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All praise to the lunch ladies

bittersoutherner.com

191–200 of 203 posts

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#191

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 a…

I do not work at Google. The cantina workers at my company are lazy, provide poor food and try to gouge me on price, by debating how many scoops of some particular food I have put on my plate and whether the scoop was a "normal" scoop or too much.

If school cafeteria workers are as bad the cafeteria at my work place, then I have actually more scorn for them.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#192
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.

If people develop a taste for it as kids, they have trouble dialing it back later when they do have hypertensive issues.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fo…

I did some more research. The Romans actually had dedicated hunting units attached to their armies, called venatores. They hunted wild game for food and also captured animals to return to the city for entertainment (venationes) and public executions (damnatio ad bestias).

So not only did they hunt, they made it a formal part of their military, not merely an opportunistic food source.

I have to say, I don't appreciate that you would take such an obstinate stance without doing any research of your own. It's intellectually lazy.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#194

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort.

Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#195
post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea came from linking salt to heart failure, but last I checked the link was a confounding variable - e.g. bad diet leads to problems that themselves lead to high cholesterol. It was not the salt in the food but the quality of the nutrition itself. However blaming salt was quick and easy so that’s what the people with money did. Historically speaking salt has been such a scarce and valuable resource. I have read…

No, excessive salt causes high blood pressure. It is definitely a problem. Limit your intake to 6g a day or less. That's plenty for flavour. Source: https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/eat-well/food-types/salt-in-you...

Yikes. It's so disappointing to see public health agencies pushing medical misinformation but that's nothing new for the NHS, I guess. In reality if you look at this from an evidence-based medicine perspective what really matters is not the quantity but rather the osmolality. And the optimal level depends on multiple factors including genetics and activity level.

https://doi.org/10.1111/jch.13374

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#196
post #185
post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

This really does keep getting worse, first you were just wasting money for your ideals now you're suggesting we purposely let kids go hungry until they behave in the way you want. We're beyond they just don't happen to like what's being served but you're trying territory and into they're going to eat it and like it or they don't get lunch. Please don't ever run for your local school board.

And no we didn't all turn out overweight, it's been a minute but I think in my grade there were three "fat kids," two girls and one boy. I really don't understand why you take being overweight as the natural consequence of this. Kids crave sweets because it's calories and they're growing. In my early teens the size of my meals were on the order of two Chipotle burritos or the entire taco twelve pack and I was a perfectly normal weight. I mean I was a girl in high school so I didn't exactly think that back then but I was fine. It wasn't until I was post college and had depression that I put any kind of significant weight.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#197
post #184
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…

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.

Yes we are responsible for what kids eat, it's why it's all the more maddening we have adults who come up with a menu of how they wished kids ate, made it policy, and take literally no responsibility for the (I think very predictable) outcome.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort. Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.

Good news. I also donate an enormous amount of money to the poor personally, with a goal of donating 100% of my net income in the not too distant future. Is that virtue signaling too?

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The taxes come out of every taxpayers' pockets - forcibly - not from your pocket, as you seem to think. If you want to do charity, do it with your own money, your own time and your own effort. Wanting to redistribute other people's private property doesn't make you a good person, it makes you a tyrant, the degree of which is only limited by your power.

Good news. I also donate an enormous amount of money to the poor personally, with a goal of donating 100% of my net income in the not too distant future. Is that virtue signaling too?

When you go around advertising it, it’s a bit, yeah.

Re: All praise to the lunch ladies

#200
post #197
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes we are responsible for what kids eat, it's why it's all the more maddening we have adults who come up with a menu of how they wished kids ate, made it policy, and take literally no responsibility for the (I think very predictable) outcome.

Except it seems to me more that American adults sort of want kids not eat that and fish for anecdotes of kids not eating normal food.

The issue in post is kids who just want a snack in addition to lunch. Kids that are getting lunch as lunch eat it.

Frankly, free lunch dont have to come with free snack pizza for those who dont eqt lunch.

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