this will teach the little buggers

I think all they get here is graham crackers and milk.

To be fair, the free lunch program is pretty easy to get on from what I understand so there really isn't an excuse for people to not be on it. Many schools even have "backpack programs" where they will send food home for the weekend. The schools have to pay for the food whether they get paid or not so that money isn't used for teachers, books, everything else the school needs.

It costs me about $150 to feed Mo for the whole year at school -- a lot less than feeding him at home.

Funny, when my kids fail to eat the lunch I pack them I make them buy the school lunch. I guess it's the same idea.

This is just strange to me. In my state a child pays at the time of purchase. Some children have a ticket that gives them a reduced rate on a sliding scale if they can't afford the regular charges. Our schools also have a slew of snack machines with reduced cost crap the kids can buy. My niece had a little business of buying Snickers bars for 25 cents and selling them outside of school for slightly below the retail price.
The dumbest thing we had happen was our local elementary school added a large organic, community garden for the kids to grow their own salad greens and veggies. When produce was ready the school cafeteria refused to use it because it was not inspected by the Health Dept.

Duke City?

Recalling the food available at school, I'd pay extra to get the cheese sandwich.

Picture it, though. Are you sure?

I'd have to agree! My daughter tried it a couple of times and that was the
end of it. It's beyond me why they can't put out a nutritious healthy, tasty meal
for kids.

I just don't understand what the point being made is, is this meant to shame the parent/child into paying for their lunch? could be that many kids would prefer the cold cheese sandwich to the "mystery meat" or whatever. then again cold cheese sandwiches could turn into some kind of status symbol (I'm from the ghetto and I wear my ass dragging pants with a cold cheese sandwich in the pocket behind my knees).

What I'm afraid of is that those no-good parents might elect communists who then enact free school lunches. I didn't flee from Germany only to find America starting up a Gulag.

The lunchs at Mo's school are actually pretty good. They have a big fruit/salad bar that features locally grown produce. Each month has a "harvest" special - peaches, apples, berries, cherries, whatever is in season.

But his school is no match for another local school that was featured on NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=6515242

cold cheese sandwiches prevent socialism.

I was just in second grade, but i recall when we moved into a new school, and the school began to provide school lunches for the first time. It was 50 cents a week, which many people complained of. By the time i reached high school, it was a dollar a week. That was actually ridiculously low. When i was a freshman in high school, a cheeseburger, fries and a coke at the pool hall was 35 cents--so a buck a week for more and better quality food was a pretty good deal. Not that you could count on teenagers to understand that or agree.

But it was a small town. We knew the ladies who made the lunches, and the young guys who hadn't yet found full-time employment who did the dishes and cleaned up the cafeteria (actually, there wasn't a cafeteria--when the new school was built, they built around the old, 1890s school building, which had once housed the elementary school and the high school--for a cafeteria, they laid canvas tarps on the floor and used the former basketball court in the former gymnasium). For all that we complained about the food, it was roughly equivalent to what one got at home, because it was being made (on a large scale, to be sure) by the ladies who made their families meals at home. Of course, everyone preferred the home cooking of their own home, but what we got was pretty good stuff. When someone at a PTA meeting proposed saving some bucks by serving hot dogs or hamburgers one day a week, there was a great deal of indignation (or so we heard). We got a choice of one of three entrees, there were always two or three vegetables, some form of starch (usually a form of potatoes, but sometimes rice or noodles) and bread and butter. Milk was two cents for a half pint bottle. That skyrocketed to five cents by the time i was in high school. I'm fairly sure my experience was conditioned a good deal by being in a small town where everybody knew everybody else. It actually got to the point where anyone who brought their lunch was looked down upon as poor, although, of course, teenagers often times took their week's lunch money and spent it at the pool hall, simply skipping lunch for the rest of the week when the money ran out. There's always a danger in that kind of thing in a small town, though--the lunch ladies notice these things, and as with anything you did, word usually got back to one's home.

The only problem i ever really saw was that when i was a teenager, and engaging in organized sports, there was never enough to eat (there were "seconds" after everyone had been served)--so i would take money i earned on my own, and to to the pool hall during afternoon study hall if i could get away. A cheesebuggy and flies really hit the spot at about 2:00 p.m.

Oops . . . sorry . . . it went up to a buck and a half a week by the time i was in high school.

I think it is a good idea. It gets so annoying when others try to take advantage. They aren't hurting the kids - the kids still get food that is edible - maybe just not desirable.

Maybe they should just give them cold broccoli or carrots.

This is gonna give cheese sammiches a bad name.

Anyone eating a cheese sammich will be referred to as a "cheese sammich eater"

They will grow up and never know the joy of a grill cheese sammich, associating it with the embarrassment of being a cheese eater whose parents wouldn't pay their bills.

Wally's mom was a lunch lady at his high school.
Half the enrollment were her children anyway, so it worked out okay.

Plus she got to take home the leftovers.

I began school in California. At first, I always took my lunch. A thin slice of baloney on two pieces of bread. Five cookies. This, every day, month after month. Finally, I could not stomach the baloney and started ditching my lunch in a garbage can. Later on, the school cafeteria fed me for running the trays through a giant dishwasher. In high school, I was paid money to work in the cafeteria, after we moved back to Texas. I never had a bad meal in the schools that fed me.

Awesome - my kids would actually like that. And I know they would like the cold cheese as well.

So called because John Wayne passed through on his way to Hollywood.