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All praise to the lunch ladies

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Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#161

Post by hearsathought »

chongli wrote: post #157
thaumasiotes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They used to pay soldiers in salt . That’s the origin of the word salary . Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.

That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important…

> That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia.

Pliny was not "scientific" nor a "historian" in the modern sense of those words. He didn't write an encyclopedia as we understand it to mean today.

> Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence.

Define "much".

> The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.

It's no reason to doubt him? It's every reason to doubt him.

> Giving every soldier a regular salt ration (a form of payment) is an extremely easy way to help them feed themselves.

Or romans could pay the soldiers with roman coins/currency? Of which we have ample evidence all over the roman empire.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_currency

No evidence of salt currency. Tons of evidence of roman money. And yet you choose to believe the one without any evidence.

Let me guess, you believe in monopods like pliny "the scientific historian" did?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monopod_(creature)

Lets say you have 10000 soldiers. Is it easier to pay them each with a pound of salt or a coin weighing an ounce?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#162

Post by throwawaysoxjje »

wtcactus wrote: post #125
slfnflctd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem to be solved in the US is that a disturbing percentage of school-aged children's parents are too poor, too busy or too incompetent to pack a lunch for their kids. In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.

Alternate theory: their parents are too lazy to actually prepare proper food for them. Healthy food actually costs less than pre processed crap. But it does take a lot more time and effort to prepare.

Regardless of whatever hypothesis you want to use, the point is the kids don’t have food.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#163

Post by Loudergood »

wtcactus wrote: post #125
slfnflctd wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem to be solved in the US is that a disturbing percentage of school-aged children's parents are too poor, too busy or too incompetent to pack a lunch for their kids. In many areas, without schools providing food, the kids would simply go hungry for the entire school day. I and many other people find this unacceptable.

Alternate theory: their parents are too lazy to actually prepare proper food for them. Healthy food actually costs less than pre processed crap. But it does take a lot more time and effort to prepare.

Time isn't free.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#164

Post by Tyrubias »

wtcactus wrote: post #133
thinkingtoilet wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And here we are, back to the poor people are lazy argument. That didn't take long.

Well, some of us refuse to indulge in this permanent complete lack of accountability for one’s choices and actions, that people like you try to push.

I refuse to indulge in the false fantasy that a household where each parent(s) works multiple minimum wage jobs is “lazy” for not preparing homemade lunches for their children. Also, in the US, many lower-income households are in “food deserts”, where there is a lack of grocery stores selling fresh food and a preponderance of convenience stores selling processed foods. In a country where the top 1% of households possess a third of the country’s wealth and the bottom 50% of households only possess 2.5%, poverty, malnourishment, and undereducation are choices made for the poor by the rich ruling class.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#165

Post by Spivak »

pqtyw wrote: post #103
Spivak wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean this is the nanny state at its best. Getting in the way of progress because you refuse to meet people, in this case kids, where they actually are. The challenge should be minimizing the amount of waste—cook literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then try to nudge toward healthier options while keeping your waste % low. Let them take any subset of the lunch as they please, prune dishes kids e…

> literally anything where the kids will clean their plates then Feeding kids sugar and hen nudging them to eat slightly less sugar while still providing inherently unhealthy meals seems suboptimal. Them cleaning their plates is not an inherently a good thing. Rather the opposite. > making sure they eat the "right" things. Certainly better than feeding them the wrong things? though. It's not like starvation or malnou…

It's always a treat when the exact problem I'm describing shows up in the replies. Yes feed them sugar. Children have a significantly heightened sweet tooth until adolescence where it slowly declines and they develop more complex tastes and a tolerance for "adult" flavors. When I bake for kids I have to make it cloyingly sweet to an adult palate and it gets snarfed down. And it's also why Funfetti cake doesn't hit like it did as a kid because your tastes have changed. Trying to impose adult standards on kids is native at best and futile in aggregate—you can only serve it, you can't make them eat it and they won't.

You understand how moronic it sounds to prepare and serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right? Plus free lunch programs are to deal with malnourishment and to make sure kids get at least one full meal a day.

My elementary school, which was a private school and so wasn't beholden to any government meddling, followed this formula and it worked out great. Every meal was carbs, protein, and sugar, and everything was sweet. It wasn't an apple, it was fruit cocktail in syrup, the pizza had sweetened bread and sauce, vegetables were sweat peas, carrots, and corn. Every student was put on a rotation to clean trays so I got to see first hand what the waste situation was. And it wasn't zero but you didn't see a tray full of food minus pizza coming back.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#166

Post by chongli »

hollerith wrote: post #159
chongli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important…

You are not making much of a case. For one thing, I severely doubt wild game would have been plentiful enough to meet more than a very small fraction of the nutritional needs of a Roman army. There is not enough wild game in the US for example to feed more than a quite small fraction of the survivors of a nuclear war according to a calculation I saw -- and the survivors in that scenario have the luxury of remaining s…

We're talking about soldiers stalking the wilderness of Pliny the Elder's past, not the present-day United States where game populations have declined dramatically. Furthermore, the population figures are way out of whack as well. The city of Rome in early imperial times was at best half a million people. Pliny the Elder's hometown of Como in northern Italy might have housed up to 10,000. An army drawn from that city would have been a few thousand soldiers at maximum.

Armies in ancient times did NOT have the highly sophisticated logistics networks that we have in the modern day. Subsisting on hunting and gathering was a major part of the soldier's life [1].

[1] https://acoup.blog/2022/07/29/collections-logistics-how-did-...

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#167

Post by thaumasiotes »

chongli wrote: post #157
thaumasiotes wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They used to pay soldiers in salt . That’s the origin of the word salary . Note that the amount of evidence supporting this claim is zero. There is a Roman source that makes the claim, based on the resemblance of the words, but at the time of writing, no one was paid in salt, and there is no record of anyone ever having been paid in salt.

That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important…

This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters.

Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant):

Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a far more pleasing quality in the cheese. Therefore, Heaven knows, a civilized life is impossible without salt, and so necessary is this basic substance that its name is applied metaphorically even to intense mental pleasures. We call them sales (wit); all the humour of life, its supreme joyousness, and relaxation after toil, are expressed by this word more than by any other.

It has a place in magistracies also and on service abroad, from which comes the term "salary" (salt money); it had great importance among the men of old, as is clear from the name of the Salarian Way, since by it, according to agreement, salt was imported to the Sabines. King Ancus Marcius gave a largess to the people of 6,000 bushels of salt...

https://www.loebclassics.com/view/pliny_elder-natural_histor...

It's worth noting here that the glosses, "(wit)" and "(salt money)", are interpolations by the translator; Pliny doesn't gloss salarium at all. We can trace the gloss "salt money" for salarium all the way back to... the 1700s. And we should probably note that there it's conceived of as money that the soldier could use to buy salt, not as money that is made of salt.

So, there is no source relating the word "salary" to the concept of being paid in salt. There is a source relating the word "salary" to the concept of salt, and, if you really want to read into it, to the concept of Roman foreign service.

But there are many more problems with your comment. Pliny's authority as a historian has no relevance to this question. You'd want the opinion of a philologist, and you'd want it to be supported by something, which as you can see Pliny doesn't do.

> his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian.

And here you show an amazing ignorance of how reliable common knowledge of the origin of words is. The norm is that it's made up out of whole cloth. You can find gamers right now explaining that "meta" developed from the expression "most effective tactics available" or feminists explaining that "mankind" developed from a sexist preference for males over females. Neither idea has anything to do with reality.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#168

Post by scns »

poink wrote: post #87
sevg wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the best chefs in the world also do not skimp on salt Chefs use lots of salt to optimize for taste rather than health. (And restaurants don’t have to declare how much salt was in your meal.) That’s why it’s a bad idea to eat out and/or get take-away every day. Your salt intake would be extremely high.

Are we pretending that optimizing for taste is a bad thing? It’s obviously bad to eat super salty “ultraprocessed” food all the time, but it’s not like the salt is the primary problem To take OP’s example, I’d much rather kids eat generously salted broccoli that is “optimized for taste” rather than unsalted mac & cheese, regardless of whether they just throw it away (which I probably would, too)

> unsalted mac & cheese

Cheese already contains loads of salt.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#169

Post by izacus »

chongli wrote: post #127
speed_spread wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it conditions your expectations of tasting salt everywhere, which is what industrial food provides. Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt.

Good food should taste great even if it's low on salt Said no chef ever. The first thing any chef will tell you is to season your food correctly. Salt activates our taste buds. Without it everything tastes bland. They used to pay soldiers in salt . That’s the origin of the word salary . Cities were founded near salt mines. Wars were fought over it. Salt is essential to the function of neurons and kidneys. Salt is lif…

Are those the same chefs that say everything needs to be bathed in butter and then deepfried with copious amount of oil?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#170

Post by [deleted] »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #167
chongli wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Roman source is Pliny the Elder, one of the earliest scientific historians and author of the world's oldest surviving encyclopedia. Much of what he wrote has been confirmed through archaeological evidence. The fact that we haven't been able to find physical evidence to back his claim about salt (which may simply have been common knowledge at the time) is no reason to doubt him as a historian. It's also important…

This is... a shockingly credulous take. Try not to be like this if your opinion ever matters. Here's Pliny the Elder in full, Loeb translation (I'm including quite a bit more surrounding context than is relevant, just to make clear that this is everything relevant): Moreover sheep, cattle, and draft animals are encouraged to pasture in particular by salt; the supply of milk is much more copious, and there is even a f…

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