I wish it weren't so God-damned beautiful there.
Well if it makes it any worse I ain't from Utah, I'm from the Inland Empire here in SoCal. I just think the Mormon church is probably the most destructively influencial group of the last two centuries here in the Western US. Though I do like at least one (dead) Mormon, that being John Moses Browning.
But then someone might get some benefit from their tax dollars!
Yet another reason why I hate every goddamn billionaire with the fire if a thousand suns.
Just the fact that billionaires even exist shows that our system is fucked.
*firey passion of a thousand suns
Edit: white hot intensity of a thousand suns (forgot the exact quote)
*fiery suns of a thousand passions
*sunny passions of a dozen fires
My school held my diploma for 6 months because of $20 worth of lunch debt that turned out to be a computer error.
That was 12 years ago.
Schools using food as a weapon against students is nothing new.
But why oh why aren't people having kids?!
Just a reminder that the same people who are against free school lunches for children are the ones who stand in front of abortion clinics screaming about how abortion is murder.
There's no contradiction for these people. All fetuses have a right to life and children should suffer if they don't have enough money. Shoulda worked harder at the bootstraps factory if they didn't want to eat shit their entire lives.
They max out at a 4 on Kohlberg's morality scale, ie the laws are immutable and nothing can change them. The law says that everyone should live and our system is perfect because it's our system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Kohlberg's_stages_of_moral_development
Sprinkle some smug self-satisifaction on top of this and it's a real good portrait of the Christian right. Religion is a narotic for these folks who spend their days judging others. They believe in the correct God™ and His prosperity gospel. Anyone who is poor or those who "sin" deserve their lot in life. And how are kids to learn self-reliance when they're coddled with free food? We're so weak to let our kids live in such decadent times! What's next, they won't have to pay for healthcare after they made the bad decision to get hurt or sick?
They ask how we can be so wasteful as a society while they clutch their imitation pearl necklace. Meanwhile the public's share of wealth shrinks and everyone is left to fight for the scraps. When the situation is so dire, it's easy to fight with each other than to question big business, Wall Street or the financial sector.
I highly doubt that image represents the food US kids get in school. It's too healthy and good looking (not saying it looks good, just better than it actually would be).
This looks like prison food or something. Way better than school lunch
Eh, not just America sadly. Half the world seems brainwashed into thinking that feeding children is controversial. The BBC did an article the other day about 500,000 extra kids getting them, and it got 9000 comments, split equally between "fair enough" and "but what about my tax money? 😢"
They should give the Libertarian nutcases a large enclave, and all the people who moan about their taxes being spent on other people should be forced to go and live there.
Oh, there's a pothole on your road? Hope one of the residents can afford to have it fixed. You were burgled? Can you afford to pay the police company to look into it? No streetlights, sorry. That's a waste. You carry a torch and light your own way. Pensions? Didn't you save enough?
Stop worrying about the tax bills of billionaires, for fucks sake. They can get by with less.
The fuck it wasn't
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49117936
The fact that they refused to accept the donations before the public backlash says everything. I guess people don't like it when you mess with their orphan-crushing machine?
LOL, imagine thinking Democrats would nominate someone standing on a "let's feed poor people's kids" platform. Was never going to happen.
I got kicked off free lunch when my mom married a rich guy. I didn’t eat lunch, or breakfast from 6-11th grade. I’d start to feel sick during the last couple hours of class.
It’s not something any child should experience. It was not something I had power over, other than digging quarters out machines to get like a Vitamin Water or something.
That's a statement in itself really. Just another one for the history books
The state wants to own your kids, that way you’re out of the way and they have slaves for life
This is a little different but it sticks out.
My baby brother was born in 91 and when he eventually got into kindergarten one of his teachers flagged him for his speech impediment. He'd pronounce his P's as B's.
He was 5 and talked a mile a minute before he was two. He just couldn't quite get the hang of that one part.
My parents weren't worried. We were all helping him. My other brother and I were 6 years older than him and we we're latchkey kids by the time I was 10.
My parents worked second/third jobs and second/third shifts rotating to make everything work for us. We barely saw them both at the same time.
I remember my Ma, and even Pops, being pissed as fuck and our chores and cleaning day was ramped up for a month or two, and all us kids had individual therapy sessions where they grilled us with questions we didn't understand because the school call CPS on them because they wouldn't (read: couldn't) make after school speech therapy work with their schedules and they knew he'd learn on his own eventually anyway. They just made my parents lives that much more stressful in that time.
This was over 30 years ago now and I have my own kids, and bonus kids even! I have my own stories I could tell but this is the absolute worst because I saw how much it stressed out my overworked parents. My brother is a functioning member of society who got over his slight speech impediment within the year, with our help but mostly letting him develop on his own time.
Meanwhile, us kids just considered it a matter of course that we wrap up plates and Tupperware after each meal. One plate for Gertie our nextdoor neighbor and whatever was left went to Jorge's family two doors down. We also learned how to mow the lawn only so the Grandma and Grandpa Hass, our other next door neighbors wouldn't have to anymore. They weren't actual family but they were to us. Jorge's family got all my and my brothers' hand-me-down clothes for his younger siblings, too. We didn't quite understand why at the time. It's just what you do. But yeah, make a struggling family's life that much harder with your performative concern.
This sounds like a great way to generate a different headline,
Sounds like a fly-over shit hole state to me.
Isn't this several years old, or is it happening again?
The original story i heard the school backed down for 2 reasons. 1 a local millionaire offered to pay the miss $26k and 2 the press was causing a lot of negative attention.
Good
Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.
At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn't have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.
Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.
As a Swede i think your system in the Netherlands sounds so foreign. When I was in school we always had 2 hot meals to chose between and a 'salad bar's. All paid for by the tax system. No one should ever be forced to go hungry imo.
Sounds like heaven! in Denmark we have to make our own rugbrød sandwich at home.. Every day.. From kindergarden until... Well some do it their entire life..
You can buy a hot meal in gymnasium but it is very expensive
In NL most people don't even eat hot lunches on a regular basis. Even at work people just bring sandwiches in most Dutch companies unless they are internationally focussed.
Nobody should go hungry, but I don't see the appeal or need for a centralised food system. Pretty sure there is less food waste if you just give your childeren food from home.
Pretty bold to assume all kids have food at home.
Like I said in the original comment you didn't read the kids who haven't had food would generally been given food at school
That can easily lead to "othering" those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.
Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.
Probably doesn't understand the disparity of the home setting of kids in the US
Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.
Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won't spoil if he can't bring himself to eat.
From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:
Which is intersecting with:
The thing is that something like sandwiches aren't cheaper to produce in bulk and a lot of the cafeteria's will have either a fair amount of food left over or they barely make enough for everybody to combat that.
I don't think the food in US school is really that fresh.
No person should go hungry period, but I rather fix the reason why most go hungry than fix the solution. And I have had mandatory lunches in school and generally there is just a choice between meat, fish or vegaterian and I often find myself picking the least bad option.
Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.
I understand the appeal of bringing a cold lunch, but from a nutritional perspective only few sandwiches really are healthy. Most breads have little to no whole grain part (I remember that ultra fluffy bread from the Netherlands exchange, it was amazing but definitely not nutritious), and at best you can fit in two slices of tomato and cucumber and a salad leaf. The greatest part is the fillers of usually "animal protein" which contain too many saturated fats.
Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely make a healthy sandwich with whole grain bread, homemade hummus, grated carrot, tomato, salad, cucumber, sprouts, quality cheese or seitan slices... But most people just don't do that. Most people take light bread with butter or cream cheese and deli meats and cheese on top.
I have been at a congress a couple of years back (I work in biomedical and nutrition science) and one presentation was by someone who gave dietary advice in clinics and reviewed some common tips and guidelines of dietetics. One of them was recommending adding bread as a whole grain source. The caveat was that people would not just eat the whole grain bread (if they were even to choose whole grain instead of white or light bread to begin with), but that - even when you substitute lets say a serving of white noodles with actual whole grain bread - you don't eat the bread alone. You put toppings on it, butter, deli meats, cheeses, which are all high calorie and not exactly healthy for you. Patients (especially the ones trying to lose weight) ended up increasing their calorie intake and their sat fat and salt intake by adding healthy bread to their diet.
I don't want to say that a cooked, warm lunch is automatically more healthy than a sandwich - but you have many more options here and more practical ones than with sandwiches. You can add so much more vegetables to it.
You have to get the volkoren (whole grain) bread which is actually nutritious and most Dutch people actually don't eat it enough. And it is generally considered to be better for you than most lunches people have. Like having Spaghetti for lunch like the stereotype for Italians.
I find it to be really impractical and expensive to eat hot lunches at work. I would skip my daily walk where I eat my sandwiches and I doubt ill be able to warm it up, clean the microwave or whatever I use to heat it and eat it in the span of half an hour. Especially if everybody needs to heat their food.
Every time when I have had good hot lunches (of going outside to a restaurant etc) it would have costed me 15-25 euro excluding drinks, but yeah that is somewhere else I understand that. Another issue is that I generally do not have enough appetite to eat food in the evening.
My sandwiches aren't the healtiest to start with because I don't eat margarine which we tradionally put on bread (it's not even actual butter anymore) and I generally put the same thing on it because well I am not even that much of a fan of sandwiches let alone creating them. I put deli ham on it and sandwichspread.
Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
You could absolutely do that, or cook dishes that are meant to be eaten cold to begin with. Onigiri, buddha bowls, gazpacho soup (with some volkoren bread ;) ), a salad with falafel balls, etc. A zucchini-egg-oats-ham-cheese slice from the oven is also a cool afternative, you can cut it up and freeze it and just let it thaw as you need - and eat it with one hand. Bring some baby tomatoes on your walk. Eating a cold lunch doesn't mean you need to choose between leftover cold spaghetti with meatballs and a sandwich.
I understand the value of taking a walk, but eating while walking is also not exactly the healthiest.
Last but not least - our little conversation here is actually off topic. The question is about school lunches. And while you might like your cold, unhealthy sandwich and a walk (all power to you) - school children who can't return back to class earlier if they eat faster do absolutely deserve a warm and nutritious lunch. Remember that in the US, a lot of people cannot afford to feed their children at home, let alone with a warm and healthy meal. Maybe a sandwich for lunch is fine if you then have a great breakfast at home and a big dinner, but imagine all you eat in a day is a white bread pb&j sandwich for lunch and then the same for dinner, breakfast skipped. This is the reality for many more people - many more children - than we can imagine. And children move more and they are growing and they have to concentrate at school, they need to be full and nourished.
This is why this is so important. Providing all children with a free or at least dirt cheap meal that is both tasty (as in, accepted by the children's freakishly picky palate) and nutritious is an incredible challenge, but it is possible. Yet it is treated as an afterthought at best and poor people shaming and punishment at worst. If a child gets a pb&j for dinner and no breakfast, it better have a goddamn delicious huge ass plate of wholegrain maccaroni with vegetables and chicken breast and a low fat joghurt with fruit salad for lunch. And a salad bar. Because salad bars rock. I'd prefer it not to be chicken, but I probably have the only kid that genuinely likes boiled tofu over meat.
You call sandwiches unhealthy while here they are considered healthy. I might look into some other dishes, but I am not the biggest cooking fan.
I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence. Which might not even fully fix the issue due to picky eather etc.
Also the waste is a lot more than if you just bring school lunch in a reusable container.
But as long as poverty isn’t fixed it is better for offer school lunches than let the kids get hungry of course, but it will not help push people to end poverty
I wholeheartedly agree here, but this would mean a huge ass systemic change. It would be infinitely better to treat the cause and not the symptom - but it would also be harder, take much more effort, more change, more willingness from politicians, more consistency. This is just not realistic in the short or even medium run. Providing free and healthy school lunches is already a very hard and difficult goal/job. However, it has the benefit of being very concrete. You have one task that you focus on with direct benefits. Improving the conditions so that parents can feed their children better is very vague and much more multifacetted. Where do you even start? Minimum wage, working conditions, daycare options, healthcare, boosting the economy, increasing social security... 100% you should do all that, but man, you'll wait a long time for this to become so much better as to have a measurable effect on "lunch performance".
Also, even at the end, parents can still make bad choices. As you mentioned, sandwiches are considered healthy even in the Netherlands. I do, indeed, work in nutrition science, and the ideal sandwich is healthy, but 99% of people eat severely unhealthy sandwiches. A friend of mine is a dietician and, my Lord, I've at least had the privilege of reading studies and not working with people because people are dumb. I can't believe that in 2025 you got to tell people that white bread and candy is not good for you or that you shouldn't drink sugared soda instead of water. People don't know that sugar makes you fat. People don't know what a calorie is. People don't know that you can't soak your salad in ranch dressing and put 15 fried chicken fingers on top and that's not "a healthy low calorie salad". You will always have negligent parents. You will always have parents with mental health issues or other struggles who cannot safely provide food. Especially in a socially rotten country like the US.
Last but not least, why not do both. You can absolutely both work on fixing the underlying issues and in the meantime work on providing free and healthy school lunches all over the country (or, for that matter, planet). Actually, you absolutely should do both. They don't exclude each other a bit.
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
We’re the tallest people in the world and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to be malnourished here, so maybe we’re doing something right :D
My sibling in Christ, your grandparents smoked and drank whilst being pregnant with your mom and dad.
(This isn't supposed to be a diss, I'm just trying to point out that this might be some survivor bias and that our ideas of what is healthy or not change over time. Which is great, we always add knowledge. It's not so long ago we discovered vitamins. My former supervisor discovered the first biotin receptor. God, a couple of years ago keto was the new hot shit.)
(The Netherlands, moreover, does have a lot going on that plays into its citizens' health. Doesn't it? You seem like a solid social democracy and you got more bikes than people. Maybe it's that and not the cheese sandwiches :P)
It is the same in Denmark..
it is way more convenient and nice to be served a hot meal every day.
But I don't really understand why people can't just make a sandwich from home, especially if they will get in legal trouble.
They should do a UBI for kids. I think 30 euros should be enough to cover a montg
I'm not sure you know how much a euro is worth if you think 30 euros a month is enough to feed a kid?
A loaf of good quality ryebread will last a week. 3 euros.
5 euros for butter.
Sausage is around 4 euros. Should be good for a week.
Remoulade just takes it to the next level, should be 3 euros.
Yeah it is probably on the lean side.
In Germany it was pretty unusual to eat in school at all, you had breakfast at home (7AM-ish), school starts at 8 and finished at 2PM latest, usually 1.15PM. We all went home for lunch afterwards, and that was that.
Same here, I brought my own lunch, sandwiches mostly, all the time I was in school as a kid a long time ago whenever I wasn't going back home for lunch. I prepared lunches for my own kids all the time they were in school.
Punishing kids for lunch debt is evil, at least give them the right to vote if you are to play that game.
I really like your spelling "teature" but it's officially spelled teacher.
Because English is silly like that.
My school here in the USA we had school lunch too, it was usually pretty ok, kids also packed lunches the same as your school.
What's NL? Why Americans always write their state names in abbreviations and expect people from other parts of the world to understand?
NL is the ISO standard abbreviation for The Netherlands and considering our history in the world (both good and bad) I assume most people understand where it is from....
Ok, sorry mate. As Americans always does this, I assumed you're from USA. My mistake. Have a good rest of the day.
Fair I understand it, I run into the same issue, but tying The Netherlands is pretty annoying especially with the amount I talk about it haha and a lot of people do understand what I am talking about.
Good day to you as well
Lmao your first hot take is hilarious though. "Why do Americans always do this shit! Oh not American, never mind, sorry for being a cunt."
Maybe realize were all humans first?
/s??
I read that as the Netherlands as it's their standard, international abbreviation
Yep. Our high school had a cafeteria where you could buy snacks, but none of the schools I went to ever supplied lunches as such. It’s basically the parents and kids responsibility to feed themselves. As it should be.
Maybe Dutch parents (used to be) much more responsible than those elsewhere. 🤷♂️
Why "as it should be?"
I don't have or want kids, but I want ever child to grow up healtht and food secure. These are humans that can't work for themselves and have no means to protect themselves from food insecurity, and they will be my younger coworkers, and bankers and brokers and building my roads and and and.... I want them to be mentally and physically well.
I don't understand why our society builds sidewalks and playgrounds and funds schools to teach kids how to be humans, but feeding them is a bridge too far.... We already hold them captive in the middle of the day when one of the 3 meals is served anyways....
I agree. Kids should be fed. But that’s not the school’s job. It’s to teach.
The Netherlands has a robust social system. There’s welfare for people without jobs, there’s financial assistance for raising a child, there’s food banks, etc. Etc. And plenty of help getting into these assistance programs.
Basically, there is NO reason for a parent not to be able to feed their child. Even if they have zero money, there’s help. The only thing they (or the kid) needs to do is make some sandwiches to take with them for school lunch. That’s it.
I'm glad you live somewhere where this problem isn't even phathomable to you.
You can certainly argue that it isn't the schools job specifically, but it would be the most practical and efficient choice. Kids are all already gathered there at the right time, facilities usually exist or can be added to buildings....
But to say "just pack a sandwich." ...... I just wish I lived somewhere where that was it. That THAT was the barrier.
Well then, I sincerely hope the place where you live gets better :-)
Thanks.
If you want to look at this situation from an economic point of view ..... what's cheaper?
Pay a kids lunch every day for about 12-14 years .... and for a growing kid, the price wouldn't be that much, especially if you are paying in bulk amounts for hundreds or thousands of kids.
or
Don't pay their lunch, let the parents go into debt, take the kids into foster care .... now you as the government have to pay for legal expenses to take the kid away, expenses to have police and social service workers to do the work, foster expenses to house the kid and care for them (now you are having to pay for every single meal for them for years), give up the kid once they become of age and go out on their own after foster care as a disillusioned, angry and frustrated young man or woman who will more than likely end up on the street dealing drugs, crime or prostitution ... who will then grow up causing or contributing to crime and increasing the costs of police, legal, emergency health care, security and penitentiary .... and chances are they will have children who will end up at school not being able to pay for their lunch
....
If you pay to help the kid when they are young, there is more of a chance they will grow up to be a contributing healthy member of society. If you don't they will become a lifelong burden on society and cause endless expenses that will be far more money than any school lunches you could have bought when they were ten years old.
Those in power do not want a contributing healthy member of society. They want malleable, docile workers that will do as they’re told and not challenge the system.
I disagree. What they want is to threaten those they see as inferior. It's a power trip borne from an ideological feedback loop. Sense and goals are secondary to "poor people need to take responsibility for feeding their children, I'm not paying for their decisions".
I don't even want to look at it from that perspective. As civilized society we need to feed and educate children. All of them. Economics can be figured out for sure, but if this is a priority we can certainly make it happen.
What are you, some kind of communist?
My wife runs a school kitchen, a big school, 2k+ high schoolers and almost 20 staff. Her pay is actually terrible, but the job has good medical insurance and I'm self employed with no benefits so she's been sticking with it. Collecting debt is part of her job. They never withhold a basic meal (no extras if they have unpaid debt) but that meal gets added to their debt.
They don't threaten anything legal like in this story, but they will not give you your diploma or transfer your credits if you haven't paid your debt in full. We're in Ohio.
I don't think there's any other country in the world that has such policies.
https://www.cnn.com/2019/07/20/us/pennsylvania-school-lunch-debt-trnd
Unless this is happening again, this story is from 2019. Still bad, just not recent
Yeah, it's from 2019. The original article the bitly link went to is gone but it's still on archive
Not wanting to feed children doesn’t seem very pro-life.
If every American learned what citizens in other 1st world countries have that we don't, there would be a revolution tomorrow.
A lot of them know but choose to look away because "mUh FrEeDoM"
"Fuck free healthcare, education, food quality standards, safety regulations,y right to own guns is more important than all that, and fuck them (school shooting) kids"
Signed -america's "patriots"
Nevermind that lots of countries allow for personal firearm ownership.
Mmmhmmmm... I actually live in one such country, if you want a gun you take a course, pass a test (and a background check), get a license, and you can then go buy a gun.
In the united shitholes of america, you find a guy on Craigslist and meet in a Walmart parking lot...
Infact virtually ALL the gun crimes committed in my country is because of guns being smuggled in from yours!
But hey, that's a real cool straw man you got there! Good luck with that!
I think you missed my point if you're accusing me of straw-manning, I was pointing out that even their flimsy justification is baseless.
We literally are under coup rule and all anyone is *doing is making up rude nicknames for the coup front man.
No they'll spew some bullshit about it being infeasable or too expensive or too restricting or but sometimes…
I’m from this region of Pennsylvania. Abuse and bullying is protected by the culture of this region. The sheriff’s office has done mass murders against strikers in the coal fields. 1860’s I believe. This guy stepped down. But his sentiment carries far in the community. It’s a bigoted hate filled hole.
A literal gun cult is financing far right radicals into local politics. A hate group is trying to force schools to out children who say they are gay. And YouTube protects their account where they post hours of hate content.
I worked with the president of the group before. He was fired from his job because he was accused of stealing $15,000.
Unfortunately nothing new. I remember as a kid that if you didn’t have money in your lunch account, your lunch was taken away and if you were lucky they’d have a peanut butter sandwich for you.
If you were in a negative balance, such as if your parents were unable to pay, then you’d also be restricted from certain activities and pressured to make your parents pay what was owed.
Grew up with lunch debt as a kid and that headline boils my blood in ways I probably shouldn't say out loud.
The same as debtors prison, how is that supposed to fix anything? Accomplishes literally nothing other than punishing people for being poor.
how about you start punishing companies for not paying people a livable wage?
That picture of the food is a damn feast compared to what actually gets served.
And they have the nerve to ask why people aren't having kids anymore
America, the only country where they think they could not be any more selfish.
Imagine going into lunch debt for horrible cafeteria food
You wanna eat?
You want to eat?
No more parents!
I think school lunch should cost something, but very little, just so the kids can understand the value of money
like a dollar per lunch isnt that much at all
but it shouldn't place a large financial strain on poor families
edit: I honestly feel like a lot of you are simply looking at the upvote/downvotes ratio and basing your reaction off that rather than the content. If the lunch is cheap enough, everyone will be able to cover it, but I'm advocating for making it cost slightly more than zero
You know what, fuck you.
Now that we have that out of the way: Kids can learn the value of money without going hungry. Let them work in the garden or pick up a weekend job, let them buy something they really want for themselves and boom, they learn about it. but don't deny them fucking food because they can't pay for it.
everyone has at least a dollar
and if they don't then have the lunch be further subsidized
but the cost should be just above $0
If you're just going to assign an arbitrary token amount to charge for the food then how will that teach the kids the value of money? And since the kids themselves wouldn't be the ones actually paying for the meal it's still a disconnected symbolic gesture unlikely to impart any lifelong lessons. You're going to be spending more effort and potentially money in tracking and enforcing payments for the meals than what you're going to recoup by (under)charging for them. How about, since everyone is already paying taxes toward education, we just allocate some of those funds to providing food for every student/child if they are actually intended to be the future productive members and leaders of society?
I would think a better method to teach the value of money is to explain the economies of scale and couple that with showing how much planning and work goes into providing and preparing the "free" meals so they aren't taken for granted as just being manna from heaven.
yeah 90%+ of the cost would be covered and the rest would be small enough that it wouldnt place a financial burden on anyone
I'm not sure you understand that anyone can afford to pay a small enough sum for food
the point isn't that the money will cover the cost
if lunch costs less than a dollar every single kid will be able to pay that and if they don't their teacher could easily provide because of how small a sum of money that is