Now if you can pull a boiling frog meme and make the pizza be healthy, haha more power to them!
But we forgot how to make decent food at scale.
We should definitely encourage schools to renovate and make use of the kitchens when they have them, encourage kitchen facilities be included in new construction, and maybe even encourage creative solutions when no other options exist.
I just want to play devils advocate on the cost : How would be paying people minimum wage to batch cook food from scratch with local produce be more expensive ?
We did that for centuries without conserve, fridge and NPK to grow our food.
We now have access to cheap energy ( historically speaking ) and a variety of preservation methods. That should be considerably easier.
( and in fact i think it is, I’m in Quebec now, public hospitals switched to cook all their food on the same budget as previously frozen crap. A lot of French municipality are doing the same. Basically you have to pay the yearly salary of à cook, some gardener and a CPA to handle what can’t be grow ( 50% )
A frozen hotdog is pretty expensive for what it really is.
Question : how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
Some hopeful example :
Quebec hospitals started cooking all their food internally on the same budget.
More and more French municipalities stopped their frozen food subscription to hire a handful of cooks and gardeners with a similar budgets. ( those are minimum wages jobs than can be sourced locally )
To conclude : human have been cooking food in batch for quiet a while. That what I mean when I say « we forgot » : some communal facilities like school don’t even have kitchen anymore.
Local produce is more expensive, as is cooking from scratch[0]. Another problem is that won't scale. You can't feed millions of kids twice a day every weekday from the local farmers' market.
[0] https://www.vox.com/videos/2018/3/22/17152460/healthy-eating...
> how would be our Republicans friends do lunch for schools? Every kids bring a box ?
Make them pay for it. If they can't pay, they don't eat.
I’m ready to change my mind once I’m reaching a wifi.
In interval :
how did we do it for millenniums before frozen carbs?
Random: Let’s say the Roman army. Ok. They were relying on canned food a lot. ( garnum )
But for sure they were not eating frozen hotdog
We didn't. Child mortality was higher, populations were smaller, life expectancy was lower and malnutrition and starvation were more common.
Our current population size is the direct result of post-industrial farming and food production making calories easily available to the masses, and all kinds of foods accessible year-round.
But again, the problem isn't modern processed food, which can be perfectly healthy, it's an unwillingness to fund school lunches enough to provide more than cheap, empty calories.
Absolutely. Post WW2 food production with NPK intrants and machineries changed how we grow food. ( thanks Bayers ! )
But it’s hardly the sole factor and I would not be surprise if it was not the main driver of multiplication.
Medecine & Basic hygiene also went a long way. As well as the great convenience of bottled energy to move things arounds for cheap.
But I think we talk about a bunch of stuff at once here.
For instance I did not mention biologic produce.
Just … cooking food in a large communal kitchens with large kitchen equipment. The kind where you can cook for 50 people at once.
As opposed to : complex industrial process to build a hot pocket or a frozen breakfast burrito.
One is something most people can be trained to do, and the other needs a team of engineers to design, and another team to build the factory and another to run it.
( watching your vox link )
Oh. Ok. Yeah. I find that part relevant
> But the US government also doesn’t subsidize leafy vegetable crops in the same way it supports wheat, soy, and corn, vital ingredients in a lot of junk food.
I think it says it all. Why is the US government meddling with the market? I live in the Us as well: We don’t pay the real price of food. Yeah produce are labors intensive. But a lot of crap food has hidden cost that should be factored in. ( but that’s yet another topic :) )
To summarize, I find it hard to smallow that buying a frozen product that flew to you and is the result of a complex industrial process is cheaper than whatever grow with sunlight, a hour of care a day and some water.