When I was going through my PhD program and my soon to be wife was in med school I ceased being amazed at what with a little effort in learning and strategic buying of spices/etc we could do with very little in the way of cash.
I’m going to law school at Seton Hall. Newark is … well it has an interest, ever changing aroma.
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Pure anecdote here:
I noticed a distinct decline in the quality of school lunches when the cafeteria staff was out-sourced.
When they were school district employees, the lunches tended toward higher quality ingredients, more variety, and more care in preparation.
To be clear, I’m not blaming the people who were actually cooking/preparing the food. I place the blame for the decline on some absentee business owner whose sole motivation in acquiring the contract was to siphon off some profits from the mission of feeding hungry kids. Those meals were optimized for absolute minimum cost.
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Hey now, for as small geographically as New Jersey is, there’s actually many different New Jerseys. Right off the top, there’s New York NJ, Philadelphia NJ, Poconos NJ, Central NJ, Southern NJ, Shore NJ, Pine Barrens NJ. Everyone one of them is foreign to all the others and completely different.
For instance, this story is from Philadelphia NJ but would probably play out very differently in New York NJ or Pine Barrens NJ.
They’re not all bad. 
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For sure the meals should be prepared without the intention to make profit, spend what’s necessary to make them good and wholesome and nothing else. Trying to make a buck off kid’s meals and giving them bad food is the kind of thing that makes me irate.
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I’d like to point out that they’re not just banning indebted children from things like prom and field trips. This policy bans indebted children from all extracurricular activities. That includes, ostensibly, things like:
- sports (good for college applications)
- clubs and activities (also important for college applications)
- student government (also looks great on college applications)
As a poor kid whose only way out was to hustle for good grades and lots of extracurriculars so I could get good financial aid offers from good colleges, FUCK THESE ASSHOLES.
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Holy hell; did you just read my mind? I’ve had full lunch boxes returned home and I ask “Did you eat anything?”.
“Yeah, but I bought lunch because I forgot I brought it and what they were serving looked good.”
Guess who’s allowance went to buying non-perishables for the food pantry that week…
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Yeah…my daughter was the worst about it (she’s now off to college)…and ironically she now has the OPPOSITE issue. I keep replenishing her pantry for $200 each month and yet she has an all you can eat plan with the dining hall and complains the food isn’t varied/good enough.
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CSB:
In college I was required to buy a meal plan if you lived in the dorms. I always ended the semester with ~$200 left on my card (non-carry-over) since I usually cooked and ate at friends’ houses who were off-campus.
BUT…you were able to order Domino’s Pizza take-out using your meal plan points. So at the end of every semester I’d order a pizza from a friend I had working there. I’d give him a $200 tip, and he’d give me $100 cash.
If the system is going to game you, game it right back.
/CSB
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Oh you ought to attend a meeting of the Cherry Hill Taxpayers League.
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Let them know how you feel about this:
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She has similar. Its all you can eat if bought directly from on campus. She then has $250 each semester that she can use to purchase at select places off campus and also for family visits.
She’s just complaining that the food choices are monotonous. Again…irony…she wants to buy $200 in ramen and mac n cheese bowls though. How is THAT not monotonous?!?
It’s all about laziness. 
They have a point. Those kids will just be hungry again tomorrow.
(I don’t really need a /s, do I?)
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Pockets of relative fun places do exist…
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Isn’t this a bipartisan thing everyone can get behind? Free school lunches across the board - no stigma, everyone gets at least one square meal a day.
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You’d think so, but this is late-stage capitalist America. If you’re starving there’s a significant portion of the population – starving people included – who believe it’s always your personal failing that caused it (and if you were a kid, why didn’t you get born into a family with money, huh?).
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Sure, it’s possible to cook cheap ingredients to make tasty food. But, are there any schools which actually cook anything, anymore? When I was a kid, the lunch ladies came in early and cooked everything, but now it’s Sodexo heat-n-eat crap of the cheapest kind, at least at the places I know about.
I have a family member who works in a low income school, and a few years ago they changed it so every student can eat breakfast and lunch at no cost to them, regardless of family income. This seems the most humane way to deal it. It might not be high quality food, but at least it doesn’t come with shame or cruelty.
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You must be new to this timeline. Welcome and good luck.
Around here the GOP like to say that anything free makes people lazy and complacent and dependent on the system, unless the recipient is wildly rich or a corporation, then the free thing stimulates jobs creation.
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By contrast, here’s how they do it in France, apparently for less money than American schools spend.
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Patron saint of sudden death?
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