Consumer Reports called on the Department of Agriculture today to remove Lunchables food kits from the National School Lunch Program. CR recently compared the nutritional profiles of two Lunchable kits served in schools and found they have even higher levels of sodium than the kits consumers can buy in the store. CR also tested 12 store-bought versions of Lunchables and similar kits and found several contained relatively high levels of lead and cadmium. All but one also tested positive for phthalates, chemicals found in plastic that have been linked to reproductive problems, diabetes, and certain cancers.
Man, what the fuck happened to LUNCH LADIES. Let them goddamn cook!
what? paying someone an actual salary for actual work instead of just microwaving lead to kids?
wont you think of the economy
Please. It’s not lead.
It’s salted lead.
Salted leaded plastic if we’re being precise.
In California they’re actually quitting to work in fast food, because the minimum wage doesn’t affect govt workers.
If true LOfuckingL and I’m so not surprised.
I was listening to the radio yesterday about all the school boards now suing social media companies. It’s great and I applaud it but let’s get real, government is shirking their damn job if school boards are expected to reign in corporations.
We got this bad because of laissez faire attitudes around a free market and letting companies do what they damn well please.
it’ll be intresting to see how raising the minimum wage for fast food workers specifically impacts the low income job market. I suspect that fast food will have no trouble hiring and other low paying jobs will.
also it’s fucking sad that teachers are quitting to work at fucking taco bell. real morale downer for both the students and teachers. I’m well into adulthood now but even back then I regret working hard at school. kids these days seem to be learning that in time. I just hope they put in the effort at self-education instead
Entitled kids, don’t they already get enough lead in school from their peers‽
Back in my day we had leaded gas and paint and liked it!
We didn’t need seatbelts either. Good Times
It’s crazy. We had full kitchens in our elementary/middle school and high school. I can’t remember them ever actually doing anything other than reheating precooked frozen food.
my experience was closer to the opposite, elementary was always reheated packaged stuff and after that the quality improved a bit. I think the real problem is it seems pretty random if it’s good or not
Quality never improved, my comment was more intended to read “they had full kitchens they didn’t use”
They all got contracted out to companies like Alsco.
Or God forbid Aramark
we didn’t just contract the same companies to build schools and prisons, we contract the same people to provide lunch in them too
Sloppy Joe?
I made them extra schloppy for ya!
I mean my kids school still has them.
What? Lunchables are expensive as hell and have practically no nutrition!
Sounds like someone’s palms were being greased to get them in schools.
I used to love lunchables, but now that I’m an adult, I can’t believe we were allowed to eat that trash.
I’m in my 30s and I still love them. When I’m really sad I get one and it makes me feel like my life is simpler than it is and helps calm me down, gives me something to do with my hands while not requiring me to be functioning well enough to actually cook. They are trash though can’t argue that lol
Get a block of cheese, crackers, and some kind of lunch meat. Only tool you need is a knife. Plus, you can add variations, like tuna or cream cheese or whatever you want. You pay more up front but get more food out of it and reduce plastic waste.
I appreciate the suggestion and I’m not trying to say it’s bad, just explain what I mean. Actually making my own cheese and crackers is already more steps and a dish into the mix. I don’t love lunchables because I think they’re fine dining I love them because some days I have the capacity to do exactly two things, and that might end up being “buy lunchable, open lunchable”. The nostalgic ‘life is simple’ feel they give me can sometimes boost my mood enough to get more done in a day which is unique to just a couple of foods for me. When I am normal sad I do things like you’re suggesting and I’ve lived with a chef for over a decade so I’ve got a lot of great value to effort knowledge there
Yeah, fair enough, I get the whole “I want to eat but I want to put exactly 0 effort into it” including to the point where I’ll put more effort walking back and forth between the fridge and freezer thinking of what could be easy to eat than it would take to cook up something simple. Though usually because there’s something else I’d rather be doing and I have enough self control at the moment to keep myself from getting into that until after I’ve eaten.
Though I’ve noticed that when I’m in one of those depressed moods where I feel like doing nothing at all, eating or otherwise, a vitamin b complex makes a night and day difference. Though please don’t take this as a “fixing depression is easy!” but as a “this helped me, maybe it could help you if you haven’t tried this angle of attack before”.
It sucks being in a mood like that, whether I have things to do that I instead just neglect or have some free time during which I’d like to do things I enjoy rather than just deciding everything sounds boring or not worth the effort, so finding something that has (so far) consistently helped with that has felt kinda like a super power.
Best wishes!
What was so good about them?
Marketing, TV Ads got me as a kid. I feel bad for my mom cooking me real food and my kid self being brainwashed complaining about wanting corporate toxic waste Lunchables
I feel bad for my mom cooking me real food
Why do you feel bad? That’s what parents are supposed to do.
You are getting tired. Read the whole sentence. OP is feeling bad about not appreciating their parents cooking for them.
Finger food that wasn’t messy and exploits the fact that kids haven’t yet lost all their taste buds.
Any kid between about 4-11 loves making little food stacks like that.
Given that charcuterie boards are pretty popular I think many people still like making stacks of food.
charcuterie boards but for kids makes sense
And they save the parents all that valuable time slicing a salami and a bit of cheese. Doesn’t save them any money though.
They definitely cater the flavor profile to what a kid would like. There’s no spice or offensive flavors, honestly kind of bland.
I loved the pizza one as a kid. Tried it as an adult recently. It was delicious, but the sauce was so dang sweet!
Easy prep. Granted, I grew up with a guy who fed us kids sleeve of saltines as a dinner because he couldn’t be fucked to do more. Better than nothing but in hindsight, I think I can do better for my kids than fucking lunchables.
No reason to be feeding that crap to our kids nationally.
To be clear, this is a subset of the lunchables brand specifically manufactured and sent to schools for lunches, which has a higher sodium content than the retail variety you can buy. They don’t want to ban all lunchables
Ban them all, they slipped in poisons into future of USA citizens. Should be a class action lawsuit
So, it’s either the school-variant with high sodium, or the store variant with lead, cadmium, and phtalates, then?
They did say “similar kits/products” implying it much not be lunchables, which feels an awful lot like a lawsuit waiting to happen.
They said “Lunchables and similar lunch kits”, and CR has a reputation for using honest language, so I don’t think there’s any reasonable confusion here about whether or not Lunchables are affected.
They said those were tested and several (not all) of the things tested were found to contain “bad stuff”
It’s actually pretty vague wording.
Considering the child obesity problem in America, maybe they should ban all Lunchables.
Fuck these Java 5 interface name having practically inedible crappy cracker packs.
I know its done to death but I really do blame Michelle Obama for how shitty school lunches have gotten. I dont know how the administration at the time got away with the enshittification of school lunches under the guise of nutrition. Some places were literally passing napkins off as vegetables because they are made of plant fibers.
I believe you and would like to learn more. Do you have a link?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ketchup_as_a_vegetable
I remember reading an article on reddit a long time ago, but the closest thing I could find was the ketchup as a vegetable thing in my 5 minutes of google searching. If I find the original article I was referencing Ill put it in another reply.
So you blame Michelle Obama but then link to to an article that references Reagan Era policies. What a moronic and fallacious argument!
Did you read past the abstract and see the part about how in 2011 the government prevented the USDA from reclassifying pizza as a vegetable because it contains 30ml of tomato paste?
That looks to have been congressional action, not executive…
Yes that was congressional action but what branch is the USDA part of?
That’s not what that said. The USDA tried to raise how much tomato paste was required to count as a vegetable which would make pizza not count. Congress said no, pizza still counts.
In 2011, Congress passed a bill that barred the USDA from changing its nutritional guidelines for school lunches. The proposed changes would have limited the amount of potatoes allowed in lunches, required more green vegetables, and declared a half-cup of tomato paste to count as a serving of vegetables, rather than the current standard of 2 tablespoons (30 mL). The blocking of these proposed higher standards meant that the smaller amount of tomato paste in pizza could continue to be counted as a vegetable in school lunches.
Would you have a source for this? Either the Obama influence or on the napkins?
The napkin one is harder to find, still searching for it. This politico article explains it pretty well.
I don’t know how you can read that article and come away thinking Michelle Obama’s efforts made school lunches worse. Unless by worse you mean healthier but less popular. The only reason people were attempting to get ridiculous things categorized as a vegetable was because they actually now had to have half a cup of vegetables.
