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The only thing about changing foods available is that the kids don't want the food that is good for them.

I've seen it first hand with my kids, friends' kids, co-workers' kids. It's also been widely reported.

So, they eat crappy burgers and fries, or they eat nothing.

Better would be to offer healthy choices and see what sells. Better yet would be to have the kids make their own lunches with ingredients provided. 

Maybe a little "home economics" wouldn't hurt.

Is that even taught anymore?

Ain't nothing wrong with school cafeteria food, I have no idea what y'all are talking about.

I would  think some decent sandwiches should be possible and reasonably healthy, turkey or something with lettuce and maters.  I eat sandwiches by choice fairly often.

I agree the food should be improved, I just am not sure of the holdup.  It's facile to blame some Big Corporation for everything.  And at times they are at fault.

Okay, here's how this plays out. It's not "blame Big Corporation", it's not anything particularly nefarious. It's all covered by standard behavioral economic theory:

• The powers that be (school board, dept of education, health dept, whoever) comes up with a list of nutritional guidelines for the food that is served.
• As such, they obviously cannot say "you must serve these 5 meals on weekly rotation" because they'll be seen as meddlesome tyrants. Which they are, but they don't want to APPEAR that way. So you get guidelines basically stating caloric requirement, inclusion of certain food groups, etc. 
• This of course includes a significant amount of lobbying, such as how ketchup becomes classified as a vegetable. A good portion of that lobbying is probably from big corporations who know that if they get ketchup to be classified as a vegetable, they can satisfy the requirements at lower cost.
• The school districts need to figure out what food supplier to go with. To justify their bloated administrative budgets, they convene a 12-person panel that meets for weeks and weeks to write the request for proposal that is sent out to food suppliers, and then more weeks and weeks to select their supplier. Lots of money is spent by people who are going to sit around a conference room arguing, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
• The food suppliers know that they are going to have to be the low bidder or damn near it to even have a chance at getting the contract. So [having already lobbied the requirements to be flexible and cheap], they work out the crappiest food and the thinnest margins they can offer in order to make a healthy enough profit on the deal to be worth their while at all. They know they'll have predictable sales volume, so it's a low-risk endeavor to keep profits low, but they have to hit the cost targets to win the bid at all. 
• The school districts get the bids. They've already spent their budget on the salaries for the people who spent endless meetings discussing the bids, so they pick the lowest bidder.

Hence, you end up with crappy, cheap, unhealthy food. But it comes in within the budget for the school districts, who don't have extra money to pay for healthier options, and the kids suffer.

Yeah, that makes sense to me.  Spend money on administration instead of the product.

Our HS food in Cincy was "OK", I ate there a few times.  I thought it was reasonable for the price, which was very low.

That's why I want to cancel as many administrators as possible. It's bloated.

In Chicago, there are 32K teachers and 6K administrators. Average teacher pay is around $70K and the average (do nothing) admin is payed around $150K.

That's $900 Million on administrators and $2.2 Billion on teachers.

There are 350K students.

Okay, here's how this plays out. It's not "blame Big Corporation", it's not anything particularly nefarious. It's all covered by standard behavioral economic theory:

• The powers that be (school board, dept of education, health dept, whoever) comes up with a list of nutritional guidelines for the food that is served.
• As such, they obviously cannot say "you must serve these 5 meals on weekly rotation" because they'll be seen as meddlesome tyrants. Which they are, but they don't want to APPEAR that way. So you get guidelines basically stating caloric requirement, inclusion of certain food groups, etc.
• This of course includes a significant amount of lobbying, such as how ketchup becomes classified as a vegetable. A good portion of that lobbying is probably from big corporations who know that if they get ketchup to be classified as a vegetable, they can satisfy the requirements at lower cost.
• The school districts need to figure out what food supplier to go with. To justify their bloated administrative budgets, they convene a 12-person panel that meets for weeks and weeks to write the request for proposal that is sent out to food suppliers, and then more weeks and weeks to select their supplier. Lots of money is spent by people who are going to sit around a conference room arguing, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
• The food suppliers know that they are going to have to be the low bidder or damn near it to even have a chance at getting the contract. So [having already lobbied the requirements to be flexible and cheap], they work out the crappiest food and the thinnest margins they can offer in order to make a healthy enough profit on the deal to be worth their while at all. They know they'll have predictable sales volume, so it's a low-risk endeavor to keep profits low, but they have to hit the cost targets to win the bid at all.
• The school districts get the bids. They've already spent their budget on the salaries for the people who spent endless meetings discussing the bids, so they pick the lowest bidder.

Hence, you end up with crappy, cheap, unhealthy food. But it comes in within the budget for the school districts, who don't have extra money to pay for healthier options, and the kids suffer.

Right.  It's a race to the bottom. For food.  For kids.  In the "best country in the world."   

I feel like I arrive at the outcome and skip all of this typing, when we all know the typing, but for some reason many of you need it all typed out.  

When it comes to food at public schools, it's basically treated the same as prisons:  keep them alive.  Honestly.  
And when standards are put in place to require x-amount of this and y-amount of that, that's how you get chili fries counting as a main entree.  

The facts are it's a broken system with those that don't have a voice suffering as a result.  That's a fact. 

Have you ever heard of the Voice vs Exit idea? 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty

Kids don't have Voice in the debate, because the powers that be are government and teacher's unions, not parents. When you don't have voice, you need exit. And kids don't have Exit, because you're stuck with the school you're zoned for, and the cost to find a better one involves moving, often to someplace you can't afford because it's strange how property values tend to track with quality of school district, no?

This is the argument for school choice. If you have no exit, then nobody listens to your voice. 

"School choice" as it's been labeled, is about one thing and one thing only - white flight. 

How is a school/district supposed to improve when their best/most concerned students/families leave? 


I'm also afraid teacher's unions are an antiquated boogeyman, too.  Over half the states are 'right to work' and don't have bloated, draconian teacher unions.  And it's hard for parents to have a voice in their local school if they're busy choosing another school.  I'm not even sure how we got to this, as I - a teacher - am advocating for better food for students. 
.
A school in a poor neighborhood isn't going to have parents advocating for quality school food because they're not providing quality food at home.  Because they're poor. 

So, your major complaint about the educational system in the United States, is the quality of the food? You see no other problems?

When my kids were in school (not terribly long ago by the way), we would get a calendar from the cafeteria every month that detailed what would be served on that day. Therefore, my kids knew what they could expect if they ate the school lunch that day. That gave them an option, eat what the cafeteria was serving or bring their own lunch. My wife and I would be sure that we had food choices at home that were transportable and available for their lunch. So if they didn't care for the school lunch, they could take something else that appealed to them.

This is called Personal Responsibility. My wife and I were responsible for ensuring that our kids had nutritious food for lunch and the kids were responsible for determining which lunch they preferred on a daily basis.  We didn't leave that decision up to some school administrator or other government agency, we handled it ourselves. Perhaps if more parents did the same, food wouldn't be an issue at schools. 

This is were you start lambasting me because we actually work to ensure our children have what they need to grow up healthy. We sure do. We also waited to have children until after we married and got ourselves into a financial situation where that would not be an issue. I suggest that others approach parenthood in a similar fashion as it is a HUGE responsibility to bring a child into this world and care for them. Too many people these days don't share that opinion.