For perspective: I come from a country where “cafeteria” food at school is good and affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food), but it’s not an obligation for everyone since it’s up to the student if they want to buy something or bring their own lunch.
The “cafeteria” in my school isn’t a typical American one, rather it’s closer to a canteen where they sell food you can purchase from cup noodles, fried stuff, sandwiches, baked goods, etc. also appliances like a kettle or microwave are available in the dining hall for students to heat up left overs if they wanted.
The thing I tend to notice from American schools (according to US movies, there’s bias whether it’s true or false) is that they tend to depict kids always heading for the cafeteria for recess or lunch picking up whats available instead of bringing their own food from home (left overs from dinner), why is that the case?
A lot of kids eat school lunch because it’s subsidized, and cheaper than food from home would be.
Or because both parents work and don’t have time to pack lunches, and the kids won’t do it themselves.
Or because no one in the household knows how to cook (no, really).
Or because it helps them “fit in”.
I always packed my own lunch, from middle school onward. Now I send my kids with lunches I pack; if I don’t they just won’t eat.
Kids are weird.
affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food)
The average cost of school lunch in the United States in 2025 was about $3.20, before subsidies bring them down to free for many families. So the cost to the actual families is often between $0 and $2, and almost always under $4 for the pre-set lunch.
Also, speaking as an American parent who often packs kids lunch from home, it’s just a lot of work in a tight window between my kids waking up and getting to school on time. I’ve got enough tasks to do in the morning, sometimes I just don’t feel like adding to that task and have my kids buy lunch instead. I’m literally a former professional cook and meal prep is really easy and fast for me, but sometimes I just don’t want to.
We in Germany just pack a sandwich (some meat, sausage and/or cheese between bread slices) and some vegetable or something.
Not like we are doing major lunches lol. Though they are an option (lunch in cafeteria that is)I’ve seen German students literally eating in class. It’s bizarre
As a German, you don’t understand the social constraints of a North American. Best not to ever eat anything any time. If you need to, get the most casual thing possible. Bringing something from home is lame
Eating in class is unusual (beyond a small candy). Chewing gum is usually prohibited by the teacher but it depends.
The only times I was specifically told and allowed by the teacher(s) to snack was for my final exam (explicitly told to not bring loud stuff like chip bags to avoid disturbance).
Anything else is stealth snacking and praying the teacher doesnt notice.
Because 1) its convenient, and 2)its affordable, and the pay scales with your parents income.
Children from very low income would get free lunch, people from low income might have to pay 2 dollars a week, and then kids from regular income might pay…10 dollars a week? At least from what i remember during my families financial ups and downs as a kid. Those prices may be different now, with inflation and seething hatred of government towards helping people.
Typically you only see the well to do kids bringing lunch, cause they’re the only ones that can afford it.
Socialism!!! That’s socialism, how dare they!
It’s free in our state, so why not?
We live in a pretty rich district too, so the food is actually really good. They’ve got multiple options each day for vegetarians and gluten free, and also a salad bar.
And it’s hot food. Sure you could send a packed lunch, but they don’t allow 1000 kids to microwave their lunches. It would take too long. So if you want hot food, you go through the lunch line.
Thermos
It’s free in our state, so why not?
Because it’s second rate slop and you’re supposed to be concerned about your child’s health. Maybe if US states spend the tax money on proper teachers instead of corrupt food service contracts your kids might learn to read.
The irony about talking about not being able to read, when apparently you can’t read yourself.
No, their food is actually really good lol. They have open lunch where parents can drop in and eat lunch with their kids. I’ve been there and eaten their lunch. It’s really solid. Whenever possible, things have to be sourced locally and the menu fluctuates seasonally depending on what is available locally. The meat comes from a few different ranchers here in Colorado directly, the veggies come from local farmers, and the milk comes from one local dairy (which we also get delivered directly to our house).
And again, I live in a pretty rich district. The teachers are VERY well paid. The absolute minimum any fresh-out-of-school teacher can make is $63k. And that’s with just a bachelors in your first year teaching. Most of their teachers have a masters or a masters and extra credits, have been there several years, and make closer to $100k or more. With a PhD (which several of the teachers have) they cap out at $140k. Our specific school is pretty small, and we know almost all the teachers personally because we almost all live in the same two neighborhoods. There are several married teacher couples with advanced degrees pulling in close to $300k a year combined, and the teacher parking lot has more BMWs and Mercedes than anything. They’re not struggling.
And my kids consistently test several grades ahead, thank you very much.
Many United States public schools treat their students more like prisoners.
When I was going to elementary school in Texas, there was a traffic light on the cafeteria wall. If the light was green, we could sit where we liked. If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line. If the light was red, we had to sit in the same order, and also we were not allowed to speak.
The food was terrible. We loved our awful little pizza rectangles because they were the least terrible thing we were served.
Holy shit, someone else that had the traffic light! They made us do alphabetical order seating instead of the order you went through line, which sucked because you couldn’t sit with your friends even if you couldn’t talk.
What?? Why? Like what caused the light to change?
For us it was always being ‘too loud’, like a cafeteria full of children 10 and under is ever going to be that quiet. It’s not like kids were shrieking all the time or anything, they just talked excitedly. There weren’t even classrooms near the cafeteria to be bothered by the noise! The more I think about it the more I want to go kick them in the shins about it
That is weird as fuck. What a stupid rule. Kids are noisy.
The people who run schools hate kids and want them to suffer
So like if it changed mid lunch would you shuffle seats?
This is such an insane thing to do to kids lol I’m so sorry you had a traffic light in the cafeteria
Oh, it was somehow even more convoluted. If the light went to red we had to remain silent the rest of the lunch where we were, and THEN the next lunch was sitting in alphabetical order in complete silence. It might be extended to multiple lunches if people kept trying to talk.
There was one period of time when we had heavy rain, it lasted for what felt like weeks straight, and we weren’t allowed outside. We kind of collectively started going insane from lack of exercise (we had no indoor gym), and then we got multiple days of red light silent lunches.
Holy shit that has to be against the Geneva convention or something.
But why ? Sounds like totally absurd as a rule
Control. Punishment and guilt are ingrained in our culture. Abuse has been normalized.
It’s a very unsympathetic thing to say but it’s also 100% true.
It’s all corrupt government contracts. Instead of teaching supplies and paying for good teachers, you get free prison slop.
Sports teams and band suspiciously overfunded while everyone else gets garbage.
Oh god that fucking sucks. I’d ask why, but you alrready said the real reason: it’s prison
God, another reason to dislike Texas.
I usually skipped lunch and would pocket the cash my parents gave me to shoot hoops in the gym or play video games or watch TV in one of the computer labs. The only ones who had any sort of lunch restrictions were those in detention and, if I remember correctly, even then there was no specific seating arrangement unless they were associated with someone else as co-troublemakers.ps edit: what was the point of “yellow”? Didn’t you generally go through the line with your friends anyway?
ps edit: what was the point of “yellow”? Didn’t you generally go through the line with your friends anywa
Yes, but that might be difficult if you were in different classes, since we were supposed to go straight from class to cafeteria. It was also like “you were kind of bad today, do better tomorrow.” I think at least one time, they even changed it from yellow to red while we were eating because they deemed us too loud or rowdy or something.
Naturally this meant one group of troublemakers could get the whole school in trouble. Collective punishment for individual offenses, just like god does in the bible. They wanted us to live in fear and shame, they were cramming us into an inhuman mold to better serve our corporate overlords.
I was in a small school and even then I can’t imagine the work it would take to arrange us in anything even close to a prescriptive order.
When third period ended, everyone had priorities. Maybe you need to hit the restroom to suck down a dart. Maybe you have to settle a beef with someone from second period PE. A romantic tryst in the north stairwell. Or you might be a normal kid and throw your shit in the locker and press up in the line, trying to cut as far forward as your social class allows. No matter how you use it, you have 45 minutes. If they tried to put us in some sort of prescribed order, that would be all we did that day
If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line
What does this even mean? Were the chairs numbered?
We had tables with benches iirc. I think whoever came out of the line first would go all the way to the front of the cafeteria and sit down on the side closest to the stage, closest to the door we came in through. Everyone else would fill the rest of that side, then the other side of the table, then the next table, etc. So if you counted it out correctly, you could still sit next to your friends. There were also teachers present to make sure we sat where we were supposed to. I think there was also a guard with a pistol. It was Texas.
I think you went to school at a cult
Yeah… I wrote a song about it.
You can bring your own food. Cafeteria food in the US (at least, from my childhood) was notoriously bad. Back in the day they didn’t really care about whether or not you could eat it either, if you couldn’t you got a cold alternative dish.
Another factor is poverty however. Poorer families are more likely to rely on the cafeteria system. Rich families provide their kids with high quality food.
For sure. My school has free breakfast, lunch, and dinner for the kids. They still throw 80% of it directly in the trash because it isn’t Takis or McDonald’s.
I haven’t seen any mention the social aspect. Kids could be sent with their own lunch, but (at least growing up the '90s) there was a lot of social pressure to conform. Bringing something from home invited scrutiny. One way to mitigate that was by bringing one of the popular pre-packaged products like Lunchables, which was certainly less nutritious than any regulated meal coming on a tray from the kitchen.
FWIW, in Portugal, during my youth, I ate at the cafeteria rather often. It was decent food for the most part (it was also my first exposure to soy minced meat). It was hot, didn’t involve carrying a lunchbox, and it was tasty and convenient and cheap. Eventually I opted to go back home because I lived close enough to walk, and mom’s food is better.
We did not get ways to heat up food (though I bet you could have asked the cafeteria staff if you needed it) of our own, though.
The lunch arrangements will vary greatly by age/grade level. A high school is more likely to have the canteen style while an elementary school is more likely to have the cafeteria style. In either case, bringing a lunch from home is also reasonably common.
My kid just started TK and the school is serving such a high poverty area that they give free breakfast and lunch. It’s hard to pass up, and isn’t the worst quality in the world but still a little more sugar than I’d prefer. Fruit yes, vegetable no, and loads of dairy (which is a thing thanks to US subsidizing farms, this is where that surplus goes. Corn syrup, too though, unfortunately).
It’s also kind of a lot of trouble for two working parents to prep a lunch for multiple kids every day. Leftovers are great, but they don’t always hold for the few hours they’re in a bag. I’m allowed to bring food to them at 11:30am, but I’m working so it’s a non starter. My daughter also attends a Japanese Saturday school though and prepping a bento box is required.
My daughter also attends a Japanese Saturday school though and prepping a bento box is required.
Wow, that’s a pretty strict policy. Is it just so they get a consistent cultural experience with meals during school? As opposed to ‘you have to bring lunch but a brown bag is fine’
I mean it’s one of those implicit things. We’ve snuck some leftover pasta in there though, along with a rice ball… hehe
Interestingly, elementary schools here (Japan) provide school lunch, so no bento required unless it is a half day or field trip etc.
It is very nutritious, and rotates through a variety of Japanese and international cuisine. We get a menu each month so we can talk to the kids about it. The children take turns helping to serve lunch in their classroom. You can go back for seconds if there is any left, and you can ask for less of certain things depending on preference.
Kindergarten usually has the option of school lunch or bento (but it depends on on the actual kindergarten). I think JHS may be bento. I’m not at that point yet.
Yeah, that’s good to clarify; my girl attends a special school in the US that originally was designed to keep native Japanese kids up to date with language while living in the US because of a father’s international work, etc., sometimes not even for a full semester. They’ve since had you start accepting US born kids too, so long as they’re proficient in Japanese.
They’re housed within a public school but are ultimately private so they don’t have access to facilities like that.
When I was in school, the full price of the cafeteria lunch, with 8 oz milk, was $1.25. That was very affordable, and the federal nutrition guidelines meant it wasn’t that unhealthy. Finally the actual food wasn’t actually all that unpalatable either.
Breakfast was free for everyone under a federally funded program. But I didn’t eat that because you had to show up at 6:30 am to get it.
It’s convenient and they like it.
I ate school lunch whenever I could because I had enough problems already without preparing a lunch for myself while groggy in the morning.
If you bring your food there isn’t really a way to reheat it. So you either eat cold lunch box food like peanut butter sandwiches or buy hot food prepared by the school.
There also aren’t refrigerators to put your leftovers in.
This is a 1:1 copy repost of a thread from months ago. Will post original if I find it again.
EDIT: https://lemmy.world/post/44664547/22841691
it was deleted
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