I remember school lunches the way you remember your first heartbreak—with equal parts nostalgia and indigestion.
Back in the day, our cafeteria cooks had access to five-pound blocks of government cheese that came in plain brown cartons—USDA surplus with a side of humility. The rest of the food? It came in bulk, sure, but at least it was real. Industrial-sized bags of beans, rice, pasta. Big pots of something hot that resembled a home-cooked meal, give or take a dented tray and a hairnet.
Me? I usually brought my own lunch. Not out of protest, just habit. But by the time I got to high school, the food had taken a nosedive into something that resembled spackle on a saltine. That’s when the guys in the Datsun B-210 pickup trucks rolled into the parking lot and started barbecuing burgers during lunch. Not for fun. For survival. It was an organized boycott of whatever the school was pretending to call food.
We laughed about it then. But what’s happening now?
This ain’t funny.
Today, school meals aren’t just bad. They’re being gutted at the source.
The USDA cut over a billion dollars in school food funding this year. Gone is the Local Food for Schools Program, which helped schools buy fresh food from local farmers. That’s right—we stopped funding food so schools could go back to frozen pizza and pre-packaged nuggets.
Congress also started messing with the Community Eligibility Provision (CEP)—a policy that lets high-poverty schools serve free meals to every kid without mountains of paperwork. The new plan? Raise the threshold, kick out the schools that no longer qualify, and let them sort it out with a spreadsheet and a smile.
In plain English: more kids will go hungry, or eat garbage.
And we’ll call it fiscal responsibility.
But we know what it really is: Tariff tantrums at the top and powdered mashed potatoes at the bottom.
And when I pointed this out on social media, someone said, “Well, it’s the school district’s budget—they’re trying to save money.”
Yeah, they are.
Because the federal government bailed on them.
Someone else chimed in: “But the long-term health effects are terrible.”
No kidding. We’ve got kids developing diabetes and iron deficiencies before they hit middle school, and we’re serving them cardboard pizza because that’s what came on the truck.
Let’s be real. You can’t run a nation on empty stomachs. You can’t teach fractions to a kid who hasn’t had breakfast. You can’t tell working parents to “just pack a lunch” when they’re already juggling rent, gas, and three jobs.
We’re not just starving students. We’re starving the future.
For some kids, that tray of pizza and corn was the only real meal they’d get all day—and now even that is being hollowed out by politics.
We live in the richest country on Earth, but we treat our children like a rounding error.
Want to know the real reason school lunches suck? Because somewhere along the way, Congress decided subsidizing agribusiness was a better investment than feeding the kids those businesses are supposed to serve.
So we keep pouring money into corporate farms and pulling it out of school kitchens.
Then we wonder why the test scores drop and the nurses’ offices fill up before noon.
We’ve got politicians stuffing themselves with lobbyist steak dinners while kids chew on pizza crusts and mystery meat.
This isn’t just a failure of policy. It’s a failure of basic decency.
Because feeding children shouldn’t be up for debate.
Not in this country.
Not ever.