Cool. Tater Tots... ew...heh. Soaked with grease, those things.

Not in the school cafeteria it isn't. If they want to bring in unhealthy snacks as a part of their lunch there's very little the school can do about it.

Plus it presupposes that families have the knowledge, resources and interest in doing so. What you're basically suggesting here is that students shouldn't get healthy food unless their parents give it to them, which is just complete bullshit.

Oh Americans, you crazy bitches.... You bomb for democracy, fuck for virginity and declare pizza a vegetable XD

You have become an amusement to the world, when you don't kill everybody with your holy wars from above and shit :-P

And for some reason I thought that an increase in toxicity and fat + low nutrition in the food that children in general eat would produce more super soldiers through natural selection. Imagine my surprise when the opposite happened.

Eh. EU isn't much better on any of those (Libya, does anyone remember Libya? I know it's not as exciting as Iraq because it was mandated by the UN & led by the French, but somebody's got to remember it).

If you read the article, you'll find that tomato sauce (if it meets certain requirements) is being declared a vegetable. That's a bit odd, but the thought process is understandable.
They're an option in some schools, but schools I've seen usually have several things on the menu that kids can choose from. From what you've described it seems like in Poland there's only one option, but in the US there's usually a salad option, a soup option, a fast-food option and frequently something else like ethnic food or subway sandwiches. And usually the drink options are juice or milk. Sides are chosen separately from entrees. If the school has vending machines the kids can buy from those, but they usually aren't part of the lunch.

The general setup is that you've got to have an entree, a vegetable and a drink

So the kids can choose the fast-food option and get chicken + green beans + milk, or they can choose salad + small soup + juice, or a sub sandwich + milk. It's definitely not as unhealthy as you're thinking.

The real problem is that there's simply too much food involved. Eating pasturized processed pizza-like product isn't awesome for you, but if it's small enough there's no harm no foul. The portion sizes aren't right though, and that's where the real trouble starts.

Not around here, at least not when I was in school. There would be one option precisely every day and it would vary daily. But it would be totally gross and would feature some inedible vegetables. I remember the string beans were always an unnatural grey color. I think it's probably gotten better since then, but most of the elementary schools don't have the facilities to do their own cooking.

At the middle school level there were a few more options, but not if you were low income, those would all be paid for by extra money, the default option was the same day in and day out IIRC.

High school they had decent options that would be fairly healthy, but by that time you could just leave campus to get something better which more or less mooted the point.

I personally shudder to think what things are like in the South where there's generally less funding and less interest in healthy dining.

Well, of course. Planes bombed. People cheered. Happy faces all round.

It is funny that the whole world managed to exist without all of the meddlesome nitwits arguing about what something is called ('a rose by any other name..')

No-one is forcing anything on anyone, as they are free to bring their own, and I personally do not like someone else deciding for me/my family what is 'right' or 'wrong' based upon whatever health bs that happens to be in vogue at the minute.

But they are deciding, regardless of which side of the argument you are on. You decide to either bring your own, or let them decide.

So now some people have surrendered that choice, the debate is about whether the choice the government makes should include pizza or not.

Exactly. What is important is having that choice, and not some mandated, nanny solution.

Edit to add: The schools in the districts, around myself, have great leeway in what they decide to serve. They often contract with restaurants in the area, to bring variety to the menu, and the staff dieticians don't seem overly encumbered by bureaucratic red tape. I'd like to see them continue to enjoy these freedoms, and not be unduly restrained by artificial implementations imposed upon them.

I take it you've never been poor. If you're poor you get what you're given and are grateful to have lunch at all. And thanks to the anti-nanny state people that includes an increasing number of people every year. Last number I saw for it was a full 1/3 of the children in the US live in poverty.

And yes, there was more freedom prior to government intervention, but there was also a much greater likelihood of dieing of preventable disease and a generally poor standard of living. If you genuinely want the government out of your life, I suggest moving to some place like Somalia that doesn't have a functioning government.

Personally, I'd rather have a safety net so that I can make use of my many freedoms that citizenship in the US provides.

I grew up poor, but that is beside the point, and the lunch programs when I went to school operated much the same as society: a free market where people chose whether to buy or carry. I generally carried as it was cheaper than to buy, and I'm quite sure that some things were healthy and some were not, but since nothing was encountered every day, it all balanced out.

Poverty in the US is not the same as poverty in some parts of the world, but sure is used as an excuse here for a whole litany of social ills. Most of the people I grew up with were poor, but they didn't feel entitled to act in illegal, immoral, or unethical ways. Money brings many additional opportunities to the people who have it, but it does not necessarily make a better person.

I personally enjoy freedom more than the safety net, and I believe in personal responsibility for one's actions. I have what I work for, am lucky to have that, and do not like my freedoms bartered away for someone else's misplaced sense of entitlement. We are creating a society of dependents here, where personal initiative is becoming a vanishing trait, and personal responsibility being summarily replaced with societal blame. If this is your utopia, have it

I went to school in WV. The low income kids in my school got the same meals as everyone else except they got the meal for free because they didn't have to pay the lunch bill at the end of the month (school kept track of how many meals each student received). There were two lunch choices in high school plus a salad bar. Pizza was either once a week or it might have been available as a choice every day, I don't recall because I always took a bag lunch which consisted of some crackers, cheese, an apple, and a can of Mountain Dew.

The FDA just classified Mountain Dew as fruit juice.

I have seen the list of ingredients.... Contains acid yellow 23. It is forbidden to import this product to Finland and Austria. Elsewhere in Europe, a label should be added , stating that "may cause attention and or behavioural disorder". And Sodium Benzoate as well, suspected to be neuro-degenerative....

So, tonight I'll make sure that what I drink is real fruit juice. 1996 vintage port ...