/ck/ - Food & Cooking

None of these answers seem right.

Liability. Parents will sue over anything.

Training. Schools can't afford to train and/or pay cooks.

Culture. America doesn't have one.

I worked in the cafeteria when I was a student in the 90s. Everything came in a box, bag, or can. There were ovens that had dozens of racks. It looked like a CD/DVD organizer. You'd dump corn dogs into a baking sheet, and that would slide into groove. Another baking tray would go under that. And another, and so on. You'd set the temperature and it would warm everything through. Vegetables were poured straight from a can into a hotel pan. That would heat underneath for about an hour before the lunch time. Less thinking means less chance for error. It's the McDonald's way.

All schools would need to do is buy huge bags of rice in bulk, and one of those 100+ cup rice cookers that take-out places have. Make some kind of inexpensive stir fry or stew with cheap vegetables like cabbage, carrots, onion, etc. Maybe some kind of pickled vegetables and a soup for some extra variety and nutrition.

To do this sort of thing, you need an actual fucking society with culture and not whatever we have here in America. It's one of the problems with being a melting pot. Everybody has their own views, beliefs, and values. So we have to end up catering to the lowest common denominator. If 1% of kids (making that figure up) have peanut allergies, then 100% of schools can't have any peanut products.

Compare to a place like South Korea (pic related). Or even an American PRIVATE school. When we're raising our children (in a collective sense) we care about how they're being fed. Nobody cares about public schools because they've been overrun by shitskins.