Chicago school bans lunches brought from home

This is incorrect at the start of it.

A loaf of wheat wonder bread only has 20 slices in it. In fact, most bread has only 20 slices. How are you making 20 sandwiches with 20 slices?! I am also flummoxed on buying any meat at only $3 a pound and making it last a week.

If you are spending only $3 per pound, you are likely buying just ham or just bologna. If you are doing that, then you aren't really providing anything "healthy." Turkey runs at about $6/$7 per pound on sale.

Your initial example is also an exceedingly plain and not all too healthy sandwich. You have starchy bread, no complex carbs and a very fatty meat.

Bananas are not 20 cents. They range closer to 74 cents each. Apples are about a dollar. Those would help a bit, but not a ton.

At the price point of $1.25, you'd not only save the money of buying this sandwich, but also the time to put it together. As such, it literally costs more money to bring your own.

 

Compass Group operates those concepts at the locations they manage -- say on a college campus -- but they don't own any of those companies.

 

And trust me, many school cafeterias that are still run by the districts are turning a profit thanks to the free and reduced reimbursement. If some local-yokel school district has mastered making a $.25 profit off of every lunch and $.10 off of every breakfast, you damn certain a private company has.

 

I think Richie Cunningham did just such an expose for his school paper in a Happy Days episode.

I don't think he won a pulitzer though.

 

Yes, I'm sure the beancounters have worked this out. And I'm sure they've greased the right wheels with the right people in Chicago Public Schools to make this happen. And they can sell it as being "healthy." And they can run over parents who don't have the means or voice to fight back. Because if these were parents who had to pay full freight for school lunch, they would be all over the district like flies on whatever shit passes for mystery meat.

The healthy food laws/rules in Illinois for schools come from a good place, but they're so wildly and inconsistently enforced to make them laughable. For example, for my kids' birthdays, I can't send treats to school. (That's why we end up with a lot of pencils.) But the hot lunch program for my 8-year-old serves a lot of fried food. That's healthy? Oh, and for my junior high son's activity nights, they can still sell pizza and candy. That's healthy?

Of course, schools don't have the money to prepare truly healthy food in bulk, even if they wanted to.

By the way, other than my 8-year-old, my three other kids bring a lunch to school. It's not for nutrition reasons. They're just fussy enough that there are too many days they wouldn't touch the school lunch.

 

Outing alert: Pastor is the lovechild of Suze Orman and Subway's Jared.

 

This is going to sound like "Stay off my goddamn lawn" kinda rant, but anyway...

Why the fuck are parents sending their kids to school with soft drinks in their lunch box? My mom NEVER did that and I don't recall any other kids' parents doing that either. My choices were either Kool-Aid of some kind (sugar free) or milk. Take it or leave it.

No wonder kids are fat.

 

I do not have kids in the public school around here, but I do get the local community paper with the school lunch menu published. At least two times a week the elementary school here has East of Chicago Pizza for lunch. I'm assuming they have it worked out with the local East of Chicago to have all these pizzas brought to the school (it is, literally, across the parking lot for East of Chicago to get to the school) and they serve them up to the kids. This has to be better than the flat, rectangular garbage they used to pass off for pizza when I was a little kid...you know the stuff I'm talking about with the little square pepperoni chunks and virtually no cheese whatsoever.
I think it is foolish this school system is making kids eat the school lunches, but it has to be better for the kids. I can remember eating bologna sandwiches that sat around at room temperature all day, or egg salad or the like. How did we all not get food poisoning?

 

Just as healthy? You are aware, are you not, that processed meat is one of the single most unhealthy foods in existence (particularly if you're male)? Now, if I have to die of something, I'd just as soon die of bacon as anything. But that pre-packaged lunch meat sure as hell ain't healthy.

 

Yes, it was well-written and informative. However, Richie did not have a solid plan to promote his story across all media platforms. There wasn't even any video! He didn't even tweet about it! Great story, but I think it's easy to see how it was an overall failure. With no cross-promotion or even half-hearted attempt to drive traffic to www.JeffersonHighDailyNews.com Richie really let everyon down.

 

My sisters kids get dinged for $5 at their school. No way this is about nutrition. I think its a revenue grab as way to offset cost of lunches that are subsidized.

 

$5.00 is way to much.

One of my customers is a corporate sibling of Chartwells and runs an award winning (truly) cafeteria at a suburban college.

They put out great food, and I forget the exact number, but they get reimbursed at less than $3.00 per meal. It's somewhere around $2.75 I think.

And they still make money.