this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
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A Boring Dystopia
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Getting school lunches is so foreign to me, but then again people here in NL just bring home made sandwiches, which are generally cheaper to make than food like in the picture.
At least in the schools I went to when the teature noticed somebody didn't have lunch with them on a consistent basis they would ask what was wrong and give them food.
Some other kids just kept eating unhealthy food every day because the school was still selling that. Heck in my first highscool they sold candy every thursday or so. It was an interesting time.
As a Swede i think your system in the Netherlands sounds so foreign. When I was in school we always had 2 hot meals to chose between and a 'salad bar's. All paid for by the tax system. No one should ever be forced to go hungry imo.
Sounds like heaven! in Denmark we have to make our own rugbrød sandwich at home.. Every day.. From kindergarden until... Well some do it their entire life..
You can buy a hot meal in gymnasium but it is very expensive
In NL most people don't even eat hot lunches on a regular basis. Even at work people just bring sandwiches in most Dutch companies unless they are internationally focussed.
Nobody should go hungry, but I don't see the appeal or need for a centralised food system. Pretty sure there is less food waste if you just give your childeren food from home.
Pretty bold to assume all kids have food at home.
Like I said in the original comment you didn't read the kids who haven't had food would generally been given food at school
That can easily lead to "othering" those kids as well. Also, many parents who can still give their kids food from home might still struggle to do that at times.
Schools are already monitoring a whole mess of kids at once. Why not just take care of feeding them too? That ensures that, regardless of what happens at home, they have at least one good meal each day.
Probably doesn't understand the disparity of the home setting of kids in the US
Not American, but here in Australia there is a growing trend towards supplying some level of food at school, quite a few schools are introducing Breakfast Club to offer food before school, and a lot of schools find they can get better nutrition for students by supplying balanced options to students directly via a variety of programs.
Food and Kids can be quite complicated and my own son can be quite resistant to the idea of even having food in his school bag as his medication supresses appetite and he feels pressured if we make him something as opposed to providing shelf stable packaged foods that won't spoil if he can't bring himself to eat.
From what I understand of the situation in the US this is an intersectional issue where it has been identified that:
Which is intersecting with:
The thing is that something like sandwiches aren't cheaper to produce in bulk and a lot of the cafeteria's will have either a fair amount of food left over or they barely make enough for everybody to combat that.
I don't think the food in US school is really that fresh.
No person should go hungry period, but I rather fix the reason why most go hungry than fix the solution. And I have had mandatory lunches in school and generally there is just a choice between meat, fish or vegaterian and I often find myself picking the least bad option.
Having prepared sandwiches at industrial scales yo would be surprised how much you can scale down costs, bulk purchases can make a suprising difference. I really envy the system that most Japanese schools have in place. They seem to be focussed on the outcomes, not the cost or social engineering. I have talked with some Japanese friends about this and while a few are from wealthy families and attended schools without a formalised school lunch program the majority talk about how it opened their horizons as far as food options, gave them a sense of community, and was just a defining characteristic of their school life.
It is the same in Denmark..
it is way more convenient and nice to be served a hot meal every day.
But I don't really understand why people can't just make a sandwich from home, especially if they will get in legal trouble.
They should do a UBI for kids. I think 30 euros should be enough to cover a montg
I'm not sure you know how much a euro is worth if you think 30 euros a month is enough to feed a kid?
A loaf of good quality ryebread will last a week. 3 euros.
5 euros for butter.
Sausage is around 4 euros. Should be good for a week.
Remoulade just takes it to the next level, should be 3 euros.
Yeah it is probably on the lean side.
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.
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
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)
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.
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.
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
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.
In Germany it was pretty unusual to eat in school at all, you had breakfast at home (7AM-ish), school starts at 8 and finished at 2PM latest, usually 1.15PM. We all went home for lunch afterwards, and that was that.
I really like your spelling "teature" but it's officially spelled teacher.
Because English is silly like that.
My school here in the USA we had school lunch too, it was usually pretty ok, kids also packed lunches the same as your school.
Same here, I brought my own lunch, sandwiches mostly, all the time I was in school as a kid a long time ago whenever I wasn't going back home for lunch. I prepared lunches for my own kids all the time they were in school.
Punishing kids for lunch debt is evil, at least give them the right to vote if you are to play that game.
Yep. Our high school had a cafeteria where you could buy snacks, but none of the schools I went to ever supplied lunches as such. It’s basically the parents and kids responsibility to feed themselves. As it should be.
Maybe Dutch parents (used to be) much more responsible than those elsewhere. 🤷♂️
Why "as it should be?"
I don't have or want kids, but I want ever child to grow up healtht and food secure. These are humans that can't work for themselves and have no means to protect themselves from food insecurity, and they will be my younger coworkers, and bankers and brokers and building my roads and and and.... I want them to be mentally and physically well.
I don't understand why our society builds sidewalks and playgrounds and funds schools to teach kids how to be humans, but feeding them is a bridge too far.... We already hold them captive in the middle of the day when one of the 3 meals is served anyways....
I agree. Kids should be fed. But that’s not the school’s job. It’s to teach.
The Netherlands has a robust social system. There’s welfare for people without jobs, there’s financial assistance for raising a child, there’s food banks, etc. Etc. And plenty of help getting into these assistance programs.
Basically, there is NO reason for a parent not to be able to feed their child. Even if they have zero money, there’s help. The only thing they (or the kid) needs to do is make some sandwiches to take with them for school lunch. That’s it.
I'm glad you live somewhere where this problem isn't even phathomable to you.
You can certainly argue that it isn't the schools job specifically, but it would be the most practical and efficient choice. Kids are all already gathered there at the right time, facilities usually exist or can be added to buildings....
But to say "just pack a sandwich." ...... I just wish I lived somewhere where that was it. That THAT was the barrier.
Well then, I sincerely hope the place where you live gets better :-)
Thanks.