For perspective: I come from a country where “cafeteria” food at school is good and affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food), but it’s not an obligation for everyone since it’s up to the student if they want to buy something or bring their own lunch.
The “cafeteria” in my school isn’t a typical American one, rather it’s closer to a canteen where they sell food you can purchase from cup noodles, fried stuff, sandwiches, baked goods, etc. also appliances like a kettle or microwave are available in the dining hall for students to heat up left overs if they wanted.
The thing I tend to notice from American schools (according to US movies, there’s bias whether it’s true or false) is that they tend to depict kids always heading for the cafeteria for recess or lunch picking up whats available instead of bringing their own food from home (left overs from dinner), why is that the case?
If you bring your food there isn’t really a way to reheat it. So you either eat cold lunch box food like peanut butter sandwiches or buy hot food prepared by the school.
There also aren’t refrigerators to put your leftovers in.
school lunch, meals used to be cost some money, and you are ineligible if your parents made to much. in HS we were giving some money for food, which was better than cafeteria anyways.
Because 1) its convenient, and 2)its affordable, and the pay scales with your parents income.
Children from very low income would get free lunch, people from low income might have to pay 2 dollars a week, and then kids from regular income might pay…10 dollars a week? At least from what i remember during my families financial ups and downs as a kid. Those prices may be different now, with inflation and seething hatred of government towards helping people.
Typically you only see the well to do kids bringing lunch, cause they’re the only ones that can afford it.
Socialism!!! That’s socialism, how dare they!
affordable (most is less than the equivalent of 5-10 USD max and it’s not slop, it’s actual food)
The average cost of school lunch in the United States in 2025 was about $3.20, before subsidies bring them down to free for many families. So the cost to the actual families is often between $0 and $2, and almost always under $4 for the pre-set lunch.
Also, speaking as an American parent who often packs kids lunch from home, it’s just a lot of work in a tight window between my kids waking up and getting to school on time. I’ve got enough tasks to do in the morning, sometimes I just don’t feel like adding to that task and have my kids buy lunch instead. I’m literally a former professional cook and meal prep is really easy and fast for me, but sometimes I just don’t want to.
We in Germany just pack a sandwich (some meat, sausage and/or cheese between bread slices) and some vegetable or something.
Not like we are doing major lunches lol. Though they are an option (lunch in cafeteria that is)I’ve seen German students literally eating in class. It’s bizarre
As a German, you don’t understand the social constraints of a North American. Best not to ever eat anything any time. If you need to, get the most casual thing possible. Bringing something from home is lame
Eating in class is unusual (beyond a small candy). Chewing gum is usually prohibited by the teacher but it depends.
The only times I was specifically told and allowed by the teacher(s) to snack was for my final exam (explicitly told to not bring loud stuff like chip bags to avoid disturbance).
Anything else is stealth snacking and praying the teacher doesnt notice.
It’s convenient and they like it.
I haven’t seen any mention the social aspect. Kids could be sent with their own lunch, but (at least growing up the '90s) there was a lot of social pressure to conform. Bringing something from home invited scrutiny. One way to mitigate that was by bringing one of the popular pre-packaged products like Lunchables, which was certainly less nutritious than any regulated meal coming on a tray from the kitchen.
FWIW, in Portugal, during my youth, I ate at the cafeteria rather often. It was decent food for the most part (it was also my first exposure to soy minced meat). It was hot, didn’t involve carrying a lunchbox, and it was tasty and convenient and cheap. Eventually I opted to go back home because I lived close enough to walk, and mom’s food is better.
We did not get ways to heat up food (though I bet you could have asked the cafeteria staff if you needed it) of our own, though.
I ate school lunch whenever I could because I had enough problems already without preparing a lunch for myself while groggy in the morning.
It’s free in our state, so why not?
We live in a pretty rich district too, so the food is actually really good. They’ve got multiple options each day for vegetarians and gluten free, and also a salad bar.
And it’s hot food. Sure you could send a packed lunch, but they don’t allow 1000 kids to microwave their lunches. It would take too long. So if you want hot food, you go through the lunch line.
Thermos
It’s free in our state, so why not?
Because it’s second rate slop and you’re supposed to be concerned about your child’s health. Maybe if US states spend the tax money on proper teachers instead of corrupt food service contracts your kids might learn to read.
The irony about talking about not being able to read, when apparently you can’t read yourself.
No, their food is actually really good lol. They have open lunch where parents can drop in and eat lunch with their kids. I’ve been there and eaten their lunch. It’s really solid. Whenever possible, things have to be sourced locally and the menu fluctuates seasonally depending on what is available locally. The meat comes from a few different ranchers here in Colorado directly, the veggies come from local farmers, and the milk comes from one local dairy (which we also get delivered directly to our house).
And again, I live in a pretty rich district. The teachers are VERY well paid. The absolute minimum any fresh-out-of-school teacher can make is $63k. And that’s with just a bachelors in your first year teaching. Most of their teachers have a masters or a masters and extra credits, have been there several years, and make closer to $100k or more. With a PhD (which several of the teachers have) they cap out at $140k. Our specific school is pretty small, and we know almost all the teachers personally because we almost all live in the same two neighborhoods. There are several married teacher couples with advanced degrees pulling in close to $300k a year combined, and the teacher parking lot has more BMWs and Mercedes than anything. They’re not struggling.
And my kids consistently test several grades ahead, thank you very much.
Unfortunately, not all kids that go to school can afford to pay for food. In some cases the meal they get at school is the only one they get.
Source: Worked with public schools
There’s also the meal prep time, which many families, particularly poor ones, can’t afford either.
My mom prepped my lunch for the week on Sunday. One pot of white rice, one can of SPAM, sliced and pan fried, and packets of ketchup lifted from restaurants. Lunch was rice, one slice of SPAM and a packet of rice. Prep was quick.
Still, free school lunch like those shown in movies looked luxurious.
Yeah, making lunch can be quick. But I also think its easy to overlook how scarce of a resource time can be when you’re struggling to make ends meet. I say this as someone who has been fortunate for most of life; it didn’t really occur to me until it was pointed out.
From experience, it was usually gross and either over or undercooked.
But it was enough to fill an empty stomach :/
Except my senior year of highschool in which they only were allowed to offer a single slice of bread with peanut butter on it and a tiny Dixie cup of water. If you had allergies, fuck you, starve.
I have warm memories of shitty school and cafe pizza from my childhood, when it hasn’t yet become a fashionable food around here and we weren’t collectively spoiled by choice of proper pizza. A thick but small slab of yeasty-as-fuck dough over- and undercooked at the same time; oddly sweet red liquid called ketchup which we’re told includes tomatoes and burnt where it dripped onto the tray; obscenely cheap and suspicious sausage and a generous helping of pickles, topped with a pitiful smattering of crappy local cheese that didn’t bother melting. I have such a vivid taste of it in my memories from the days when “time felt like a thick jelly” that I’ve looked up YouTube videos with recipes and am planning to make it sometime. It’s imperative to bungle it in all the right ways.
This is a special case but we learned my partner has AFRID on top of food restrictions. So it can be especially harder for children with special needs to be able to eat
I realize you only made a typo, but for anyone looking for more information the abbreviation is ARFID
Which is why the school lunch should be funded by tax money, like in some sane countries.
And no, just because its funded by tax money, it doesnt have to be some cheap slop, you can make laws and regulations that govern what sort of quality the food has to be. Just like in some sane countries.
Some US states already do this. It’s mainly unpopular in red states, though, because their ‘protect the children’ rhetoric ends when it stops being synonymous with harming women.
Not to overly repeat myself, but as discussed in the book “dying of whiteness”, there’s a lot of people that would rather their kid go hungry than a black kid get a meal.
Can confirm, while my parents never let my sister and I go without something for dinner, sometimes they didn’t eat and often it was sandwiches.
School lunch was both the biggest meal I usually got and the only one my family didn’t have to pay for. (my school had subsidized and free lunches depending on financial situation)
And thanks to republicunts in my area, most local schools are prohibited by local laws from offering free lunches now. As a result, the school I went to now has 1 cent lunches since it HAS to be paid for, and they leave a jar of pennies by the register so you can take one and hand it to them. And the MAGAts pat themselves on the back for taking food from literal children.
Or if like my family they DID make enough money but they used it in addition to starving me at home when being punished for who the hell knows what. So I got a job and paid for that lunch. It was the only meal I would eat many days. Summers were not good.
A lot of kids eat school lunch because it’s subsidized, and cheaper than food from home would be.
Or because both parents work and don’t have time to pack lunches, and the kids won’t do it themselves.
Or because no one in the household knows how to cook (no, really).
Or because it helps them “fit in”.
I always packed my own lunch, from middle school onward. Now I send my kids with lunches I pack; if I don’t they just won’t eat.
Kids are weird.
This has to be reiterated whenever anyone talks about ‘American schools.’
US has a Federal system where each state runs its own schools, and each local community has its own school board. Two schools can be ten miles apart and have completely different standards and curriculums.
Also, each school has a different social milieu. In one place, the popular kids might bring in meals cooked by their maids, so eating cafeteria food is a sign of poverty. In another place bringing your own lunch might be a thing only the poor kids do.
In one place, the popular kids might bring in meals cooked by their maids
Ha, plenty of rich households completely separate the function of food preparation from cleaning the house. Maid, chef, nanny are 3 different jobs.
Sometimes bringing your own food is due to cross-contamination in cafeteria foods, especially if a kid is allergic to stuff. I was below poverty and still had to bring my own food due to celiac disease.
Many United States public schools treat their students more like prisoners.
When I was going to elementary school in Texas, there was a traffic light on the cafeteria wall. If the light was green, we could sit where we liked. If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line. If the light was red, we had to sit in the same order, and also we were not allowed to speak.
The food was terrible. We loved our awful little pizza rectangles because they were the least terrible thing we were served.
Holy shit that has to be against the Geneva convention or something.
It’s all corrupt government contracts. Instead of teaching supplies and paying for good teachers, you get free prison slop.
Sports teams and band suspiciously overfunded while everyone else gets garbage.
God, another reason to dislike Texas.
I usually skipped lunch and would pocket the cash my parents gave me to shoot hoops in the gym or play video games or watch TV in one of the computer labs. The only ones who had any sort of lunch restrictions were those in detention and, if I remember correctly, even then there was no specific seating arrangement unless they were associated with someone else as co-troublemakers.ps edit: what was the point of “yellow”? Didn’t you generally go through the line with your friends anyway?
ps edit: what was the point of “yellow”? Didn’t you generally go through the line with your friends anywa
Yes, but that might be difficult if you were in different classes, since we were supposed to go straight from class to cafeteria. It was also like “you were kind of bad today, do better tomorrow.” I think at least one time, they even changed it from yellow to red while we were eating because they deemed us too loud or rowdy or something.
Naturally this meant one group of troublemakers could get the whole school in trouble. Collective punishment for individual offenses, just like god does in the bible. They wanted us to live in fear and shame, they were cramming us into an inhuman mold to better serve our corporate overlords.
I was in a small school and even then I can’t imagine the work it would take to arrange us in anything even close to a prescriptive order.
When third period ended, everyone had priorities. Maybe you need to hit the restroom to suck down a dart. Maybe you have to settle a beef with someone from second period PE. A romantic tryst in the north stairwell. Or you might be a normal kid and throw your shit in the locker and press up in the line, trying to cut as far forward as your social class allows. No matter how you use it, you have 45 minutes. If they tried to put us in some sort of prescribed order, that would be all we did that day
If the light was yellow, we had to sit in the same order we came through the line
What does this even mean? Were the chairs numbered?
We had tables with benches iirc. I think whoever came out of the line first would go all the way to the front of the cafeteria and sit down on the side closest to the stage, closest to the door we came in through. Everyone else would fill the rest of that side, then the other side of the table, then the next table, etc. So if you counted it out correctly, you could still sit next to your friends. There were also teachers present to make sure we sat where we were supposed to. I think there was also a guard with a pistol. It was Texas.
I think you went to school at a cult
Yeah… I wrote a song about it.
Oh god that fucking sucks. I’d ask why, but you alrready said the real reason: it’s prison
Holy shit, someone else that had the traffic light! They made us do alphabetical order seating instead of the order you went through line, which sucked because you couldn’t sit with your friends even if you couldn’t talk.
What?? Why? Like what caused the light to change?
For us it was always being ‘too loud’, like a cafeteria full of children 10 and under is ever going to be that quiet. It’s not like kids were shrieking all the time or anything, they just talked excitedly. There weren’t even classrooms near the cafeteria to be bothered by the noise! The more I think about it the more I want to go kick them in the shins about it
So like if it changed mid lunch would you shuffle seats?
This is such an insane thing to do to kids lol I’m so sorry you had a traffic light in the cafeteria
Oh, it was somehow even more convoluted. If the light went to red we had to remain silent the rest of the lunch where we were, and THEN the next lunch was sitting in alphabetical order in complete silence. It might be extended to multiple lunches if people kept trying to talk.
There was one period of time when we had heavy rain, it lasted for what felt like weeks straight, and we weren’t allowed outside. We kind of collectively started going insane from lack of exercise (we had no indoor gym), and then we got multiple days of red light silent lunches.
That is weird as fuck. What a stupid rule. Kids are noisy.
The people who run schools hate kids and want them to suffer
But why ? Sounds like totally absurd as a rule
Control. Punishment and guilt are ingrained in our culture. Abuse has been normalized.
It’s a very unsympathetic thing to say but it’s also 100% true.
The lunch arrangements will vary greatly by age/grade level. A high school is more likely to have the canteen style while an elementary school is more likely to have the cafeteria style. In either case, bringing a lunch from home is also reasonably common.
Movies don’t always do a great job of depicting things. I imagine they might skew towards depicting practices that are common in southern California, or where the creative team grew up. If the cafeteria set on the back lot is shaped a certain way, re-dressing it to change to another style might not make sense for your budget.
It’s going to vary based on private/public, state, and then local school jurisdiction, wealth of the community, and wealth of the family.
My school experience had a mix of:
- Kids bringing their own lunch. This would often be a sandwich, and might include additional items like fruit (apple or banana) or single serving snack packets (chips, cookies). Sometimes there wouldn’t be a sandwich. Leftovers were rare, partially due to no microwaves being available for student use. Sometimes these items would be packed by a parent, or the kid might pack their own.
- Kids buying lunch. A hot lunch had a fixed fee per day and there were usually several items of questionable culinary/nutritional value to choose from. There were also cookies, chips, or milk available for purchase. There may have been more options here, I didn’t interact much with the paid lunches.
- Kids bringing money for lunch and choosing to pocket some or all of it, and just eating later.
- Kids not bringing money for lunch, and not bringing their own. This could be their choice, food insecurity, neglect, or any number of other reasons. Their friends may or may not feed them depending on the relationship.
- Trading items with friends. It doesn’t even have to be food for food.
- Various mixing and matching of the above depending on external factors. A kid might bring lunch then buy milk or a snack on top of their other items. Or they might beg their parents to buy them lunch once a week so that they could have pizza when it was available on Fridays.
Most tables would be a mix of these choices. Some tables might only have kids buying items, or only bringing items from home. In one friend group it might be considered lame to buy lunch, or lame to have something packed by a parent. In some groups and age brackets trading might be prolific, rare, or non-existent.
