> The idea that lunches can be freshly made, on site, out of healthy ingredients and children are active participants in serving and cleaning up is just crazy.
> When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.
....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those requirements (which is almost nothing).
To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.
It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.
Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into. No exceptions.
Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen *everywhere* in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.
It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that *everyone* will pay the cultural toll. It must be *everyone*, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.
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Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.
> When I encountered it for the first time I felt like a big part of my childhood had been sold to the lowest bidder.
....I share the sentiment, but I also see the chasm between the requirements to get to what's desired, & what's actually given to meet those requirements (which is almost nothing).
To have this program exist requires children that can be trusted to not waste the food that they're given, to behave, & to learn about preparing their own meals.
It's a bootstrapping problem, trust problem, & expectations problem, all at once.
Japan was able to do this by pressuring its citizens & youth to pay the cultural toll needed to get there, and it was a toll that *everyone* had to pay into. No exceptions.
Whilst there can be pockets of local communities that can do this, the probability that the same thing can happen *everywhere* in the US is close to zero, given the cultural emphasis placed on individualism.
It is also from this emphasis of individual exceptionalism where there can be no guarantees that *everyone* will pay the cultural toll. It must be *everyone*, or this proposal won't work: It'll just be another form of subsidization by another name.
------
Note: This doesn't mean that it can't happen, just that the amount of effort needed to get there is monumental, and that certain axioms have to be relaxed significantly to do so.