20 school lunches from around the world.

Except for the meager fare in some of the impoverished countries, most of the meals everywhere outside the US look wonderful.

I saw an African school with a bowl of beans and a piece of bread. Simple, but still nutritious.

I would pay good money for some of those lunches.

Delicious!!!

It looks like the french fries are the main course... plus a roll and cheesecake. Then add mussels and an artichoke. Plus fresh fruit and a yogurt.

That's quite a lunch.

I must admit that when I flipped to the slide of United States. (Mrs. Q) my stomach did get a little queasy - chocolate milk, unidentifiable fruit cocktail in (undoubtedly) high fructose corn syrup, and PBJ graham cracker sandwiches. The apple juice was probably benign.

It wasn't until I read further that I discovered the actual San Francisco lunch:



Seems like both lunches probably came from the same place. If you read the label on the PBJ Graham Cracker Sandwich it says "HFI Heartland Foods". I first searched for 'Heartland Foods' and came up with Heartland Food Corp - which is "the second largest Franchisees of the BURGER KING® Restaurant chain". Turns out they aren't responsible for the PBJ-GC sandwiches.

HFI Heartland Foods is a brand of Preferred Meal Systems



located in (you guessed it)

Preferred Meal Systems, Inc.
5240 St. Charles Road
Berkeley, IL 60163

So I browsed around their website and...you know, they appear to be doing (or at least trying to do) the right thing: nutritional information, wholesome meals, sustainability, parental access to menus in their children's schools,...all that good information. I applaud this company for (at least on the surface) responsibly filling a need. But, yes, they are "an off-site by large operation churning out thousands upon thousands of meals" for schools, nursing homes, and other institutions.

We live in a culture where "cooking home-style meals in on-site kitchens (or even outside over campfires)" doesn't happen. There are probably a lot of reasons for this...among them cost, labor availability, health requirements, risk of litigation,.... We live in a time when economies of scale tend to dominate what might seem more reasonable alternatives.

I am not judging anything here. The post was good - it got me thinking about the problem. The results I found were not what I expected. Maybe this thread will stimulate some conversation about where we are, who we are, and where we want to be.

In another lifetime, I dated a woman from Peru who came to work for a US company. She was shocked by what passes for lunch here. She said that in her country, lunch was the most important meal of the day and "not just a sandwich". A lot of the meals in the blog (at least those in the more affluent countries) demonstrated that. When lunch is over, the kids' stomachs are FULL of nutritious body and brain building food.

When I've asked about the poor quality of the food, here are the answers I've gotten:

1. Kids like junk. If fewer kids buy lunch, the lunch program can't support itself. Kids buy pizza, hamburgers, etc..

2. The lunches have to deliver enough calories; there are more calories in higher-fat junk, which provides required calories with less food....

It's not quite as bad in my current state/district as it was in the previous. Here, there is a bar with fresh fruits and vegetables to add to the junkie entree. Sometimes salads are available.

Edited to add:

I remember a time when our school cafeterias included actual kitchens, cooked fresh food, and served them on real plates with real flatware that got washed and re-used, instead of generating mountains of trash every day. It hasn't always been like this.

In fact, we don't allow peanuts in the district I work in.

Or the one my wife used to work in.

Found out Friday I was in violation of school policy last year when i had mini-Snickers in my classroom to reward the occasional instance of exceptional behavior. Peanuts.

Most of the lunches in the cafeteria looked no better or worse than most of the ones from other countries. Overcooked veggies (that artichoke is on its last legs), mystery meat, stuff in little plastic bottles. It really doesn't matter if you stew the meat to mush in a commissary or over a camp fire; it doesn't matter if you've cooked the veggies to mush on-site or not. But they usually come with something fresh(er) on the side--more often than not some sort of salad, perhaps cole slaw or a fruit--and some dose of starch (rice, bread, pasta).

I work in a large high school. They make most of their food on site, even if that just means opening up the 50-lb bags of Krusteaz and mixing it with water before baking.


That's true in the two districts I have experience with, where I used to live in Oregon, and where I went to school in MD.

More problematic is, say, the narrowness of the American kid's tastes. Not compelled to eat some of everything when they're small, but to pick and choose the few things they and their friends want, when they get to school they continue to have a restricted diet. Too much work making kids do what they should. Easier to let them do what they want.