5
Schools Pay Companies To Suck The Nutrition Out Of Food
For over 70 years, the National School Lunch Program has given surplus agriculture to schools for their school lunches. It's much better PR than throwing tons of fresh food into a ditch and setting it on fire. Public schools around the country can fill their larders with all the fresh fruit, vegetables, and chicken they need. So why is the closest thing you find to fresh produce in a school cafeteria the bubblegum in the lunch lady's mouth? Because schools are paying food companies to take their fresh, healthy ingredients and turn them into complete shit.
Schools get about $1 billion in free food each year, and $445 million of it goes straight into the pockets of companies like Aramark and Sodexo, which turn that food into "food." Fresh chicken gets turned into chicken nuggets, cheese and tomatoes get turned into frozen pizza, potatoes become french fries, and peas somehow end up with fingers in them. Why do schools do this? The answer, as always, is money. Schools figure that they can save by not maintaining proper kitchens or kitchen staff, a clever lifehack someone should really tell restaurants about.
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Never mind.
But as it turns out, schools just end up spending more on fees and food processing in response. Schools spend about three times their free food's value in turning it into sludge. A batch of fresh chicken worth $11.40 costs $33.45 to become nuggets. $5.95 of raw potatoes costs $14.75 for the McDonald's treatment. That cost doesn't just come in dollars, but also in IQ points, as some studies are linking lower tests scores to students having to eat junk that "exceed[s] the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium." Ironically, our students are slowly turning into dumb donut holes because school administrators are bad at math.
Maybe the kids should be taught by the private food management companies instead, as they are making money hand over fist. They save by not having to hire skilled kitchen labor, and they also get convenient kickbacks from the food processing companies, which the schools don't see a dollar of. So the next time your child gets winded walking from the bus to the school's front door, at least you know their inevitable heart attack paid for some CEO's weekday yacht.
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This stock model kid is smiling because this photo shoot is the first time he's ever seen fresh fruits and vegetables in a cafeteria.
4
Kids Are Publicly Shamed For Not Paying Lunch Bills
A lot of kids have to read The Scarlet Letter in school. It's a gripping story of America's barbaric past, when people in power used public shaming to punish and degrade the less-fortune. The book teaches kids a valuable lesson: namely, what will happen to them if they ever run out of lunch money.