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All praise to the lunch ladies

bittersoutherner.com

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Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#171

Post by wtcactus »

Tyrubias wrote: post #164
wtcactus wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 poss…

There we go again.

USA is the richest country in the world, people there, even the ones at the bottom of the work ladder, have access to riches that for most of the people on the planet are only dreams. You have no idea what it is to be poor or to live next to actual poverty (even I have no idea, and I live in a country that's poorer, and that when I was younger much poorer than the USA).

94% of adult Americans drive a car. Anyone there can go to a store that sells vegetables and raw meat, buy it, and prepare a proper meal that's cheaper than some deep-fried, frozen processed crap.

Enough with the performative virtue signaling. It's all so tiresome. Nobody in the USA goes hungry unless they really choose too at every single step in their lives.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#172

Post by chongli »

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…

Try a different translation [1]:

All the amenities, in fact, of life, supreme hilarity, and relaxation from toil, can find no word in our language to characterize them better than this. Even in the very honours, too, that are bestowed upon successful warfare, salt plays its part, and from it, our word "salarium" is derived. That salt was held in high esteem by the ancients, is evident from the Salarian Way, so named from the fact that, by agreement, the Sabini carried all their salt by that road. King Ancus Martius gave six hundred modii of salt as a largess to the people, and was the first to establish salt-works.

The rewards of successful warfare, including salt, bestowed on soldiers. That is payment! King Ancus Martius also used salt as payment.

[1] http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:19...

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#173

Post by expedition32 »

rkomorn wrote: post #30
jimbokun wrote: post #4

Indeed. Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch. These lunch ladies are the ones fighting to be allowed to do the same things for the children in their communities in the USA. But getting ham strung by the whims of federal politics and the crippling fear that someone somewhere might be given something for free…

> Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch. Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias. My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food. IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) we…

In the Netherlands we eat bread for lunch. Many Southern Europeans have been brought to tears when they were invited "for lunch".

The classic cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. So remember it can always get worse.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#174

Post by rkomorn »

expedition32 wrote: post #173
rkomorn wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Occasionally I will see posted the beautiful school lunches given to children in many European countries. Nutritious, appetizing, made from scratch. Man, comments like these compared to my 10+ school years in France really make me wonder wtf happened in my 3 different schools' cafeterias. My 3 and change years in 2 US schools definitely had tastier food. IDK if my expectations of food in France (my home country) we…

In the Netherlands we eat bread for lunch. Many Southern Europeans have been brought to tears when they were invited "for lunch". The classic cheese sandwich and a glass of milk. So remember it can always get worse.

Cheese sandwich and a glass of milk sounds genuinely better than extremely overcooked, watery pasta with watery slices of pork.

If you solely looked at my schools' menus on paper (or arguably even in pictures), sure, it would've seemed good.

Side note: I lived in the Netherlands (but went to school in Belgium, so I have zero experience with school meals) as a young kid. I do remember chocolate sprinkles on toast being a thing, though!

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#175

Post by renewiltord »

sharts wrote: post #137
renewiltord wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The usual truth is that labor costs more in the US than it does anywhere else. A lot of things are just what you get if you have cheap labor. As an example, all over South Asia you can get top-notch personal cooking and cleaning on a daily basis. In the US you cannot. It's because everyone is rich in the US. The embodied cost of labor in everything you get is quite a large fraction. The median household income in Pol…

The labor costs more because other assets cost more — namely, housing, food, clothing.

Indeed. And wet roads cause rain.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#176

Post by HeyLaughingBoy »

carlosjobim wrote: post #135
HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems odd to me that anyone would need an argument in favor of free school lunch. School is mandatory between certain ages and it's free. Let's just make meals free as well. And I'm not sure how school buses are out of step with "the modern world." What are you proposing? Uber or something? For the wealthiest country in the history of the world, we sure seem to spend a lot of time discussing why we shouldn't spend…

The argument would be that parents have an obligation to feed their children. That's the least you could expect of them.

Awesome. And as for the ones who are not able to for some reason that you apparently can't comprehend, what do you propose?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#177

Post by scrps »

gishh wrote: post #151
scrps wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

faint sound of fading laughter from a US SSBN If you want a successful lunch program (and rations if you have a to-go bag) look no further than the US Navy's sub program. Given the environment and danger (and having a bunch of humans in close proximity, deep under the ocean, with nowhere to go, hangry, is not going to inspire unit cohesion) they get really, really good food. Which is probably not a bad thing to give…

The sub nukies I know would disagree with this. The few weeks before they would get back to port they just eat whatever they can find. Storage is a big deal on a sub.

Ah didn't know that, thanks!

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#178

Post by carlosjobim »

HeyLaughingBoy wrote: post #176
carlosjobim wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument would be that parents have an obligation to feed their children. That's the least you could expect of them.

Awesome. And as for the ones who are not able to for some reason that you apparently can't comprehend, what do you propose?

What happens in reality in those cases?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#179

Post by hollerith »

chongli wrote: post #166
hollerith wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

2000 years ago in the regions where the Roman army operated, animal husbandry was already an established way of life for 5000 years or even (in some spots like Asia Minor) a lot longer than that, and the overwhelming majority of the mammalian biomass was in the form of domesticated animals, not wildlife. The land that was not under cultivation was either quite hilly or had something wrong with it that make it bad for supporting wildlife just like it was bad for supporting agriculture.

The page you linked does not mention "hunt" except in 2 of the comments (and one comment is about hunting enemy soldiers). Do you claim that the other comment that mentions "hunt" supports your position?

If not, please quote the passage on the page that supports your position.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#180

Post by jimbokun »

krapp wrote: post #72
komali2 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I watch a video about American military nutrition, the only takeaway I have is "are these people incompetent?" Sailors in the USA navy get fat after their first deployment, common knowledge. Why? Because half the time their food is frozen chicken nuggets, frozen tater tots, etc, chucked into the oven, served bulk at mess. 2025's most well funded army, that's the best they came up with? Why not just freeze no…

>Hire a chief lunch lady who has the same job a head chef does - find the local produce and dairy and fish and meat, plan meals and portions, organize supply, and direct meals. Who's going to pay for all of that? Not the American taxpayer, who would consider it theft and waste, and not the poor kids who actually need school lunches, and probably not their parents. You'll wind up with a Macdonald's kiosk in every scho…

The ladies discussed in this article.
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