With the exception of those of us raised by wolves, everyone's familiar with the human rights violations known as school lunches (wolf school lunches are great). American school cafeterias are the stuff of nightmares, with the quality of their food lying somewhere in the range of "underfunded prison sponsored by McDonald's." But while we might think schools simply aren't allowed to serve anything but undetermined bird nuggets and cardboard cutouts of fries, there are myriad dumb reasons these lunches blow as much as they do.

5 Schools Pay Companies To Suck The Nutrition Out Of Food

For over 70 years, the National School Lunch Program has given surplus agriculture to schools for their school lunches. It's much better PR than throwing tons of fresh food into a ditch and setting it on fire. Public schools around the country can fill their larders with all the fresh fruit, vegetables, and chicken they need. So why is the closest thing you find to fresh produce in a school cafeteria the bubblegum in the lunch lady's mouth? Because schools are paying food companies to take their fresh, healthy ingredients and turn them into complete shit.

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Schools get about $1 billion in free food each year, and $445 million of it goes straight into the pockets of companies like Aramark and Sodexo, which turn that food into "food." Fresh chicken gets turned into chicken nuggets, cheese and tomatoes get turned into frozen pizza, potatoes become french fries, and peas somehow end up with fingers in them. Why do schools do this? The answer, as always, is money. Schools figure that they can save by not maintaining proper kitchens or kitchen staff, a clever lifehack someone should really tell restaurants about.

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Never mind.

But as it turns out, schools just end up spending more on fees and food processing in response. Schools spend about three times their free food's value in turning it into sludge. A batch of fresh chicken worth $11.40 costs $33.45 to become nuggets. $5.95 of raw potatoes costs $14.75 for the McDonald's treatment. That cost doesn't just come in dollars, but also in IQ points, as some studies are linking lower tests scores to students having to eat junk that "exceed[s] the standards for fat, saturated fat and sodium." Ironically, our students are slowly turning into dumb donut holes because school administrators are bad at math.

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Maybe the kids should be taught by the private food management companies instead, as they are making money hand over fist. They save by not having to hire skilled kitchen labor, and they also get convenient kickbacks from the food processing companies, which the schools don't see a dollar of. So the next time your child gets winded walking from the bus to the school's front door, at least you know their inevitable heart attack paid for some CEO's weekday yacht.

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This stock model kid is smiling because this photo shoot is the first time he's ever seen fresh fruits and vegetables in a cafeteria.