Perhaps the BEST B1G Forum anywhere, here at College Football Fan Site, CFB51!!!

The main things I see different about food in France is:

1.  Fresh ingredients, and
2.  Prepared on the spot.

People shop daily for food, frozen items and preprepared items are available, but eaten less often than here.  (They also walk a lot, and many younger females smoke to maintain weight, it's notable.)

I've tried to move more to "real cooking" at home, with simple ingredients bought recently.  It's more time consuming than heating up a frozen pizza of course.

They also don't have:

1) Fast Food on every block on every street - absolute garbage that is slowly killing people. they barely have these places. we have them every freaking where.
2) HFC - your body cannot break this crap down. it's in literally everything here. it's banned in europe. they use you know- actual sugar.

And oh yeah the EU bans I believe like 50+ food additives or pesticides that are allowed to be used in US by FDA/EPA. They are A LOT more strict with their food supply.

Dude... White flight already happened. They moved out to the 'burbs where property values are higher and school systems are better.

School systems in the poor neighborhoods suck. In many of them, per-student funding is quite healthy (albeit spent on the wrong things, i.e. bloated administrations). How are we supposed to solve the problem of those school districts? Throw more money at it?

We need reform, and it's not going to happen when the "customers" are legally required to go to school, and cannot afford to go to private schools or move out of the poor neighborhoods, so they're captives to the system.

I'm probably not going to make you a school choice believer... I'm fine with that.

What's your solution?

I know 'white flight' is taught as a one-use term to describe the specific era you shared, but it's not just that - it's continuous and occurs in nearly every portion of our society.  All this damn integration has run amok and cities are somewhat checkerboards when it comes to neighborhood quality.  It's so sad that every elite neighborhood can't buffer itself with an upper middle class neighborhood, away from the poor kids.  
So it's another white flight from mostly-nice public schools to charter schools (money-making bonanzas) and private schools - both of which have somehow (guess which party helps) extracted public funds.  

So what's the solution?
Well, the solution is NOT to siphon money from public schools to give to charters and privates.
The solution is NOT for the best students and most involved families to ditch their public schools....if that happens, then there is no solution.  

An actual "fix" of our school system would require a total reset, based on what's best for the students.  Not what's easiest to test them, not what's going to avoid hurting feelings, etc.
Teachers are tasked with being given a bell curve of students and told to make them all average or better.  It's absurd.  
Grade levels aren't a problem, but having annual cohorts and 95% of them marching along to the next grade year by year is a clown fantasy come to life.  There are MANY 8 year olds that should still be in kindergarten.  There are MANY 8 year olds ready for middle school content.  We're more worried about the social stigma of holding kids back or promoting them too quickly, based on their knowledge/ability level.  Except that that pales in comparison to these students not being at the correct level even more (imo).  

We could fill 1000 forum pages on this, but there needs to be a paradigm shift of epic proportions.

Grade levels aren't a problem, but having annual cohorts and 95% of them marching along to the next grade year by year is a clown fantasy come to life.  There are MANY 8 year olds that should still be in kindergarten.  There are MANY 8 year olds ready for middle school content.  We're more worried about the social stigma of holding kids back or promoting them too quickly, based on their knowledge/ability level.  Except that that pales in comparison to these students not being at the correct level even more (imo). 

I was going to bring up this very thing next.

COVID is worse than the flu- but it was being billed as something that was going to kill us all. Turns out- it's not really that dangerous. It's far more dangerous for the elderly and the obese. I believe that the CDC reported 50+% of all COVID deaths were from nursing homes- most of these people are on deaths doorstep as is- and 78% of all COVID hospitalizations in the US were obese people.

Well, if you dig into the statistics, it's also much more deadly for the young and healthy than the flu is, but again tripling a very tiny mortality rate for one category--the flu is almost never deadly for that group--is still a very tiny mortaility rate.

There's also the concern about long-term effects. There are a lot of stories about people stuck with long-term fatigue, cardiac issues, lung issues. I don't know the actual numbers and I don't know if those are expected to clear up with more time, but it's one of the reasons I was gung-ho about getting the vaccine... Despite being young and healthy enough that I'm highly unlikely to die from COVID, the potential long-term effects could still hit me.

Want to fix health in the US? A great start would be rethinking our entire food system. Getting rid of soda and getting rid of fast food. Will that ever happen? No. But it would help a lot. We have the fattest population in the world and the most garbage food in the world. You don't see too many absolute cows in Europe. Italians drink olive oil by the gallon and French people eat 10 sticks of butter a day and they aren't obese- and oh yeah their food shits all over our food. Makes you think.

Agreed... I think it's cultural. I think America, particularly post-WWII, was a land of excess. "Bigger is better", as you could see in our cars of the era. That applied to food--restaurants competed on portion size rather than quality. And having an extreme car-driven culture also led to more and more fast food.

I do believe that there is starting to be a difference, but similar to OAM's point, that change is occurring at the higher income brackets rather than the lower, leading to even more disparity between rich and poor in health outcomes. I think it'll take a generation at least before it starts to filter down, much like child names--the rich people make a new name popular, then 10 years later it's a middle class name, then 10 years later it's a poor kid's name.

At least I hope it'll filter down. The country needs to remake its food culture to be more healthful.

Betcha a dollar they have nothing like our lobbyists. 

They do indeed, and his two examples are both false, so there is that.

Their initial HFC "ban" was to protect their sugar industry.  Their bans on things like GMO are also to protect their industries.  I could go on for a long time, Europe has many trade restrictions with the US due to their industry lobbyists and farmers.

In the US, by and large poorer people are more often obese, and thinner folks are more often upper class on income etc.

It's a reversal since say 1900.

'Fast food" including the frozen items at Kroger are prevalent, as are snacks, candies, ...

One thing I did as a parent was to have zero chips and salted snacks and candy items.  They got one day after Halloween (which I hated) and all the candy disappeared.

I did order pizza too often.

I'm not sure eliminating a 3 cent profit on a $2 lunch changes the quality much.

An actual "fix" of our school system would require a total reset, based on what's best for the students.  Not what's easiest to test them, not what's going to avoid hurting feelings, etc.

We could fill 1000 forum pages on this, but there needs to be a paradigm shift of epic proportions.

If that's true, then it's either time to throw up our hands completely because the entire power structure won't allow a paradigm shift of epic proportions, or we should determine incremental steps that, when you slowly implement them all, will get you where you need to go.

It's the offseason. We've got 1000 pages.

I'd like to hear a few more concrete initial steps, and how to "sell" them to the public and the powers that be to get it started. That would be quite interesting offseason chatter IMHO.