MCPS lunches are gross. My kids and all of their friends have taken their lunches every day, all the way from elementary to high school.

It really doesn't matter what's being served. If you don't like it or have a problem with it send your child to school with his lunch.
Fwiw, I think the school lunches here are quite nice compared to where we use to live.

DCPS is pretty gross. My kid drinks the milk and eats the fruit though. And he will eat pizza, chicken nugget, and any of the bean sides. It's free at our school so I usually pack a medium sized snack and encourage him to try it.

Stokes PCS has an organic in-house kitchen.

Anonymous wrote:FCPS lunch menu looks a lot healthier than what I grew up eating for school lunch (2003 HS grad)! I remember fries being a vegetable choice daily. No fresh veggies -- everything was canned. Also, funnel cakes were offered every day.

It may look healthier on paper, but most of the days it tastes really gross. My kids like most vegetables, are adventurous eaters and in theory like the items listed on the menu, but most of the days options just taste terrible. There are about four days a month that they want to eat the lunches, and one of those days is breakfast for lunch. The portions are also very tiny so there is not enough food or calories for kids maybe 3rd grade and up, and definitely not enough food for teen/preteen boys who require 1000 more calories than the average adult woman.

Imagine taking small bland portions of meat and vegetables, mass cooking them with no skill, eliminating all salt, pepper and other seasoning, and trying to feed it to your kid and keeping the portions small enough that the calories fit the federal requirements. I have tried some of the lunches and it is gross. The kids throw a lot of it out.

I imagine fcps is losing money on these new lunches, and I also think that the cafeteria ladies are worried about job cuts. A few months ago the cafeteria ladies were talking with the older kids. They were telling them that they wanted to cook food that they would love to eat, and asked the kids what they would want to see in their lunches. My kid said that the general consensus from the 6th graders was to bring the old food back, give bigger portions, and to season it a little so that it wouldn't taste gross. They weren't asking for Cheetos, or Hohos, just edible, tasty, healthy food.

Anonymous wrote:FCPS lunch menu looks a lot healthier than what I grew up eating for school lunch (2003 HS grad)! I remember fries being a vegetable choice daily. No fresh veggies -- everything was canned. Also, funnel cakes were offered every day.

No way! That's hilarious. I can imagine loving that as a kid.

Our DC charter school has healthy food. There is no way that they would partner with a fast food chain.

I've been impressed with the meals in Falls Church City (here is a write up: http://fallschurch.patch.com/groups/schools/p/building-a-better-burger-at-falls-church-public-schools), they seem fairly healthy and my daughter ( a second grader) eats it every day. She eats way more adventurous items at school than she does at home.

That said, I don't really know if she eats the veggies, or how healthy it really is or not....

Anonymous wrote:FCPS lunch menu looks a lot healthier than what I grew up eating for school lunch (2003 HS grad)! I remember fries being a vegetable choice daily. No fresh veggies -- everything was canned. Also, funnel cakes were offered every day.

13:34 here. When I've had lunch with my kid, I've noted that the cafeteria workers make kids take the required two vegetables and one fruit. If a kid got up to the register with only one veggie, the worker would direct the child to get more vegetables. Now whether the kids ate said veggies is another story...

FCPS lunch menu looks a lot healthier than what I grew up eating for school lunch (2003 HS grad)! I remember fries being a vegetable choice daily. No fresh veggies -- everything was canned. Also, funnel cakes were offered every day.

We're at MCPS and lunch is terrible! I've even heard our principal complaining about it, lol.

We mostly just send in lunch, and let DD buy once a week.

MCPS did recently get rid of Strawberry Milk, which was pretty encouraging! Some crazy red dye goes into that sh*t.

If you're in MoCo (or if someone else reading this is), check out Real Food for Kids Montgomery. They're trying to improve the situation.

http://www.realfoodforkidsmontgomery.org/

This is shocking? I was in high school from 1998-2002 and our school cafeteria featured a hot lunch that nobody ate, dominos pizza slices for $2 (pepperoni or cheese), french fries and otis spunkmeyer chocolate chip cookies

I don't think soda was allowed until after school hours though We had vending machines that only worked once the final bell rang. Plenty of juice though

http://fcps.edu/fs/food/serve/lunchmenus.shtml

Look at the various lunches FCPS does in all their schools. In my kid's class, about half buy and half bring (my daughter always brings). If you don't want them to eat school lunch (and no one is forcing you to), just pack your child's lunch.

FCPS lunches are terrible under the new regulations.

Far fewer kids buy them now as none of the kids like to eat them (Except the kindergartners. They like the novelty of buying a school lunch.)

If these lunches are supposed to show kids how to eat healthy food, they are failing miserably. All they are teaching them is government mandated "healthy" food tastes really, really gross.

Hi - my DS is too young for me to know anything about Public School lunches in this area, but I was shocked by the statistic in the movie that 80% of public schools in the US have contracts with fast food companies to provide their meals!!! They were literally showing cafeteria lines stocked with hamburgers, fries, and pizza. It was kind of stunning and certainly enlightening as to one reason kids are having such a hard time with obesity these days.

Is that what it is like around here? I'm not sure I even realized public schools provided lunch, I thought kids brought their own. I went to private, so I don't have any personal experience to recall, but we intend to send DS to public.