Daily Dose of English 190
School Lunch
Daily Dose of English 190
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about school lunch. So, a lot of schools in the US give lunch to the kids that are there at the school for either free or very cheap, or sometimes not very cheap at all, depending on the school. It's a huge thing. But I actually want to talk more about what is in the lunches and about bringing lunch to school and that sort of thing, rather than necessarily the whole social issue. My opinion is that any kid that is going to school should be given a healthy and a substantial free lunch every day. Their kids, it's not their fault if they can't afford lunch and they should be healthy. So let's do that. But that aside, Let's talk a little bit more about school lunch. So I didn't go to school very long somewhere that had lunch, or had like school lunch rather, because I ended up going for a lot of my schooling to a pretty small school or Well, actually, did my high school have lunch? My high school did have lunch. There was a lunch program, but my parents made me lunch, so I actually wasn't part of that. So actually, only for like five-ish years did I go to a school without a lunch program, but a lot of them have that. But that was mostly because I went to a really small school. That's something different. Um, in elementary school, I don't even remember if I ate school lunch. I feel like I didn't. Um, I feel like my parents made me lunch, which is obviously a great option if your parents can make you lunch, but if it's either too expensive or they don't have enough time or whatever, it's also pretty reasonable for, um, parents not to be able to make their kids a lunch every single day. That's a, a luxury. So I don't personally have a ton of experience eating school lunch in general, but I've definitely seen them and I've seen how they are in like in films or in other schools and that sort of thing. Um, so I'll talk a little bit about that. Then I'll go off and talk about my actual school lunches that I do have experience with since I can't really comment a ton. So school lunches in the US are interesting because they are, it's very hard to make food for so many kids, basically. And especially if you want that food to be relatively healthy and not too expensive. It's just a difficult problem to cook for so many people. And that's totally reasonable. I understand that. I definitely sympathize with people that work in school kitchens or have to plan all that. However, I feel like we should be able to figure it out better because school lunches have a reputation for not being very good, for having a lot of very mediocre food options or downright not good food options, especially in the meat and the protein options because that is usually the most expensive part of a meal, which means that it is very often neglected or cheaped out on, you could say. Typical school lunches have some kind of fruit and vegetable to start with, whether it's carrots or apples or something like that. It's usually a very simple option. I think a little bag of carrots or some steamed vegetables are the most common because they're pretty easy to make a lot of. In the US, there's also lots of companies that basically sell school lunch or parts of school lunch to schools. It's a very big business, which is part of the reason it's so inefficient, because there's a lot of money to be made. And so the fruits and vegetables are often not very good. The quality might be fine, but it's like an apple or a carrot or something like that. Like it's not very interesting and the kids usually don't want to eat it if it's not that good, right? Because it's carrots or something. Oh, there's a moth in my room. Hello, Mr. Moth. And then the main dish is the thing that actually gets like made or focused on. It's very often things like that are easy to make a lot of in bulk. So something like mashed potatoes and some kind of meat or a sandwich or pizza. It's very common for pizza to be like a weekly thing in schools, I think, since you can make very large amounts of pizza pretty easily. It's just, you can put them all into a big old pan, right? And so a lot of schools, Like a lot of kids know that Friday is pizza day or whatever. Friday is the day where they get to eat pizza and that in some schools, especially if they're underfunded, that might be the only food that kids will eat because the other ones are too disgusting or just not good, right? And so school lunch, or sorry, pizza Friday or pizza day is a relatively frequent thing. I think nowadays it's less common to be weekly and they'll do like a delicious Friday or whatever. It's like, okay, Sloppy Joe's or pizza or what else is there? I don't know. But so yeah, school lunches tend to be pretty typical. They're pretty boring, pretty bland. Ideally, they're not stale, so they are relatively fresh, but no promises there, especially in some states with less funding or especially schools with less funding. Something that's not very good about the US's school system is that the funding for the schools for almost all schools is directly connected to the property values in the area. Which means that rich areas get more money for their schools and poor areas get less money for their schools. Which doesn't make sense because the rich areas with rich parents can like make their kids food, they can buy their kids pencils and notebooks and stuff. And so they don't really need all that extra money. but they get plenty of it and they build things that are not as useful like bigger sports stadiums or whatever in a high school or even a middle school might have a really nice basketball court or something because they just have extra money essentially when other schools have nothing. But that is not what I'm trying to talk about here. Anyways, I wanna talk a little bit about my school lunches since that's I realizing that I don't know that much about the generic school lunches. And so yeah, definitely lucky that my, usually my, actually not, no, both my parents cooked. So it wasn't even just my mom or dad who made lunches. However, it was often my mom who made the lunches and put them together and my dad would make dinner, which was the typical situation, although it's not like, it wasn't a rule or anything. And so we would have some pretty similar things on rotation, since it's also not the easiest thing to make a different, unique, delicious lunch every single day for your child. And so we ended up doing sort of a similar thing with the school lunches, where it's like, OK, we repeat these things relatively often. One of the classics was hot dogs, but without a bun, just a hot dog, like just the sausage part. Because they're really easy to do, right? All you would do is you buy a big old packet of dogs and then in the morning you boil a couple of them and you stick them into a thermos. And a thermos, by the way, keeps things warm or cold. And so it would keep them hot and by lunchtime you just open the thermos and you'd have like three hot dogs and you just eat them. Um, that was not my favorite because like, it's just not that much fun to eat just a goddamn hot dog. But, uh, it was okay. They were fine. Um, and they were easy. It is better than some of my friends. Uh, I know, I remember two of my friends, their mother would keep the hot dogs in the freezer and they would pull, she would pull them out in the morning and be like, by lunchtime, they are thawed. They're not frozen anymore. Which is way worse than what I got, for sure. They would also do that with frozen burritos for lunch, which was insane. But you know, you do what you gotta do. Another classic was what we called cheesy pasta, which is basically just pasta with various types of cheese, a little bit of butter, and typically with some hot dogs in there for protein. Beans and rice was also really common because it's quite easy to do. And I remember once, and actually in high school, my mom made beans and rice for me and put it in a thermos, but she put in way too much salt, like so much salt that I could not eat it. But I was hanging out with my friend at lunchtime and I was like, oh God, these are disgusting, they're too salty. And like I talked to my mom, she's like, yeah, I thought I might've put too much salt in. I think what happened is she forgot that she put salt in, so she put more salt in and I was like, wait, did I put in salt and put in more salt or something? But my friend ate all of them. He was like, I don't care. I was like, it tastes good. I'm like, are you serious? There is so much salt in this thing. I can't even like taste anything else. It's horrible. He's like, nope, don't care. I'll eat it. Beans and rice were a common one. What else? I'm kind of blanking on other things that I had for lunch now. Oh, apart from like the main dish, there was also like fruits were easy. A mandarin oranges were really common. Some grapes, um, like some cheese and crackers. So that was also a good one. Just throw in, like cut up some cheese, cut, cut up, uh, cut crackers, cut up some cheese, put together some crackers. There you go. Easy snack, nuts, almonds, and. Uh, cashews, for example, also a great thing to throw in. Um, occasionally like some kind of dessert, a little bit of, my mom used to make this delicious coconut fudge, which is actually mostly coconut, but it tastes really good. I love that recipe. I don't make it very often because it's, actually, I don't know why. It's easy to make. It's mostly coconut and a little bit of honey, so it's actually quite healthy as well. Like it's just mostly good fat, so. Yeah, maybe we should make that again. But yeah, anyways, I'm going off topic and we're at 11 minutes now. That is everything for school lunches. I'm very curious to know what are your school lunches like or what were your school lunches like if you're not in school anymore? Did you make them? Did your parents make them? Did your school provide them? I'm very curious to know. I have no idea what school lunches are like in other parts of the world because I didn't go to school in other parts of the world. So yeah, let me know down in the comments. I'm very curious to hear. That's everything for today. I will see you again tomorrow for a brand new episode of A Daily Dose of English with me, with Ben. Have a good one. I'll see you then. Bye.
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