Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Adding that I am not calling this food “junk”, but am definitely calling it as not enough and not good enough for a growing human. How do chips keep anyone feeling full?
I remember in high school after PE class we would all pile our plates up as full as you can get them and you would still be hungry again in the afternoon.
This is the one thing I am kind of proud of homecountry-wise. It’s not gourmet or anything special, but it’s wholesome real food. Picture is a pretty average version of it:
Every school has a weekly menu and most school lunch food are staple foods that people also eat as adults and make at home. Everyone has their school food favourites and favourite things to hate, many of the foods have remained the same through the decades, but many have also been removed from the menus, because nobody would eat them today. The humble spinach pancake with lingonberry jam is a favourite across generations.
Since the 90s more and more schools have closed their own kitchens and fired the cooks that we still had when I was a kid, my highschool cook made such good roast potatoes from leftover boiled potatoes that the foodline always got a bit rowdy because there was never enough for everyone (they were a bonus treat on top of the normal menu). These days the kitchens are moving more and more towards centralized kitchens and the food has gotten a lot worse as a result, far fewer kids actually eat it today even though it is free. But it’s still made to certain standards and it has to have enough protein and energy for proper sustinance.
During school closures from covid school lunch was also still given out weekly in daily portions because for poor families it is a huge deal.
I feel like this and the right to roam laws are the two things the national bourge dares not touch, althought they periodically do try. But if this was changed, I am sure conditions would worsen a lot faster.
Ah, the humble finnish school lunch. Despite my endless supply of criticism of this bullshit nightmare country, I gotta say that the finnish school lunch system is an absolute banger. Soup days were my favourite, because they’d serve regular soft bread instead of näkkileipä (crispbread? idk). Now as an adult I of course understand that näkkileipä fucking rules, but as a kid I hated it.
Pretty sad that schools and daycares don’t have their own kitchens any more. No idea what school lunches are like these days, but I can imagine it’s indeed a lot worse. Better than nothing though, I hope.
Yeah the central kitchen stuff is sad, but it is kind of nice that when kids just don’t eat the food or feedback is all negative, they still do change the producers. But these are the great results of privatization./s
But it is still nice that some municipalities are floating the idea of breakfast now as well and in some places they offer it too. There is a whole discourse around it that touches the universalism and positive discrimination debates that Finns love to do (typically to benefit the already privileged), but it is at least being considered.
I like how these days school have a wish menu week and also in some places they use local produce. Just wish the schools still had their own kitchens. I did substitute teaching in small rural schools and my god the food was so good when there was a cook who was a part of the school community. In bigger cities the food has been worse for a long time. I remenber the feeling of sadness when I moved from a rural high school to a bigger city upper middle school and the food quality went down a lot, this was decades ago now.
I loved in a very, very well off suburb in California when I was a kid. This is what the average lunch was, and we had to buy this we didn’t get free meals, probably because my friends and I didn’t make the cut off. These are the exact items I remember getting lol. A lot of the time we would go to the Thai restaurant across the street and buy a cup of rice for $1 and put sweet and sour sauce on it, or go buy a slice of pizza next door. This was in highschool
That’s a snack.
Like this is sort of the amount that you would get in the afternoon here if you have a long day. A sandwich or something with maybe a yogurt and some juice or something.
It was all so disgusting, too. Everything was sitting under warming lamps that I swear were just regular light bulbs. The fries were like, cold, wet and dry all at the same time. And the tortilla in the burrito was super dried out and it probably had that yoga mat fake meat filler in it but we liked those best. But yeah, that’s why we would often just go across the street and get rice instead of all that, it was at least hot and fresh from the rice cooker. It was kinda crazy, there would be a line of 15-20 kids outside of that restaurant waiting to get a fucking cup of white rice with nothing else on it because it was tastier than our school food. Recounting this is really making me understand just how insane it was to be fed this way.
Were those sausages in gravy in your photo? And were those normal Dill pickles or something else? I would’ve devoured that as a kid if I had a choice between yours and mine
God dammit that is dark! And they do look like the saddest fries anyone has ever seen.
Answering your question they are small sausages in gravy yeah, very popular with taters here, kids especially love this dish. These days there is also a vegan version of this. And that is dill pickles. Could also be pickled beets or such in a dish like this one. But this is definitely a local school lunch favourite.
We also do the fish fingers and chicken nuggets sometimes, but the salad buffet and a side of mashed potato or rice and a gravy of some sort will also be there with it. Fish finger gravy is typically a spinach gravy and its so good.
You also get that dry cracker bread every day in school, except on soup and porridge days there is usually soft bread and some veggies, cheese or ham to put on it, because the soup or porridge alone isn’t considered filling enough. And milk every day, these days also a plant milk option. The milk historically was the dairy industry lobbying in schools, everyone had to drink all this milk for healthy bones and teeth. We had hilarious dairy propaganda posters in our school cafeteria.
Feels so bizarre to me that these kinds of scratch-prepared meals would be served in schools. Everything in ours comes from a plastic bag. No wonder a lot of Americans have such an unhealthy diet, we are literally conditioned from birth to eat that crap. I am very lucky that once I discovered vegetables as a young adult I started to eat EVERYTHING and now I generally have a decent diet (when I have the energy to cook anyway).
The dairy lobbying was definitely a huge thing here, too, but the actually advertising has died down a bit. Commercials pre-2000’s were so fucking weird lol
One of the weirdest cultural differences for me when I had a partner in the US was the way he talked about his mom “cooking homemade food” and it turned out to be precooked stuff like chips and nuggets on paper plates. On the other hand it was endlessly odd to him the way we would peel our own boiled potatoes for every meal and how I made food from base ingredients. Like he would get a pancake mix and I would get milk, flour and eggs and mix it.
We genuinely don’t have those types of premade things even today and ready meals are very different to the stuff in the US. It too is mostly basic everyday food here, just made on a large scale. Basically the same fish soup is made at home, eaten at school and sold as a ready meal.
The grocery store in the US was also a truly wild experience for me. The produce section was so small compared to the shelves and shelves of somehow premade stuff. It’s very different and I suppose it is reflected on the school lunch too.
What’s your home country?
Finland. Afaik only Finland and Sweden have free school food today, but this might be a Western brainworm take. I’ve no idea about AES countries for example.
School lunch is currently written into law and the law has been in place since 1948. It started from a law where the kids took part in picking the food with their teacher for a five year period outside the school hours to gather food for this, some schools had gardens and stuff too. This produce was then used to make collective meals. After the five year start period it has been fully free and paid for by the municipalities and the state.
When I was in school we would still go out to pick berries with our teacher that were then used in the school kitchen to make the lingonberry and bluberry jams for the winter. Everyone had to pick a small cup of them so it was nothing like the original giving away of labor time outside school hours.
I’ve not yet found a recount of the history of the school lunch from a leftist pov, but I can bet this is a result of the deep struggle here that began from the strikes in 1905. After the war our fash had lost and were probably more eager to give out things like this to the proles.
The schooling system and its role in nation building and homogenization of the proletariat here is a complex one where consessions and control are sometimes hard to tell apart, especially since today everything in history is stated in a way where they say things like “in 1948 Finland wrote a law that ensures school lunch for everyone” and none of how we got there and who was this for gets adressed.
I was guessing Sweden (the lingonberry jam and right to roam). I was close!
I started reading the Under the North Star series by Vaino Linna, about the struggles of Finnish history. I’ve read book 1 so far and plan to read the sequels. I was an au pair in Finland too, many years ago. I loved it and would have loved to stay there but health issues combined with the fact that the nordic countries aren’t that easy to move to, made it impossible. I would definitely like to learn more about Finnish history. I keep intending to watch The Unknown Soldier too.
Oh that is very cool.
You should definitely watch The Unknown Soldier. It is one of the rare war movies that doesn’t glorify war. The writer was a leftist and his sentiment about the war is a lot clearer in the original book, but later prints and the movie too are pretty heavily bourgeoisie-washed. Other great leftist authors are people like Lauri Viita, but pretty sure he was never translated. On marxist.org there are also amazing writings by commies from here that are all also in Finnish, but they can tell you the leftist history of this country, the war and how we ended up where we now are.
OT: I will add that the right to roam law in Finland is very different from the Swedish one and the Finnish one is the most expansive. It originates from the time where the various peoples living here had no concept of landownership and people would just take up a spot in the forest and live their life there (slash&burn farming) and when you moved on from a spot, it was again free for anyone to live in. As a result all sorts of foraging and sleeping in the wild is allowed and nobody can announce anything as private property even if they own it. In Sweden it was more like “you can spend a night in the lords lands and eat one handfull of nuts from the tree, but then you need to move on”.
What do you mean, later prints are bourgeosie-washed? Do you mean that they changed later editions of the book? If so I will have to see if I can find an old copy one day. I would love to read more from Finnish writers, it’s too bad most didn’t get translated. It took me about 15 years just to find a translated copy of the first Under the North Star book. It only got translated into English once, many years ago and all the copies got sold and never re-printed. After years of searching I found a library with a copy.
I would love to read more about how Finland came to be the way it is, it seems to have such an interesting history. I wanted to learn the language too (it sounds lovely) but I don’t have the energy to take on such a task and there aren’t that many resources for learning it. I learnt a little Swedish many years ago and there seemed to be a lot more resources for learning Swedish at home, very few for Finnish.
The bourgeoisie very much took on the nationalistic project and the works of Finnish authors and kind of claimed them. The original print Linna wrote was never published as it was as the publisher demanded parts of it to be censored and the local bourge press turned the book into a moral panic as it went against their narrative. The original book name would be just “A War Novel” and today you can find it printed under the name Sotaromaani. In it he takes clear stances againts nationalism and militarist for example and these are things that have been purged from The Unknown Soldier. There is a study about it here in Finnish that might be translatable. Linna also personally held some anti-Soviet brainworms and some of these were also purged so it’s complicated as well. But later the book and the movie both have been heavily utilized to advance nationalism, militarism and russophobia even though it was the Whites who used to hate this book.
It’s a shame that most if not all of the actual leftist history here is these days underground or only in Finnish. But I do know that O.W. Kuusinen also wrote in English and these works can at least be read online.