<story><title>Nine-year-old’s lunch blog shames school into making changes </title><url>http://grist.org/list/nine-year-olds-lunch-blog-shames-school-into-making-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinalexbrown</author><text>Awesome and hilarious - I would be a very proud father or older brother.&lt;p&gt;But on a serious note, directed at the media woohoo that always ensues, demanding better food for schools Jamie Oliver style misses the constraint of a limited budget. Presumably there&apos;s some price/utility tradeoff between the cost of the food and the health/taste.&lt;p&gt;Then there&apos;s a tradeoff between teacher quality and wages, school size and the number of teachers you must hire, etc. What we should be asking is whether the nutritional value outweighs wherever else the money would be spent. Maybe it is, maybe it&apos;s not, but &apos;oh the school is shamed&apos; is a little much.&lt;p&gt;Edit: of course the other discussion to have is whether there is a tradeoff between cost and health (including additional cooks needed to produce healthier food on a large scale). But I don&apos;t see this in most media discussions either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jdietrich</author><text>If your political system doesn&apos;t see child nutrition as a priority, your political system needs to be burned to the ground. Are we honestly expected to believe that a first world nation can&apos;t find room in the budget to give children vegetables?&lt;p&gt;I cannot imagine a future in which they do not look back and think &quot;Food was cheaper in their age than at any point before or since, but they fed their children worse than cattle. How could a school have computers but no fruit?&quot;.</text></comment>
<story><title>Nine-year-old’s lunch blog shames school into making changes </title><url>http://grist.org/list/nine-year-olds-lunch-blog-shames-school-into-making-changes/</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kevinalexbrown</author><text>Awesome and hilarious - I would be a very proud father or older brother.&lt;p&gt;But on a serious note, directed at the media woohoo that always ensues, demanding better food for schools Jamie Oliver style misses the constraint of a limited budget. Presumably there&apos;s some price/utility tradeoff between the cost of the food and the health/taste.&lt;p&gt;Then there&apos;s a tradeoff between teacher quality and wages, school size and the number of teachers you must hire, etc. What we should be asking is whether the nutritional value outweighs wherever else the money would be spent. Maybe it is, maybe it&apos;s not, but &apos;oh the school is shamed&apos; is a little much.&lt;p&gt;Edit: of course the other discussion to have is whether there is a tradeoff between cost and health (including additional cooks needed to produce healthier food on a large scale). But I don&apos;t see this in most media discussions either.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>leot</author><text>Blarney.&lt;p&gt;Healthy food is not pricier unless you get fancy. Legumes, quinoa, and vegetables aren&apos;t more expensive (though they do have smaller margins!) than the crap that they had been serving previously.</text></comment>