Yet we in Britain do not generally hate and fear our government, the way so many Americans seem to hate and fear theirs.
Thanks - I missed that on previously scanning the thread. It’s a local dish for the school in question, which makes much more sense now.
That’s where we differ, I think they very much are the same thing. It is all education.
I’m OK with making school lunches available for all students. I’m one of those “lazy” parents whose child buys his lunch in the cafeteria most of the time, and he’s usually fine with what’s on the menu. But I’ve seen him on days when he doesn’t like what’s being offered, and most of what’s on his plate goes in the trash. Then he’s hungry all afternoon, cranky when he gets home, and he raids the kitchen looking for something to eat, leading to overeating because he’s physically hungry and emotionally pissed off. (We usually plan ahead for these days, but it usually happens when there’s a change in the menu that we didn’t anticipate, like all of the snow make-up days.)
That said, I’d be fine with mandatory lunches if there were choices available. For example, one choice could vary each day, so there may be chicken tikka masala on Monday, pizza on Tuesday, meat loaf on Wednesday, bean burritos on Thursday, and fish on Friday. But there could also be a fixed option, such as baked ziti or some such that’s kid-friendly and a known quantity; if they don’t like the entree du jour, they know there’s something they will like. Kids with dietary or cultural needs, such as food allergies or kids from kosher/halal families would be able to get waivers so they could bring food from home. And, yes, a doctor’s note would be required for the dietary stuff.
I can’t figure out how US schools are going to come up with a rota of dishes which are multiculturally acceptable and nutritious, devoid of major allergens, and attractive to children. Most schools wouldn’t be able to serve anything with peanuts. Many schools would not be able to serve pork. The serving size appropriate for overweight Annie isn’t right for athlete Oscar.
That said, if a choice between two meals was offered each day, maybe this would work.
Choice A
Beans and rice in some vegetarian permutation; cheese optional
Seasonal fruit
Seasonal vegetable or a baked sweet potato
Choice B
Chicken/turkey or beef or fish
Potato (baked or boiled)
Seasonal fruit
Seasonal vegetable
It would be OK to have the fruit cooked into a dessert, or the meat in a casserole.
There are a lot of ways to make an odd food accepted, but most of these ways are incompatible with mass food service, I’m afraid.
Have you looked at the Buzzfeed link showing meals from around the world? I guarantee that kids everywhere look at school lunch and think, “How does this food compare with what I can get at home?”
If they decide that it looks at least as delicious as what they’ll get at home, they’ll snarf it down. If it looks not quite as good, but good enough that they may as well eat now rather than waiting three hours, they’ll do that. If it looks gross compared to what they get at home, kid’s gonna wait. Again, guaranteed, based on my experience in the cafeteria.
The US has created a real challenge: kids are marketed a tremendous amount of fatty, high-salt, high-sugar foods, and a lot of kids regularly eat this way at home, and it’s freakin’ delicious (and contributes to obesity and other problems). The current thinking is that school lunch needs to offer an alternative to that diet, which is true–but the current thinking doesn’t take account of the child’s own decision-making process.
I had some students write a letter to our district’s cafeteria manager about this topic. Their proposal? Use some salt, ferchrissakes! I think this is a great idea: while reducing fat intake and sugar intake is important for kids, reducing salt intake is nowhere near as important, and so the school should use as much as as necessary to make dishes delicious.
Respectfully, I disagree about the salt. Yes, make salt available on the table. It’s a good lesson to see how much salt you would have to sprinkle on food to bring its taste to your preference. But saltiness is a learned preference. If we’re making this mandatory lunch an educational experience, learning what vegetables and meats taste like naturally is a big part of the education.
This is the case in our school district. In fact, no sugary items are allowed at all, which I think is overkill. I’m in a pretty hippie part of California, though.
I grew up on school lunches (though I didn’t always like them), and I think the concept is a great thing – but I don’t like it being mandatory, if only because my daughter a) is generally a good eater, but occasionally will decide she won’t eat something that seems totally innocuous to me, and b) completely loses all emotional control if she doesn’t eat enough at a meal. I mean, my very easy-going child goes into flailing-on-the-ground screaming tantrums about small things that normally wouldn’t faze her at all. (She gets this from me; I am like this as well, although I have more coping strategies than I did when I was as kid.)
If I could never pack a lunch for her if it was clear to me she wouldn’t like the day’s offering, I think she’d be extremely hard to handle on some days. Why subject everyone to that?
There’s no such thnk as… oh never mind.
I’m torn. I hate anything nanny state related. But I’m lazy enough to be happy to leave making the kid’s lunch to someone else. But in the end I am against it being mandatory. Because kids will throw out food before eating anything they don’t like. So a lot of those taxpayer paid meals are going in the garbage regardless of how lovingly they are made. And a lot of kids will be hungry.
Lose the pie crust.
Slice up the potatoes and onions, and chop up 6 or 8 pieces of bacon. Take a casserole dish [a standard round or rectangular Corning French White covered casserole dish is one of my go-to pieces of cookware.] Start layering the potatoes and onion and bits of bacon, and periodically sprinkle with freshly cracked pepper and chopped fresh parsley. When you run out of ingredients to layer, pop the cover on and put in the oven at about 400F. Bake until a long bamboo skewer or thin piece of uncooked spaghetti easily pierces the potatoes and onions all the way to the bottom of the casserole in the center. Take out, eat with a nice tossed salad. You can also add in chopped cabbage and call it lazy pierogue.
The linked article is talking about this happening in the UK. Most of those accommodations are already happening, just on a smaller scale. Many primary schools here have already entirely banned peanuts.
Well, we fear them in the sense that we fear they’re bungling incompetent cretins, rather than in a sinister sense.
They are quite delicious, I’m not a big pie-eater but they usually have a thick crust with soft potato making up most of the innards. God knows how they made it a healthy option, though.
I would be offended if I were required to let the school teach my child phonics instead of doing it myself, should I have the inclination to do so. Would probably do a better job.
If swinging in the chairs damages them (the excuse used by my teachers), that’s the school’s prerogative.
I’ll dress my kid how I want. And no, she won’t call you “sir”.
I triply disagree :). First, salt on the table could work in a middle- or high school once you purged it of assholes who’d use it to play mean pranks. But you can’t rely on kindergarteners to use salt competently, nor even on third-graders to use it competently (some can, but some can’t).
Second, salt isn’t a learned preference. It’s a necessary nutrient that we and other mammals instinctively crave, and it does chemical things in food that fundamentally change the way other flavors are experienced.
Third, sprinkling salt on food as a last-minute thing leads to different taste sensations from adding salt during cooking. That’s why virtually no recipe for a cooked savory dish you can find, meat or bean or vegetable, leaves out salt. Go ahead–check around, and as long as you’re not specifically searching for low-sodium dishes, I think you’ll find that I’m right.
Sorry, but they are. My in-laws were totally anxious about what to serve me. They had as hard a time with the “Does she eat bacon? Does she eat ham?” conversation as Homer Simpson. See, they knew there was something called “kosher” and that “Jews don’t eat pork,” but they didn’t really know if pork was in bacon. They’re not stupid, but they’d never had to think about it. Even now, the idea of attempting to describe kosher cooking, with the separate knives and the no real bacon bits and the meat and the milk, oy. I shudder to consider it.
Yes, but I expect the food service professionals who run a school dining hall are much more familiar with food customs than your in-laws. There are probably classes in such things.
Don’t make me whip out my “But the fish broth makes the vegetarian soup tastier!” college Saga anecdote.
I’m a fan of free lunch programs for students and even free breakfasts because there are a lot of kids who are food insecure. I am not a fan of banning lunches that students bring from home though.
I would have a HUGE problem with mandatory school lunches, and so would my kid. In fact, he wouldn’t eat them, (even now, at the age of 44 he wouldn’t eat that crap and neither would I) so he’d go hungry. I would not like that.
I’m very much in favor of school lunches for kids that want or need them.
You are wrong on this one. Craving salt is natural and everything tastes better with some salt. But the line between “pleasantly seasoned” and “unbearably salty” is indeed conditioned. Studies have shown that people who get accustomed to a low salt diet rather quickly ratchet down the amount of salt they add to make something taste “right”, while people who eat high salt diets acclimate and expect more salt across the board.