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Every time I read about this I remind people of the Iowa governor.
The feds offered free money to help clear Iowa kids lunch debt.
Iowa governor Kim Reynolds turned it down because “we are in an obesity epidemic”.
Read that a couple of times to yourself just to let it sink in. Conservatives are about hurting people just so they can get a couple of easy points in the polls, even if it means literally letting innocent children of poor families go hungry.
Obesity can actually be caused by not eating enough
No really, your body thinks you’re in a time of famine and holds onto EVERYTHING it can… You also get more stressed which causes your body to store your adrealine as extra fat.
But think of all the jobs in the orphan crushing industry!
If a kid was able to do this by saving his allowance, then it can’t possibly be very much compared to resources of a school or its surrounding tax base. Give the kids their food.
Yeah usually they’d cut kids off from lunch after like 10ish dollars of lunch debt for my school, like 5 meals behind max.
So a class worth of school lunch debt legit might be like 100$, and prevent a handful from being allowed lunch anymore. The level of petty is absurd.
What is school lunch debt?
We’re not ok in the USA
In a nutshell, it’s capitalism at its worst.
Long story short, because giving students lunch on taxpayer money would be socialist, the USA decided to charge children to eat food made by the school cafeteria.
In theory this is good if you want to send your kid to school with food to eat, you don’t have to pay for lunches that your kid won’t eat, whether directly, or indirectly, through taxes.
In reality, kids, or more accurately, their parents, either can’t or won’t pay for the food that their kids eat from the school cafeteria, most notably the former.
Instead of simply not feeding the kids, they just accrue debt for eating the food prepared by the school for them.
Thus, school lunch debt represents the worst of capitalism. The kids, and/or their parents are being billed for the children eating food.
It’s weird to me because I didn’t go to a school with a working cafeteria (one that makes food) until highschool, and it was basically just a cafe in the school, you paid for what you wanted when you bought it from the cafeteria. No money, no food.
I was always sent to school from grade 1, with a lunch in hand because of this. I understand the convenience of having a school able to prepare and serve lunch to the kids, but I’m not aware of any where I am that do that. To be fair, I haven’t been in school that wasn’t a college/uni, for over 25 years. Maybe things have changed here? IDK.
To add to this. Some schools won’t give official graduation from various levels of school or diplomas if you have lunch debt
