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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 ⁨3⁩ ⁨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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