> “That’s stupid,” she said with 7-year-old clarity. “Why don’t they just let them eat?”
We’ll spend the rest of that child’s life convincing them that the answer to that is complicated.
I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
291–300 of 918 posts
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#292I might be misunderstanding the problem but in Australia the parents send the kids to school with packed lunches proportional to the household income… fancy lunches for rich kids, and rice or bread for poor kids.
Yeah I have never understood this one.
I took a packed lunch to school almost every day. Later on I packed it myself. If I wanted the canteen had hot meals. Sometimes if you forgot your lunch they would give you 1 meal on credit.
IIRC there's a program in the absolute poorest aboriginal communities to provide free hot lunches at school, because it nearly guarantees attendance and works towards defeating malnutrition. I dont think yanks are that hard up yet but who knows.
Somehow the yanks are constantly demanding free lunches like there's no alternative or workaround?
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#293As an Australian, I find it crazy that getting food from a cafeteria at school is the norm in the US. In Australia you bring food from home 90% of the time. On special occasions or every now and then you order lunch from the canteen. It seems almost against American individualism to have a communal meal where everyone is served up the same food and sit indoors in a dining hall. Maybe it is just strange to me but I ca…
Same. Really seems like a yank thing.
I remember the horse trading at lunch as we rotated sambos to align better with taste.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#294South Korea started dabbling in free school lunches around 2001 - when a few schools started it. It gained momentum, and then it became a huge debate in 2011, when Seoul's mayor somehow decided he hated free lunches so much that he arranged a referendum, and said he would quit if people didn't agree with him on the matter. He did quit. Fast forward to 2025, and now free school lunches are nearly ubiquitous. Once peop…
> Seoul's mayor somehow decided he hated free lunches so much that he arranged a referendum, and said he would quit if people didn't agree with him on the matter. He did quit.
It’s nice when things work out.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#295Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lose your job, lose your children. Great policy ideas from the thoughtful HN crowd, as always.
That's not a real argument. There are plenty of assistance programs, including free school lunches.
How many assistance programs have you applied for? Frankly, if you haven't applied for any, your opinion is uninformed. Even people who are told how difficult it is, underestimate how difficult it is to apply for many programs.
I've helped a bunch of homeless folks apply to assistance programs (not for school lunches, but for a lot of other aid) and almost universally, applying for aid is extremely difficult. I've walked at least 30 people through the process of applying for housing aid and I'm pretty sure exactly none of them have actually received aid. The only program's I've seen people actually successfully apply for were medicaid and SNAP. It is the norm for it to take over a month to receive medicaid, and it's the norm for it to take over 6 months to receive SNAP. Meanwhile people are dying of medical conditions and starving.
Now add in all the reasons people are in this position in the first place--these people are struggling. It's hard to apply for these programs, and it's harder when everything else in your life is going poorly as well.
And after all that, you might discover that you don't qualify even though you clearly have need. In the OP the author notes that many families with lunch debt were right above the income line for receiving aid.
Some political forces are concerned that people will take advantage of these programs who shouldn't, and others simply don't want these programs to work so that they can have an excuse to cut them, and as a result there are numerous hurdles set up before you can obtain any sort of aid.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#296DISD ( Dallas Independent School District ) has had free lunch for as long as i can remember. Free breakfast too. On school holidays you can still goto school and get a meal. I want to say they do this on weekends too. Granted, MREs from an Army surplus store are better than school lunch but it is free. I don't think my kids have ever eaten a school lunch. During COVID my wife and I got a EBT (food stamps) card in th…
Wow that's amazing. I'm glad to hear they're doing it at least somewhat right somewhere.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#297One word for this - heroic.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#298A political party in New Zealand just considered rolling back school lunches to only those in need, rather than every kid at a lower decile school. This article is a great response to why that is a bad idea.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#299Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without reading into lunch specifically, I'd very much be inclined to say yes. The reason is, I spent many hours researching the fair structure of my transit agency. Fares that have, obviously, been in the news for being harming to low income citizens. What I found was that the city spent almost 1 billion on upgrading their collection systems, whereas the yearly revenue from those same systems amounted to 1/10th of t…
One of the "don't say the quiet part out loud" with transit fares (which would NOT apply to school lunches) is that transit fares are a convenient way to remove unwanted transit enjoyers. It is somewhat hard to define "being disruptive on the subway" but it's easy to define "doesn't have a ticket".
I've not been in a place with a functional transit system where fares were high enough to prevent disruptive people from boarding. I've seen rich people get onto Acela trains obnoxiously drunk.
I have, on the other hand, seen transit operators (bus drivers, mainly) kick people who had paid fares off for being disruptive. The definition of "being disruptive on the subway" does not seem to be the barrier you think it is.
Re: I decided to pay off a school’s lunch debt
#300I love living in Minnesota. Walz passed the Free Meals for School Kids Program[^1] at my elementary school, no less! about two years ago. I’m happy that other states are finally realizing, gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve. [^1] https://education.mn.gov/MDE/dse/FNS/SNP/free/
>> gee, this is such a straightforward issue we could actually solve Shifting the cost from the parents who had the kids onto the taxpayers is not solving the problem. It's making people who didn't cause the problem subsidize the people who did cause the problem. That's not solving the problem. It's making sure there will be more problems.
Honest question: are you a Malthusian? If so, what do you think is the ideal birth rate?