[WWLink]

We shouldn't let perfect be the enemy of good. I'd rather see kids get free pizza and hot dogs for school lunch, than I would a system where it costs $8 per student and only some kids get free lunch, but it's 100% vegan fair trade certified healthy food.

Now if you can pull a boiling frog meme and make the pizza be healthy, haha more power to them!

[dopidopHN]

I agree with you, I really do. Some meal is better than no meal.

But we forgot how to make decent food at scale.

[Kon-Peki]

Many schools, especially newer ones, do not have the facilities to cook real meals.

We should definitely encourage schools to renovate and make use of the kitchens when they have them, encourage kitchen facilities be included in new construction, and maybe even encourage creative solutions when no other options exist.

[dopidopHN]

Absolutely. Yes. The local part goes a long ways

Some hopeful example :

Quebec hospitals started cooking all their food internally on the same budget.

More and more French municipalities stopped their frozen food subscription to hire a handful of cooks and gardeners with a similar budgets. ( those are minimum wages jobs than can be sourced locally )

To conclude : human have been cooking food in batch for quiet a while. That what I mean when I say « we forgot » : some communal facilities like school don’t even have kitchen anymore.

[krapp]

We didn't forget. It would just be expensive, and Americans simply don't want their hard-earned tax dollars to pay to feed other people's kids, so schools have to resort to cheap solutions. It took radical activism (mostly by the black community and groups like the black panthers) just to get school lunches to begin with, and Republicans/Conservatives have been trying to tear it down ever since.

[dopidopHN]

I get your US context. That’s a handful. Thanks for providing that ( irony : 0% )

I just want to play devils advocate on the cost : How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?

We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.

We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods. That should be considerably easier.

( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )

A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.

Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?

[krapp]

>How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?

Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market.

[0] https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/3/22/17152460/healthy-eating...

> how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?

Make them pay for it. If they can't pay, they don't eat.

[dopidopHN]

Thanks for the vox link, I can’t load it now, I’m traveling and have no bandwidth.

I’m ready to change my mind once I’m reaching a wifi.

In interval :

how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?

Random: Let’s say the Roman army. Ok. They were relying on canned food a lot. ( garnum )

But for sure they were not eating frozen hotdog

[krapp]

>how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?

We didn't. Child mortality was higher, populations were smaller, life expectancy was lower and malnutrition and starvation were more common.

Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.

But again, the problem isn't modern processed food, which can be perfectly healthy, it's an unwillingness to fund school lunches enough to provide more than cheap, empty calories.