[mylesp]

As 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 can't be the only person to think this.

[_AzMoo]

In Australia this is actually an issue for low-income/underprivileged children in schools. Some parents don't give their kids breakfast or lunch, because they can't afford it or they just don't care.

Some schools run a "breakfast club" that everybody's welcome to attend, where they provide things like toast or cereal to kids that don't get breakfast at home, and it's couched in shame-softening language, though most kids know that if you go to breakfast club it's probably because you can't actually afford breakfast.

Schools will often have some bread and spreads available in the office for kids who are sent to school without lunch. I'm not sure how widespread it is, but I know that in some schools this is just funded voluntarily by some of the staff who will pick up more bread or whatever when it's required, because they don't want to see kids go hungry.

I think the idea of having lunch provided as part of your school fees is actually a good one. No kid should go hungry, or be subject to humiliation and shame, because their parents can't afford or can't be bothered to provide them lunch.

[crooked-v]

School-provided lunches in the US started in the first place in the 1930s and 40s because the sheer number of malnourished teenagers was making military planners nervous. The US is much wealthier now, but there's still about 20 million children who get free lunch for financial reasons.

[jeroenhd]

I've had the same experience here in the Netherlands. Except there often was no real cafeteria to order from if you forgot your lunch or if something special was going on.

This mechanism does cause troubles for the poorest kids, though. Poor families send their kids to school without lunch, or with very unhealthy food (because that's cheapest).

I'm in favour of schools offering lunch. Parents pay for the sandwiches or whatever they hand out to their kids anyway, might as well get the benefits of economies of scale to reduce costs, while helping poor kids through the day. I doubt the taxes necessary to make this happen would be close to the price parents pay for food (and the time they spend preparing meals for their young kids).

[trollbridge]

Back in the 80s, everyone packed a lunch when I was growing up in Australia. One of my brother's classmates was of Malay background, and we were fascinated by the lunches he'd bring in, including a thermos containing fried rice which would still be hot when he'd eat it at lunch.

America is a place where we don't like the idea of people going hungry. The government provides a great deal of food assistance; 13% of the country receives food stamps. Government policy is that every American should be getting at least $291 of food; if providing yourself that would be more than 30% of your income after expenses like rent, the government makes up the difference. Groceries are cheap, relatively speaking - they're sure cheaper than what they cost in Australia. We have extra programs for pregnant/nursing moms which provide food like milk, eggs, beans, and fresh produce, or if they can't or don't want to nurse, we provide infant formula for them. (Income based, but about half of new moms qualify, although in turn only around half of those new moms bother to take advantage of it.) We have excellent food banks that (at least in my area) are well-stocked. They currently have "expanded eligibility" (meaning they don't screen you when you come in) because they aren't running out of food.

We don't like the idea of kids at school going hungry either, so first we had school lunches, and now we have school breakfasts in places. We also have "summer" food programs. My state decided to use the federal funding for this for "summer EBT", which means food stamp amounts go up by what would be the cost of providing school lunches. (Americans skip out of school for 3+ months in the summer.) The general trend is towards free lunches for everyone, instead of making it income eligible.

Whether any of this is a good idea is another question. We don't seem to be a terribly healthy nation, and we eat way too much ultra-processed food which does not seem to be good for us. Big Food and Big Ag have an incredibly strong grip on government. The amount of money involved is big money. To give you an idea of the dollars we're talking, the amount of food stamps spent in America on soda was around $10 billion. You can go ahead and guess which corporation lobbied to expand soda to be eligible for purchase with food stamps.

[gedy]

It seems to have changed in past decades. When I was in school in 70s/80s, everyone brought their lunch. And we weren't in a well-off area or anything.

[Brybry]

As a sibling comment noted, the National School Lunch Program started in 1946. [1]

The School Breakfast Program started in the 1960s/70s. [2]

More recently, in 2010, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act was passed which enabled the Community Eligibility Provision which lets low income area schools offer free food to all kids without individual application/qualification. [3][4]

Various schools I went to in the 90s/00s had some kids bringing their lunch, some kids paying the school for lunch, and some getting free lunch (because they were poor enough to qualify).

[1] https://www.fns.usda.gov/nslp

[2] https://www.fns.usda.gov/sbp/factsheet

[3] https://www.usda.gov/about-usda/news/press-releases/2014/05/...

[4] https://www.fns.usda.gov/cn/cep

[protocolture]

Same. Really seems like a yank thing.

I remember the horse trading at lunch as we rotated sambos to align better with taste.

[asdf6969]

Same in Canada. I think this is just another one of those things like voter ID where Americans have been tricked into believing something many other countries do is impossible and evil.