I own a business that provides school lunch software to charter schools and private schools.  I have also perviously run a school lunch catering business for several years.  I currently get Google news alerts for “school lunch” sent to my email everyday.  There are a few kinds of stories that typically show up.  You get the pat-yourself-on-the-back stories about schools that made some kind of modest improvement to their school lunch program.  You also get the stories of all the school lunch programs that are running massive deficits, because schools that participate in the federal free/reduced lunch program have to give meals to students regardless of whether they have paid.  There is also an army of angry mom bloggers and freelancers, that take it upon themselves to whine about the poor nutritional quality of lunches offered by schools.

Where their intentions are good, if they do offer solutions, they are rarely practical or useful.  For example, Chef Ann Cooper, of Lunchbox Advocates, recently submitted a press release to express her disgust with the fact that Congress voted to increase the amount that the federal government will reimburse for school lunch.  According to the press release:

“When you do the math on 31.5 million school lunches annually, the new budget translates to a miserly dime-a-day increase per student meal,” said Cooper, known as the Renegade Lunch Lady.

“A dime is less than the cost of an apple a day. I can’t believe that any of us think that’s what it is going to cost to feed all of our children healthy school lunch,” said Cooper.

The Child Nutrition Act, reauthorized every five years, pays $12 billion to feed schoolchildren, averaging only $2.68 per day per child, with only 93 cents spent on food and the balance on operations.  While Cooper and many children’s health advocates applaud First Lady Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” Campaign, the current budget on deck for school food has them saying, “Oh brother.”

For Cooper to be outraged that our bankrupt government didn’t vote to spend more money that they don’t have on something they can’t afford demonstrates why the current nutritional bankruptcy of school lunch programs will never be fixed.  You notice the other fact in this release that gets little attention: the government spends $2.68 a day per child, while only spending $.93 a day on food.  The problem isn’t that the government isn’t spending enough money. $1.75 per meal per day on operations is an absolute pathetic joke that reflects an egregious example of government incompetence.  When I was catering school lunches, we charged $2.50 (less then the government pays), spent $1.60-1.75 per meal on average on food, covered our operational costs including labor, and still made a decent profit.  Sorry, Chef Ann Cooper, the problem isn’t that we aren’t spending enough money, the problem is that people like you fail to recognize the broken nature of this system, and despite its flaws still advocate that the government should be involved in something that clearly sucks at doing.

You are never going to increase the overall nutritional value of lunches as long as the Department of Agriculture, (a massive, entrenched, worthless government bureaucracy that has worn out its usefullness) uses the National School Lunch program for dumping all the excess commodities that it is responsible for creating through inefficient subsidies.

It is our job to produce waste

You want to see the quality of school lunches increase?  Privatize the whole thing.  Get rid of the hours of paperwork that administrative staff has to perform every day.  Get rid of having a full-service $500,000 kitchen in every public school.  Get rid of unionized school lunch ladies who get paid to do work that others will happily do for $7 an hour.  All of the sudden those ridiculous overhead costs will disappear and you will have almost a whole dollar a day to contribute towards higher food quality.  Of course demanding that school lunch programs become more efficient, isn’t a solution that is offered by agitators like Chef Ann Cooper.  Her solution: Spend more money.