When I was in high school (graduated almost 20 years ago now), our lunch period had 30 minutes for lunch, and that included the time it took to cross campus to eat (from one side of campus to the other took 10 minutes to walk if you could cut through the fields, but if it were raining and the campus flooded, you were stuck on the sidewalks and it would take 15-20 minutes to cross campus).
If you were "lucky" you got either first or third lunch, because that butted up against the 10 minute inter-period "travel" time, giving you 40 minutes for you lunch/play.
But each lunch had around 1000 students competing for the lunch line, and there were many days where the lunch line did not complete before the lunch bell rang, and lunch was over.
Jesus, dude, where was this? I graduated in 1999 from a school with nearly 3,000 students and it didn't even take me five minutes to walk to the school from my house, let alone to cross the campus. It was an average of maybe 40 seconds from classroom to the lunch area, depending on which class you had immediately before. If it was band, you lucked out and were right next to the cafeteria, though we also had separate outdoor food sellers and I never personally ate at the cafeteria and there weren't too many lines because there were so many options. Once senior year came and we could leave campus, there were three different walk-up Mexican lunch counters within four blocks of the school and it didn't take 10 minutes to get to one of those, either, and we were across the street from a grocery store. I lucked out senior year because my day ended with three consecutive periods of art and the art building was the one right next to the gate to the parking lot.
Credit California for at least that one thing. The open air campuses with hacienda style layouts were really easy to get around. Contrary to European imaginations in which all of the US is Frisco, TX, even in a Los Angeles suburb I could also walk pretty much everywhere as a kid and the weather was kind enough most of the time to even make it pleasant.
Small town of only 30k people, but the school district kept absorbing other districts. Some kids (me included) had 2-3 hour bus rides to school. Some days if I missed the bus, I would have to walk, but the walk was only 30-45 minutes depending on if I stopped at a friends house or not.
Our lunches were not free. We paid $2.50 for lunch, and that came with an apple, choice of entre (microwaved hamburger on wheat bun, microwaved pizza, or microwaved chicken nuggets). Our lunches probably cost around $0.50 in food, and our cafeteria workers were paid minimum wage, so in the 8 hours, the 5 cafeteria workers all together made $210. Assuming 30% of kids took their lunches (I doubt it was this many), and assuming $2 in food profit per child. That was around $4k/day in profit. It all went to our football stadium. I'm from Texas.
So, adjusting for inflation, that meal would be around $8.75 today. And with todays food prices, and today's higher minimum wage, it is still profitable.
NO ONE would pay $9 for this meal today, but we were paying $2.50 for it 2 decades ago.
A microwave hamburger patty is $0.90, a bun is $0.18, a gala apple is $0.65 - these are grocery store prices, not bulk orders from suppliers. But that comes out to $1.73 vs $1.75 ($0.50 adjusted for 20 years of inflation).
EDIT: As others have stated my inflation calculation is off by about 2x, but the point still stands, I can remake the same meal today at grocery store prices for less than the school meal cost 20 years ago when they were buying for 2000-3000 meals per day. There was definitely a profit being made on those meals. Along with all the other fees we were required to pay to attend our public school.
That sounds particularly crappy even for a US school lunch. But I don't think the numbers are right.
Even back then 50 cents a lunch for food is not a real number. Also, reduced and free lunches generally accounted for ~40% of students, and getting reimbursed for that from the federal program required pretty tight bookkeeping.
> Jamie's School Dinners is a four-episode documentary series that was broadcast on Channel 4 in the United Kingdom from 23 February to 16 March 2005. The series was recorded from Spring to Winter of 2004 and featured British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver attempting to improve the quality and nutritional value of school dinners at Kidbrooke School in the Royal Borough of Greenwich.
> Oliver had his work cut out for him: firstly, the daily budget for school dinners was a mere 37 pence per child.
That's currently 47¢. Wages and other costs are different, but it's in the ballpark.
In the US, the federal reimbursements starts at $0.37 cents for paid lunches and goes up to $6.37 for certain free lunches. That's in addition to additional grants and aid that is available at the state and district level:
Maybe things are worse in the UK or food is that much cheaper - but I suspect Jamie excluding certain funding sources for the sake of drama is more likely.
I grew up in a very impoverished, but very proud area. Kids usually get their first job at 14 to help pay for their school food and fees (even our public school had fees for basically every elective you took - and you were required to take multiple electives per year... not very elective, if you ask me).
There was a number I heard years ago (after I graduated, and went back to work for the school district), that high-90s% of the students met the reduced/free lunch, but only 10% took it. My mom and dad paid for all 4 of use to have our lunch at full price even though my mom and dad together brought home under $30k for most of my childhood.
Even now, the school district actually offers free lunches to ALL students regardless of income levels, and again, very few families have signed up for it.
It's beyond dysfunctional that this happens in the richest country in the world. Money is a means and not an end, if you cannot ensure a decent childhood for your country's children (while less wealthy nations manage much better), what is even the point of so much economic growth?
I know we are sharing anecdata from walking up the hills both ways but I'll add my own. I went to the Peoria Illinois school district. You can look it up - it was one of the poorest, worst performing, most underprivileged school districts in the state (outside of south Chicago and East St. Louis). I was on the reduced lunch program (40 cents a meal). But even we had a pretty boring affair of canned peaches and vegetables with lima beans with our Salisbury steak.
Also, the application for reduced lunch was included with the registration for the school so uptake was pretty high. At the time the district was legally compelled to feed kids whether they paid or not, so they were incentivized to maximize the reimbursement from the federal government to defray the costs.
If we didn't have money, our "free lunch" was a peanut butter sandwich. The problem is (at least in elementary and junior high) you probably weren't sure if your parents even paid the school for lunches. So you would get to the end of the line, select your entre, apple, and milk, and then put in your pin, and the lunch lady will take your tray back, and hand you a peanut butter sandwich (no jelly).
Not sure what the free lunch is now days, but probably not peanut related.
I went to school in a fairly affluent area a bit more than 20 years ago. Our choices for lunch were nacho and cheese, grilled cheese sandwich and frozen pizza.
Same, Fairfax County school lunches were gross in the 80s and 90s.
Meanwhile, a friend worked at Sidwell Friends for a few years and she said the food there was better than most restaurant offerings. It's good to be rich and powerful.
If you were "lucky" you got either first or third lunch, because that butted up against the 10 minute inter-period "travel" time, giving you 40 minutes for you lunch/play.
But each lunch had around 1000 students competing for the lunch line, and there were many days where the lunch line did not complete before the lunch bell rang, and lunch was over.
And if you did not make it to your class on time