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All praise to the lunch ladies

bittersoutherner.com

181–190 of 203 posts

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march.

The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could have managed the slaughtering of livestock?

But besides that, there were plenty of forests around (which they used to gather firewood, as mentioned in the article). Those forests absolutely would have contained deer and other game they could hunt and preserve.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#182
post #69

Great read! I sent this story to my girlfriend who works as a lunch lady in a small West Texas town for the last 10 years. She said they are still able to provide nutritional food for the kids. Her mother had an aunt that worked at the same school in the 50's and 60's and they made everything from scratch. Vegetables were bought locally too. She also mentioned the kids hated the whole wheat pasta and breads when Mich…

I will never understand why Michelle Obama’s plan included low salt. It’s not like kids have major hypertensive issues.

low-salt was a sign of poverty in roman times...

"The word "salary" comes from the Latin word for salt."

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

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#183
post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the Netherlands no elementary schools have any cafeteria, kitchen or lunch area at all. Kids bring their own lunchbox, with usually some sandwiches, fruit and water, and eat inside the classroom.

Same in Germany, and not just for elementary schools but also secondary schools. At least that's how it was decades ago when I was a student, maybe it's different now.

My relatives live in Germany and in all schools their kids were in school gave out lunches. They were not packing own luch and did not considered sandwitch as a proper lunch.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#184
post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We did "free" lunch for all here a couple of years ago. The idea is great, execution is terrible. You can't get a la carte free, only the full "FDA approved" lunch is free. So if you forget a drink, or just want to add a snack to your own packed lunch, you go get the whole thing and throw everything else away. The elementary school tried adding the "share table" where you can put anything you don't want so that someo…

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…

I find this attitude super weird. Adults are responsible for what kids eat and problem of kids taking multiple lunches can be solved by allowing them to go only once.

What is weird is that American kids seems to be taught to refuse "healthy" food. Somehow the problem of kids refusing fruits and real food is something that happens only once in a while with few kids elsewhere, but is apparently epidemic in america.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#185
post #165
post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

> serve food that kids won't eat in the hopes that they eat less, right?

Not hope as such. Ideally they eat it eventually. If they are not allowed to eat unhealthy foods they won't have much of an option. Even the most obstinate ones will change their mind after spending a couple of days being hungry.

> followed this formula and it worked out great

And they didn't end up being overweight?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#186
post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The rhetoric you see in some places about how social assistance is used on hair weaves says something about the underlying reasons for much of this concern.

Remember the only reason we have school lunch programs in the US at all is because the Black Panthers started a free breakfast program for black children in the 70s and the government wanted to undermine the political and propaganda power the Black Panthers had gained through that and other social programs. So the government created its own, then Reagan underfunded it.

Where do these weird conspiracy theories come from?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Foraging for soldiers included plundering and pillaging the local population. They could also just have easily hunted the local villagers' livestock as a source of meat which they could then salt and preserve for food on the march. The article I listed explained in detail how Roman soldiers carried out the full process of turning grain into flour and then baking bread in their encampments. You don't think they could…

In a previous comment, you wrote about Roman soldiers "hunting any game they came across". "Game" means wild animals.

Of course they stole and ate any livestock they could get unless they were passing through the territory of an ally, in which case the commander probably has warned the men that any man caught pillaging would be executed, but in compensation, the commander had probably purchased livestock and other food from the ally to be distributed to the men.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Please explain to me how advocating for material policies for the poor, funded by taxes that come out of my pocket, is "performative virtue signaling." Does this phrase just mean "any kindness whatsoever" at this point?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#189
post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same in Germany, and not just for elementary schools but also secondary schools. At least that's how it was decades ago when I was a student, maybe it's different now.

My relatives live in Germany and in all schools their kids were in school gave out lunches. They were not packing own luch and did not considered sandwitch as a proper lunch.

Is a sandwitch made with Salemi?

(Sorry.)

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#190

The modern bourgeois obsession with valorizing the easiest unskilled jobs, done by people with zero abilities and ambition, is so bizarre. No, putting food out for kids is not a glamorous or praiseworthy job. It is one of the easiest jobs in the world, requiring no skills or education or even any particular amount of effort. And because you live in the richest part of the earth you get comparatively extremely well re…

I work at Google. One of the top things people ask me about working there is the lunches. There is a glowing video on youtube about the cafeteria staff and the process of serving healthy, tasty, and varied food to thousand and thousands of people every day. These jobs are recognized as skilled and valuable.

Nothing about this job changes when the patrons are children rather than adults. But our society turns around and treats school cafeteria staff with derision.

For what it is worth, the hardest I ever worked in my entire life was as a busboy at Chili's. As a software engineer I make something resembling 50x the wage of what I made as a busboy.

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