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I understand the appeal of bringing a cold lunch, but from a nutritional perspective only few sandwiches really are healthy. Most breads have little to no whole grain part (I remember that ultra fluffy bread from the Netherlands exchange, it was amazing but definitely not nutritious), and at best you can fit in two slices of tomato and cucumber and a salad leaf. The greatest part is the fillers of usually “animal protein” which contain too many saturated fats.

Don’t get me wrong, you can absolutely make a healthy sandwich with whole grain bread, homemade hummus, grated carrot, tomato, salad, cucumber, sprouts, quality cheese or seitan slices… But most people just don’t do that. Most people take light bread with butter or cream cheese and deli meats and cheese on top.

I have been at a congress a couple of years back (I work in biomedical and nutrition science) and one presentation was by someone who gave dietary advice in clinics and reviewed some common tips and guidelines of dietetics. One of them was recommending adding bread as a whole grain source. The caveat was that people would not just eat the whole grain bread (if they were even to choose whole grain instead of white or light bread to begin with), but that - even when you substitute lets say a serving of white noodles with actual whole grain bread - you don’t eat the bread alone. You put toppings on it, butter, deli meats, cheeses, which are all high calorie and not exactly healthy for you. Patients (especially the ones trying to lose weight) ended up increasing their calorie intake and their sat fat and salt intake by adding healthy bread to their diet.

I don’t want to say that a cooked, warm lunch is automatically more healthy than a sandwich - but you have many more options here and more practical ones than with sandwiches. You can add so much more vegetables to it.

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FinishingDutch@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.

We’re the tallest people in the world and I don’t think it’s humanly possible to be malnourished here, so maybe we’re doing something right :D

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- volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Yeah, well, if a cheese sandwich was good enough for my grandparents and parents, it’s good enough for me.
  
  My sibling in Christ, your grandparents smoked and drank whilst being pregnant with your mom and dad.
  
  (This isn’t supposed to be a diss, I’m just trying to point out that this might be some survivor bias and that our ideas of what is healthy or not change over time. Which is great, we always add knowledge. It’s not so long ago we discovered vitamins. My former supervisor discovered the first biotin receptor. God, a couple of years ago keto was the new hot shit.)
  
  (The Netherlands, moreover, does have a lot going on that plays into its citizens’ health. Doesn’t it? You seem like a solid social democracy and you got more bikes than people. Maybe it’s that and not the cheese sandwiches :P)
  
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Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
You have to get the volkoren (whole grain) bread which is actually nutritious and most Dutch people actually don’t eat it enough. And it is generally considered to be better for you than most lunches people have. Like having Spaghetti for lunch like the stereotype for Italians.

I find it to be really impractical and expensive to eat hot lunches at work. I would skip my daily walk where I eat my sandwiches and I doubt ill be able to warm it up, clean the microwave or whatever I use to heat it and eat it in the span of half an hour. Especially if everybody needs to heat their food.

Every time when I have had good hot lunches (of going outside to a restaurant etc) it would have costed me 15-25 euro excluding drinks, but yeah that is somewhere else I understand that. Another issue is that I generally do not have enough appetite to eat food in the evening.

My sandwiches aren’t the healtiest to start with because I don’t eat margarine which we tradionally put on bread (it’s not even actual butter anymore) and I generally put the same thing on it because well I am not even that much of a fan of sandwiches let alone creating them. I put deli ham on it and sandwichspread.

Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.

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- volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
  
  Maybe I should just bring some leftovers and eat them cold, could do that as well I guess.
  
  You could absolutely do that, or cook dishes that are meant to be eaten cold to begin with. Onigiri, buddha bowls, gazpacho soup (with some volkoren bread ;) ), a salad with falafel balls, etc. A zucchini-egg-oats-ham-cheese slice from the oven is also a cool afternative, you can cut it up and freeze it and just let it thaw as you need - and eat it with one hand. Bring some baby tomatoes on your walk. Eating a cold lunch doesn’t mean you need to choose between leftover cold spaghetti with meatballs and a sandwich.
  
  I understand the value of taking a walk, but eating while walking is also not exactly the healthiest.
  
  Last but not least - our little conversation here is actually off topic. The question is about school lunches. And while you might like your cold, unhealthy sandwich and a walk (all power to you) - school children who can’t return back to class earlier if they eat faster do absolutely deserve a warm and nutritious lunch. Remember that in the US, a lot of people cannot afford to feed their children at home, let alone with a warm and healthy meal. Maybe a sandwich for lunch is fine if you then have a great breakfast at home and a big dinner, but imagine all you eat in a day is a white bread pb&j sandwich for lunch and then the same for dinner, breakfast skipped. This is the reality for many more people - many more children - than we can imagine. And children move more and they are growing and they have to concentrate at school, they need to be full and nourished.
  
  This is why this is so important. Providing all children with a free or at least dirt cheap meal that is both tasty (as in, accepted by the children’s freakishly picky palate) and nutritious is an incredible challenge, but it is possible. Yet it is treated as an afterthought at best and poor people shaming and punishment at worst. If a child gets a pb&j for dinner and no breakfast, it better have a goddamn delicious huge ass plate of wholegrain maccaroni with vegetables and chicken breast and a low fat joghurt with fruit salad for lunch. And a salad bar. Because salad bars rock. I’d prefer it not to be chicken, but I probably have the only kid that genuinely likes boiled tofu over meat.
  
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  - Vinstaal0@feddit.nl ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    You call sandwiches unhealthy while here they are considered healthy. I might look into some other dishes, but I am not the biggest cooking fan.
    
    I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence. Which might not even fully fix the issue due to picky eather etc.
    
    Also the waste is a lot more than if you just bring school lunch in a reusable container.
    
    But as long as poverty isn’t fixed it is better for offer school lunches than let the kids get hungry of course, but it will not help push people to end poverty
    
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    volvoxvsmarla@lemm.ee ⁨2⁩ ⁨weeks⁩ ago
    
    I rather fix the issue of why parents can’t feed their children cause they probably can’t properly feed themselves than working on fixing an consequence.
    
    I wholeheartedly agree here, but this would mean a huge ass systemic change. It would be infinitely better to treat the cause and not the symptom - but it would also be harder, take much more effort, more change, more willingness from politicians, more consistency. This is just not realistic in the short or even medium run. Providing free and healthy school lunches is already a very hard and difficult goal/job. However, it has the benefit of being very concrete. You have one task that you focus on with direct benefits. Improving the conditions so that parents can feed their children better is very vague and much more multifacetted. Where do you even start? Minimum wage, working conditions, daycare options, healthcare, boosting the economy, increasing social security… 100% you should do all that, but man, you’ll wait a long time for this to become so much better as to have a measurable effect on “lunch performance”.
    
    Also, even at the end, parents can still make bad choices. As you mentioned, sandwiches are considered healthy even in the Netherlands. I do, indeed, work in nutrition science, and the ideal sandwich is healthy, but 99% of people eat severely unhealthy sandwiches. A friend of mine is a dietician and, my Lord, I’ve at least had the privilege of reading studies and not working with people because people are dumb. I can’t believe that in 2025 you got to tell people that white bread and candy is not good for you or that you shouldn’t drink sugared soda instead of water. People don’t know that sugar makes you fat. People don’t know what a calorie is. People don’t know that you can’t soak your salad in ranch dressing and put 15 fried chicken fingers on top and that’s not “a healthy low calorie salad”. You will always have negligent parents. You will always have parents with mental health issues or other struggles who cannot safely provide food. Especially in a socially rotten country like the US.
    
    Last but not least, why not do both. You can absolutely both work on fixing the underlying issues and in the meantime work on providing free and healthy school lunches all over the country (or, for that matter, planet). Actually, you absolutely should do both. They don’t exclude each other a bit.
    
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