5 Absurd Things American Schools Do To Completely Ruin Lunch

In 2016, a public school in Gardendale, Alabama stamped the words "I Need Lunch Money" on a child's arm because of an unpaid bill -- adding a smiley face, because the words alone didn't convey the "Fuck you" well enough. It's only a matter of time before the school starts weighing the cost-effectiveness of making these children wear shirts saying "I am a poor, hate me" as a uniform.

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Gardendale is far from the only school district to turn lunch into a Philip K. Dickian nightmare, however. Plenty of states, like Pennsylvania and Utah, will take hot food from children unable to pay and throw it in the trash. They could feed another child with it, but it was served to a commie freeloader, so that food has lost all of its capitalist nutrients. Other children get threatened with "The Sandwich," which sounds like a humiliating frat initiation but is in fact two pieces of cold bread with maybe something cheap in between, easily marking out these hungry unfortunates for efficient bullying. Administrators do assure that The Sandwich meets the minimum federal requirements -- because when it comes to human decency, some schools gladly settle for being D students.

The Department of Agriculture is trying to get states to cut these practices out, on the basis of America still pretending it isn't a dystopia, but they're ultimately leaving the burden up to the states. So far, only New Mexico has tried to ban lunch money shaming entirely, reducing the amount of school-based shaming statewide by a full 6 percent. For everyone else, though, we can do nothing but hope that The Sandwich doesn't eventually devolve into The Bowl of Gruel, which students have to work off in the textile mill after class.

Maybe we should look at what other, slimmer countries are doing. Look at France, which has the lowest child obesity rate in Europe. What are they feeding their kids for lunch? A four-course feast fit for a king, it turns out:

1) Cucumber salad with vinaigrette

2) Salmon lasagna with spinach

3) Baguette and fondue

4) Fruit compote (or, once a week, chocolate cake)

And you better believe that food has plenty of refined grains, fat, sodium, and other life-shortening things that make us feel some semblance of happiness when we're eating. So again, how come French kids are thinner and healthier than what we're rolling into classrooms? It's because in France, they eat less food in general, like every other country that isn't the United States. Children are taught to eat in moderation, and are given foods that keep them from snacking in between meals. In addition, French students can get up to two hours to eat their lunches, giving them enough time to enjoy and digest their food while also taking several breaks to look wistfully out of a window in black and white.

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Which brings us to another point ...

A 2015 study from the Harvard School of Public Health found that if kids have 20 minutes or fewer to eat lunch, they end up eating 13 percent less of their entree, 12 percent less of their vegetables, and drinking 10 percent less milk. If that seems like an unreasonably short amount of time for lunch, you'll be quite alarmed to learn that 20 minutes are quickly becoming the average. In some schools, lunch periods can be as short as 15 minutes, as lunch hours get cut in favor of more classroom time. After all, we can't be worrying about our children's physical health when they need to study for standardized tests in order to win a dick-measuring contest with a dead superpower.

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When schools look for ways to improve test scores, instead of doing the smart thing and funding arts education, they end up cutting time from other places like lunch instead. This leaves kids with less time to eat the food they need in order to grow properly, hitting kids from low-income families (who rely on school lunches for half their food intake) the hardest.

But it's more than the lack of calories that will hurt students in the long run. Unsurprisingly, kids not only learn math, English, and social Darwinism in school, but also their future eating habits. Eating faster can lead to health issues like weight gain, poor nutrition, and other digestive problems like heartburn. Lunchroom rush can easily turn into a lifelong maladjustment which will follow them into college, where they will lose the battle against obesity while cramming entire bowls of Chipotle guacamole down their throats at a time.

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And in case you were still hoping the Obama-era health guidelines would save the day: Those regulations were leaving schools with even less money than before. When the rules took effect, 70 percent of schools ended up taking a "significant financial hit," as students simply didn't want to pay money for food that prolonged their lives but tasted like cardboard. The year after the regulations began, Detroit's public school system lost a full million dollars in revenue. We're basically in a no-win situation; either schools lose money on unhealthy school lunches which make students fat, or they lose even more money offering healthy lunches students refuse to pay for ... instead buying snacks which make them fat. It's almost as if the real problem isn't with schools, but with Americans having this toxic relationship with food wherein many would rather have to be buried in a piano crate than eat the occasional zucchini.

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And who knows how to solve that problem, right? We're all idiots who have no idea what we're doing. Maybe it's because we didn't get good school lunches when we were kids ...

Jim Avery was a brown-bagger growing up. These days, instead of a terrible lunch, he brings terrible opinions to his Twitter and game reviews to GeekNifty.

For more reasons public schools are depressing, check out 5 Reasons You Hated School (That You Were Right About) and 6 God-Awful Ways Real Schools Tried To Save Money.

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