Something conspicuous is missing from Nicholas Confessore’s New York Times Magazine story “Lunch Money,” about the charged national political debate surrounding public school lunch and new regulations to make it healthier (which means less white flour and sodium and more fruits and vegetables on the tray). Spoiler alert: It’s the actual school lunch.

Chartwell, a Charlotte, NC, based school lunch service that provides such meals to more than 575 schools in this country, is the one that supplies my kids’ elementary school. The other day when I went to have lunch with them, I bought a plastic tray with barbecue chicken, a sweet potato, and green beans on it. At my kids’ excellent school in a great district, where they are privileged to live, they have only 30 minutes to eat (including bathroom break), and they adamantly refuse to buy a lunch, a decision costing our household both time and money. They hate the look of school lunch so much that they willingly make their own lunches to avoid it.

I can’t say I blame them. My chicken piece was a back that, unbelievably, had not one bit of chicken on its bones—it was a carcass of a back; the sweet potato had been roasted to the point of achieving a unique cottony texture that both melted on the tongue and yet was difficult to digest; the green beans were covered in what I had hoped was butter but tasted and had the distinct mouthfeel of plasticky margarine. This is the new, improved school lunch everyone’s so upset about?

In Confessore’s walk down school lunch memory lane, he gives the short, sharp facts: that the lunch program has military origins and was proposed to Congress in 1945 by U.S. General Lewis B. Hershey, who testified to turning away 40 percent of draftees due to “poor diet”; that the USDA sends billions to states and even to individual school districts to fund school lunches; and that the 2010 “Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act,” which set to right the nutritional wrongs of the lunches, was backed by the White House, the School Nutrition Association (the SNA, a.k.a. “the lunch ladies’ lobby”), and massive Congressional support.

At the meaty heart of this debate sits the issue of childhood obesity. School lunch has morphed from what was historically a semi-dispiriting meal at best into a political battleground, a point of moral panic in the fight against obesity. And in the process our kids’ meals have been dealt out of the conversation. Here I’m talking about the food itself: Even if my spoiled kids condescended to eat school lunch, I’d feel terrible about it—because, in all this call for reform, where did that chicken come from? A commercial processing plant god knows how many states away, where it was shot-through with antibiotics.