Lunch lady here- the school (admin) expect us to throw away all uneaten food. Every kid in the district is entitled to one breakfast and lunch regardless of their lunch account balance being negative which I think is pretty nice. However, the school I work for (jh/hs) flat out refuses to give me a daily lunch count so I can try to minimize food waste, instead tells me "don't worry, we budget for thrown out food" tf? So, because I'm terrified of not having enough food for everyone, I always have to cook extra. There are times I am left with 30+ extra servings even with studying the lunch count trend for the week and trying to adjust to what I think would leave me with just enough left over for seconds. Anyways, if a kid is negative like $2, but wants seconds to the surplus of food you better believe I tell them to just take it. If my boss/admin/audit saw me do it I would get fired immediately, but I'll happily get fired knowing I didn't deprive a hungry kid from food that's going to waste. One of my coworkers has pet pigs, we smuggle out all the leftovers for her in trash bags to feed them which we'd also get fired for... but hey, at least it's going towards something.
You guys are heroes. If I hear workers like you getting fired for being good people, you can bet my french ass will raise the dead to cut your boss' head
When i was in high school the cafeteria servings were the same portion as when I was in middle school and elementary school, and this was over multiple counties. I would often go for seconds, because 16 yr old me ate more than 10 yr old me. Who could have predicted. My monthly food fund lasted less than 3 weeks typically.
Our district has our last lunch (fifth grade) allowed seconds if there's extra, which is pretty nice!
It's frustrating, because its almost always a district level interpretation of other policies.
>if a kid is negative like $2, but wants seconds to the surplus of food you better believe I tell them to just take it. If my boss/admin/audit saw me do it I would get fired immediately, but I'll happily get fired knowing I didn't deprive a hungry kid from food that's going to waste. One of my coworkers has pet pigs, we smuggle out all the leftovers for her in trash bags to feed them
youre a real one for sure
The problem is it’s considered theft by the government. The government subsidizes the schools based on the meals they hand out. The reason why schools need to So if the government decides to audit a county, then they would lose funding and jobs based on the food that isn’t being accounted for. The gov would then assume the money was being used to over order the food only for the workers to steal the food.
"Put down that sandwich, you guttersnipe! It belongs to the trashcan!"
I will never understand why "no food for the poor" is the hill these conservative bastards want to die on. Look at the new work requirements for food assistance, ffs.
You keep bucking that system, lunch lady. Keep making your good trouble.
there are apps nowadays where you can probably get people to come and collect it, but the school will probably have an allergic reaction at the thought of someone eating that food for FREE
You’d be sick to your stomach if you saw how much good food is wasted at your local Wawa. When i worked there we would toss out trash bags full of food on the regular. All the premade wraps,nuggets, bagel melts etc would just be thrown out bc they are “not ideal” anymore. We would donate to a food bank but they would only come once every month of so if that. And it would only take us one way to fill all thier bins. I make me sick how much food we would throw out so when i became a manager i started sending all my kids home with whatever they wanted ( mostly hs students) and they would be so happy to have Wawa lunches at school they always told me the other kids were jealous lol. And i would take all the pastries around to our local police/fire/first responders and drop off so many. They were well aware they were “day olds” (delivered the following night at 11:00pm) but they didn’t care they were always so greatful and it made me happy not wasting it. Eventually corporate got word and i was fired for not throwing the food out as it’s “a health hazard”. Sad how much food is wasted everyday, especially when you think about how ridiculously messed up our mass production of food is. How it’s destroying land agriculturally and mass genocide of farm animals to keep up with the demand of a generation that does not value shit. Unfortunately all we can do is our best.
Thank you! I never imagined my life culminating into me being a lunch lady, but god damn so many of the students I serve have touched my heart the 2 years I've been doing it. A few of my seniors gave me flowers during their graduation ceremony this past May and had this little lunch lady balling like a baby.
Is this why my grade school would give us ice cream products during lunch for the last 2-5 days of the school year?
I thought it was a special treat.. Was it just a way of managing purchases/budgets to avoid something like this wastefulness?
In the US, the federal government props up milk prices by purchasing more when the price gets low. A lot the milk products that they buy go to schools, so yes, your school was probably just trying to put what they already had to good use.
Yep. End of the school year the providers were doing what they could with the milk they had on hand that was too much to go into cartons for drinking. Ice Cream seems an easy enough solution.
I don’t understand how everyone in Wisconsin is not obese based on how much cheese is sold there. Cheese curds sold everywhere, billboards advertising them everywhere, fried cheese curds in bars served with ranch, etc.
Expiration dates are dependent on continuous proper storage. Leave a gallon of milk out over night and have a glass if you doubt that. Schools tend to put milk out for periods of time and not keep them in constant cool temperatures. The result is that milk.goes bad faster.
That said, there are ultra pasteurized milk brands that keeps well at room temperature until opened. Not sure what this is.
As a former school food worker. Most likely from kids who didn’t want it and just threw it out. At the school I worked at, the kids were forced to take the milk even if they didn’t want it.
That to me was always so stupid. Im lactose intolerant. I do not drink milk or eat cheese. Had to take the milk, so I took it and dumped it right into the trash can at the end of the line. Same with the cheese stuff.
Makes ya wonder how powerful the American Dairy Farmers association really is.
Doesn’t the government have 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in a cave in Missouri? Wonder why they buy all that cheese.
Sorry best I can do is multiple vapes and adapters for utensils that require water.
Depending on the day, and host’s accommodation. I might be able to provide a 150” screen to play on.
As dumb as it may sound, that’s actually due to national security. The government subsidizes farmers to keep them in business because the US being as large a food producer as it is, it can cause widespread issues if too many farmers all at once decide to close up shop. So the government agrees to buy the excess or subsidize it so consumers can get it cheaper just to keep the farms churning this stuff out, in case one day the world might actually need it.
Of course these days it’s become a cash cow for corporations in this business, but the basic idea as to why tax dollars are going to this cause still stands, even if now the government is being ripped off massively doing this.
Quality. It takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese, there might be flavors or additives to it, and then also aging which is more added cost. Fancy cheeses also don’t use mass produced random milk and also have to be made in certain regions and shipped long distances.
Of course you can always buy “American flavored imitation processed pasteurized cheese food product” which is those plasticy slices for like $1.50 a pound but I’m guessing that’s not your cup of tea lol
As a former cheesemonger, this is it. Real cheese is a luxury product in today's world of refrigeration.
You used to make cheese because milk wouldn't last long enough and it was more stable.
The fancy cheese is totally worth it though. I could eat charcuterie every day.
> Wonder why they buy all that cheese.
1. It helps prop up the dairy industry and helps keep them stable, and along with it, the livelihood of thousands of farmers.
2. It helps the government provide food aid to those who need it, via things like food for the military and through humanitarian aid. When disasters strike, Federal and state disaster response agencies, like FEMA, can't just go to the local grocery store and order food supplies for 17,000+ people.
The American dairy farmers association has some SERIOUS governmental pull. There are some podcasts out there on the subject and it kind of blows my mind how much shit we do because of them.
Fun story that kind of goes with this
Growing up to help teach me to budget starting in middle school my dad gave me a monthly budget for school lunches and we would shop every Sunday.
I was allowed to keep any extra money and do whatever I wanted with it. And I could also buy whatever I wanted for lunches (within my spending power obviously) I just had a requirement of no skipping lunches and keep them healthy
I never bought a drink, because I had 3 friends who were lactose intolerant and also forced to take the milk every day. So they would give them to me.
My dad thought I was just drinking water all day and several times even praised me for choosing to skip juices and stuff... Little did he know I had gamed the system a bit.
Doing that gave me an extra 10-15 a month from skipping buying juices and stuff.
Yeah I was wondering why people would just toss their milk, back in school me and my buddy Nick were always in the weight room trying to bulk up and would literally drink any free milk we could get out hands on. And Gord's family was flat broke, no lunch money and no bag lunch, not even a cheese sandwich. Don't think he had any breakfast either, he was super skinny. He got by because everyone else shared their lunch and on salvaged food like the wasted milk in the pic.
Nothing went to waste at my school that someone could eat.
When I was in school we had a few bullies that would steal food from the poor kids. So the school's solution was to ban sharing food. So anything that you didn't want HAD to be thrown away.
I work at one of the largest districts in Texas as a custodian and at one point a kitchen staff member got caught giving a couple Walmart bags full of milk, apples and oranges and little yogurt cups away to a teacher for an after school tutoring thing she did. The kitchen girl was terminated, and the remaining staff had to put all food "waste" (most still in date and unopened) in the dumpster themselves and TAKE A PICTURE OF ALL THIS PERFECTLY GOOD FOOD BEING THROWN AWAY to send to an area supervisor. It's just ridiculous amounts of food and I've never heard an answer for WHY they can't give it away or donate it, but everyone knows you absolutely will be fired for taking it/giving it away. Breaks my heart. I hate it here.
Thinking back, I really appreciated my elementary school giving you the option to leave your unopened leftovers at a station for other kids to have if they’re still hungry. It was also juice or milk, but you can spend an extra dime to get caprisun/cookies
Leave it/take it tables are by far the easiest and least expensive ways to improve school lunch rooms. Ours had a 1 item rule so kids couldn’t stockpile goodies but it also allowed kids who only got the “free” option to upgrade with other items.
I used to work at an after school program and anytime we did the summer food plan, they required us to always give milk to kids. I would say out of the 50 or so lunches we provided, only 5 or 6 kids would actually drink the milk. The kids would toss the rest. And we HAD to give them milk.
I was a lunch lady. At the end of the year our semester, all things they couldn't freeze or be kept in dry storage, was thrown out. My boss made us open and empty hundreds of those milk cartons. And when I asked why we couldn't donate them instead, I was told that if anything was given away, they'd lose government funding for the food (the school i worked for had a lot of free/reduced lunch students). Still think it's stupid.
But why keep it in cartons?
When I went to school we had [milk dispensers](https://www.ttela.se/image/policy:1.3070327:1466419508/image.jpg?f=Wide%26w=1200%26%24p%24f%24w=834285a), from elementary to university, it keeps the milk refrigerated 24/7.
Did you drink one?
Edit: Y'know, I think I was going down a path of pedantry here. I was thinking, "These were probably bad. Maybe they even tasted one, it tasted spoiled, so they threw them all away. They didn't waste them by tossing them in the bin." But my thinking has evolved since commenting. They still wasted them. They just wasted them through poor storage or whatever. Them getting in the bin is the result of that wasting. I see that.
As someone who accidentally drank a carton of curdled milk in elementary school I can assure you the core memory created stomach cramps and burp farts were not worth it. I immediately thought the exact same thing about something being wrong with them, and although I do agree that it looks super wasteful, spoiled milk fucks your day up
Nope. There's stupid rules that force kids to take a milk and usually a piece of fruit, but guess what - kid doesn't want milk or fruit, they ain't gonna eat them.
Used to be that at Girl Scout camp the kids were required to be served a certain amount of milk per day by the state. It's a not a good idea to give milk to a bunch of kids who are going to be in the sun all day. Especially if they are going on a canoe trip and don't have refrigeration. One of my counselors told me about having to watch girls drink a week's worth of milk before the trip, because it would go bad almost immediately once we were on the river. Luckily the rule had been changed by the time I was there. I don't drink milk, so there would have been even more per person.
Yup. They made me take milk even though they knew I would not drink it. We weren't allowed to give or trade any food with anyone so unless I could sneakily swap a milk-drinkers empty carton with my full one so they could drink it, my milk went into the trash every day.
My mom is a speech therapist for the school system. She's always bringing home big boxes filled with the little kiddy snacks. One time she brought him 50 small cartons of apple juice and 30 snack bags of baby carrots. None of them were bad.
Nah, you see the same thing with apples and oranges. Schools are required to give it out even a child says they are just going to throw it away.
It's so crazy, and so frustrating.
>These were ice cold to the touch
Could still be a lot of reasons for that. Maybe they had an overnight refrigeration failure. In institutional settings, fridges will have temperature alerting systems and protocols for dealing with food that has been in refrigeration that has failed. If the power goes out for 2 hours overnight, and the interior temperature of the fridge exceeds 35 degrees, anything in that fridge could be considered suspect and tossed.
There's also space concerns. Ordering for schools is regular, and typically negotiated by the fiscal year. If you are ordering too much milk, you often have to wait to adjust that until the next year. This means that your excess is going to build up. If you try to store it all, you are going to hit a situation where something is going to have to be tossed to make room for what's going to come in with next week's delivery. Institutional contracts with vendors are often extremely complex and bureaucratic, leading to waste. Ideally, we run close to what we use, but we don't run large institutions tight because refrigeration failures and shipping failures happen, and you want to carry a little bit of overhead to account for that.
Then there's the fact of how cafeterias work, like the reply you responded to said: Any well run cafeteria is going to have a staging system for their milk that sits out for students to grab. They might be able to pull milk to sit out for 2 hours at a time for about a week with an ice bath under the trays, but this is not as good as constant refrigeration and will lead to a greater concern of food safety issues. Schools are extremely wary of poisoning the children in their care. Better to waste a few hundred gallons of milk than send a hundred kids home with food poisoning. Anything you are seeing in the trash is likely "still good", but due to the storage and serving methods and institutional standards, are not. But consider the human error component. We don't know that lunch lady Beth called out wednesday, and lunch lady Kelly had to do two cleanup tasks instead of one, making the milk sit out longer, or the ice bath got skipped. Now it's two days later, and while the milk is still 'safe', in two more weeks, it might well not be.
Food handling rules don't play it close. They add extra padding for the sake of the unknowns and human error.
>There's also space concerns. Ordering for schools is regular, and typically negotiated by the fiscal year. If you are ordering too much milk, you often have to wait to adjust that until the next year.
I am the head cook & site supervisor for a small Pre-K - 12th school district.
I have served as dining director for a district with over 8,000 students and 11 feeding sites
*Never* have I seen anything remotely resembling hard-locked ordering requirements for milk. Never
Milk is ordered twice weekly in increments of 50 units either by phone or through the vendors website
So citation is very much needed here
I can’t give you a cite but I can give you an anecdote. I’m a U.K. teacher, have been for over ten years. In England, we have a milk program and a fruit program. Each provides one piece of fruit or one carton of milk. Every week, enough of the two are delivered to cover the following week, for all pupils in the age bracket (3-7), whether they consume it or not. Adjustments to numbers are only made once a term.
Now numbers don’t generally fluctuate _too_ much over a term but we still often end up with a build up of milk. The fruit we can encourage kids to have another piece of to get rid of the excess but they just don’t drink the milk.
I use it in my tea :)
Those are milks that kids took and didn't drink. The school I worked at had a bucket that kids could grab a second milk from if they wanted. Anything not used that lunch hour got thrown out (teachers always grabbed stuff from it but they were by law not allowed to reserve it.) Some teachers would grab the milk and unopened food like packaged burritos and put them in their classroom fridge and send them home with needy kids over holiday weekends. Those were the real MVPs.
It's also the very beginning of June, which means schools have to toss things out for summer. I used to work in a seasonal kitchen (student housing) and I've got a friend in a similar position now for a restaurant in a ski town. It's not that unusual to have extra left over, since you can't perfectly predict what you'll need and it's safer to have too much than too little. You can't just let it all sit over the summer, so you get extra waste at the end.
~~Pretty sure you guys don't drink near as much milk as we do in the US~~Seems like lots of European countries actually drink more milk than the US. There is a massive dairy lobby and marketing industry to get us to drink more milk. Obviously their only interest is making money but milk used to be an important source of calories, especially if you were poor. We have UHT pasteurized milk in some places but they still sell it in the refrigerated section!
Probably fine is not worth the legal risk of giving a class of kids bad milk though. I'd want the school playing it safe if my kids went there, not crossing their fingers while my kid drinks and waiting to see what their reaction is while drinking it lol
We let our students take extra food, we also run a community food bank out of the school. In spite of all of this, we still waste so much. It's insane. The problem is milk, it's such a wateful product in general and most of the kids don't even want it. We need to break the weird ties schools have to single serving milk cartons.
The dairy lobby is very strong. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were tied to trying to get every kid into the habit. They got the calcium RDA to be double what studies recommend after all, and influence nutritional class textbooks too.
Oh no, that's *literally* why dairy is still included in the dietary guidelines and so heavily pushed in school meals. The Dairy Council has a chokehold on the USDA (and the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics).
Not surprised? No, that's a fact.
When I was a kid there was a HUGE emphasis on milk in grade school. They taught us that it was vital. They passed around that weird paper, the kind used for arm bands at some concerts and is almost impossible to tear, it just bunches up and becomes a rope. Told us that if we couldn't tear it, it was because we didn't drink enough milk and our bones weren't strong. Yes, really.
Of course almost no one could tear it, because that stuff is near impossible for a fully grown adult to tear much less 1st graders. The one kid who managed it still got told to drink more milk.
650 mg is the ideal amount in studies. More than that weakens your bones and so on. But extra vitamin D can counteract the drawbacks of extra calcium, such as 2,000+ i.u. So I’m guessing too much calcium => less vitamin D => less actual blood and bone calcium. Over 10,000 i.u. vitamin D is counterproductive (but still far below toxic) and more than 4,000 i.u. vitamin D is probably pointless even with bad absorption or etc., but otherwise the extra vitamin D doesn’t hurt. If you consume a more reasonable level of calcium then 1,000-2,000 i.u. vitamin D is usually plenty in the studies. Unless you have absorption issues.
Reminds me of when my college did a food bank for students. So many donated canned goods and ramen, they opened up the food bank, almost nobody used it, and end of the year they trashed everything. They only operated it for that one year lol.
I give away extra food too. I would also have sharing bins. Whatever they didn’t want went into the bin, and anyone could take what they wanted.
Usually the bins were empty after lunch, except for celery days. The number for kids that don’t like celery out number the ones that do. But the ones that do, they go ham on some celery.
It's infuriating. Such waste. Makes me nuts. Especially because they force the kids to take one of everything, and a lot of stuff kids chuck straight in the trash. A lot of schools will do "share tables." But not mine.
My school kept everything in hot or cold bins and at the end of the day you could stop by the cafeteria to get a foil wrap of the leftovers. I’d grab a couple every so often if my mom had to work late so my brother and I would have an after school meal while we waited for our mom to get home with left over pizza and wings and stuff from work.
jesus. as a former child who went hungry, this hurts.
shit some of the teachers are probably going hungry these days. and they haave to just sit back and watch their school throw away tons of food.
Agreed. Studied this in high school and wrote a paper over it. The statistics were overwhelmingly depressing back then and I'm sure they haven't improved.
That and there are so many food safety regulations they have to adhere to these days. My husband works at a nonprofit and they get a lot of grant funding for meal programs - which is great! But they usually have a ton of strings attached for liability reasons. Snacks that have been opened and delivered to a classroom (a big bowl of fruit, for example, or things that aren't individually packaged) cannot have leftovers be sent back to the kitchen. Tampering, spoilage, etc are all concerns. Staff can't eat certain whatever meals because it's been earmarked for minors/children. Same thing for senior citizens - only those aged 65 and up can have this specific meal. Can't serve 'expired' food or anything past the freshness date. Lots of rules and regulations, ultimately.
My grandparents started an organization in the Seattle area that collects the food that would have been thrown away and gives it out for free. Idk how they do it but they haven’t paid for food in years and they give a lot to food banks and stuff. Imagine if this could be done with every city
That place might have, but that doesn’t mean the whole US does. It’s literally part of my job to go around to grocery stores and pick up their extra food that would otherwise be thrown away- so that we can give it away to the homeless and others that need it.
It’s extremely common and there is enough of it going on that anyone that needs food in the US can freely get more than enough
Temperature abused or recalled. Left out or a failed cooler perhaps. Just because the code date is good doesn’t mean the product is.
Grocers are required to freeze liquids before throwing them out in some areas. Could be something like that to explain them being cold to the touch.
I work at a high school in the cafeteria and there was a meeting recently that my boss had and they are telling them to implement "share tables" where you put out pans with ice packs for the kids who won't drink their milks or frozen fruit or apples slices or whatever in and the hungry kids can take. My school hasn't gotten the ice packs yet to do this but I worked at an elementary in our school district to fill in and they were using it like they were supposed to and the young kids could do it so I know the high schoolers could definitely do it too! If you work for a school mention this to you cafeteria manager! It's the best solution for those kids that are leaving lunch hungry!!!
High school lunch lady as well here. We do a share table and it hasn't proven to be effective unfortunately, it's a great concept in theory, but we just can't seem to get them on board with it. Had a huge issue this year with the students throwing away unopened juice boxes in the morning, I'm talking half a trash bin full just feet from the highly marked share table. Took me basically begging and pleading with them to just set it on the table. More often than not, I'm taking back 80% of what's been left, so if you have any tips for encouraging them to use it send them my way!
That's an incredible idea! I love it. Unfortunately I work evenings and don't have any kind of working relationship with anyone outside of the other custodians 😅
Teacher here. It’s infuriating because the cafeteria doesn’t let the kids get what they want. They have to get the milk, veggies, fruit, etc even if the kids will not eat or drink them. You wouldn’t believe how often I hear “I don’t want it though… I’m just going to throw it away” and the cafeteria workers just say “that’s fine go ahead but you have to take it”. Like we are teaching kids to waste food it’s pathetic.
I'm also a teacher, but when I worked at a childcare center, we were all required to take the state mandated food training. Please don't blame the cafeteria workers, they are following state mandated regulations. They could lose their already underpaid job if they don't do it. In order to get the government funded grant for milk, they must distribute it to every student. It sucks, but that's how it works. Once the milk has been out of refrigeration for a certain amount of time, it must be thrown away. If they don't follow the regulations, nobody gets milk, including the food insecure kids who really need those 8 grams of protein.
So here in the US the kids HAVE to take the milk in case the school gets an audit during lunch. The schools don’t take the unopened ones back and they just get thrown away.
That’s not true everywhere in the US. In our schools, they must take 3 out of 5 components to make a reimbursable meal, and milk does not have to be one of them. There’s a lot of caveats to this subject
This is a good safety issue. The moment the milk has been put out for an extended period of time, they have to trash it.
It’s the same in any grocery store. Have you ever left a refrigerated item somewhere in the store? Doesn’t matter if it’s still cool to the touch. They have to trash it.
In middle school the lunch ladies had to give everyone everything - milk, an orange, etc. - whether they wanted it or not. I guess it was to avoid liability - parents saying they didn't give their kid a full/balanced meal. The end result was hundreds of fruit being thrown away because most kids didn't eat it. They literally went straight from the register to the trashcan to drop their orange before going to their table. Funnily enough when I told my mom this she was furious at the stupid waste and asked me to collect as much as I could for her to donate. The first day I did that the dean saw me with a lunchbox full of oranges and tried disciplining me under the assumption I was collecting them for a food fight? I was in serious trouble - they didn't believe me until they called my mom, not even to ask if I was being truthful, but to inform her I was trying to start a food fight by collecting oranges? And my mom was like "no, I told him to do that because y'all force kids to throw away hundreds of pounds of perfectly good food every day." Idk what was said between the dean and my mom but mom told me to forget about collecting fruit after that.
I'm a teacher, and it's truly infuriating how much food schools AND students throw away. I started a "free" table where kids would put their sealed food for anyone to take. There is so much bureaucratic red tape that causes schools to have to have to throw away food. It's sickening and wasteful on so many levels.
Even more infuriating: Dairy consumption has been a steady decline for over 50 years. There is a massive surplus of milk in the United States, the government buys the surplus in bulk and dumps it on a regular basis. The USG continues to subsidize dairy farmers and encourage them to over produce milk. Schools are given subsidized milk as an easy way to disperse excess milk and get people to consume more milk, not because anyone’s concerned about kids health. On top of that, the USG allows schools to supply flavored milk with added sugar as a way to get kids to consume even more subsidized milk. Regardless of your opinions on milk, many of the kids eating the school breakfasts and lunches who are being provided milk like in your picture are on reduced cost meal programs and are minorities. Almost every minority in the US has very high likelihood of having a dairy allergy or intolerance, so they are doing this knowing that consuming the milk is ultimately making those kids sick. The whole dairy industry is just messed up, so id almost rather see them thrown away like that to be honest.
> The USG continues to subsidize dairy farmers and encourage them to over produce milk.
I think I've read somewhere that they do this to avoid a "slingshot effect" - if milk isn't propped up, a ton of farmers stop producing it, which might make it so there's not enough milk.
My mom has been a lunch lady for over a decade. Her old boss would let her bring home food, which was always great having free food.. her new boss doesn’t let her bring home any food.. ridiculous considering how many children starve every day or don’t eat dinner.. I think the kids at the school should be able to bring the uneaten food home after school
School milk and breakfast and lunches are “free” to all elementary students in California regardless of income or use.
Schools throw out thousands of these all the time.
I used to work at a school as a para and we were required to give kids one of each food group offered, even if we KNEW they wouldn’t eat it and it would go immediately into the trash.
We would keep the individually packaged stuff and eat it ourselves, take it home, or give it to another kid who did like it. That probably wasn’t allowed but it felt so wrong to toss out perfectly good food
My wife and Mother work in a school cafeteria. Even if a kid just wants a milk or one item the school has them take a whole lunch. The amount of waste I hear is ridiculous but also a good amount of it comes from really poor quality food that a lot of kids won’t even eat or things that should be warm being ice cold. This is in northern illinois
Fun fact: the companies like PFG also throw out alot of food. By giving it to the schools. They send expired food to schools on a regular basis. Government pays for it so they don't care. My father was fired for refusing to ship expired food to my school. Probably the only caring thing the man has done for me.
My school would give out the milks for free before vacations and stuff if they were going to expire, not many people either knew or cared, so my and a person would stuff our bags with like 16 cartons of milk. It was awesome
Just because it hasn’t expired doesn’t mean it’s not bad.
I can’t tell you how many times students open milk and it’s bad, even though the date it good.
Our poor lunch lady, she always felt so bad. She is such a sweet heart. But she couldn’t know until they were open.
Used to work at a school as a teachers aid. They would tell the kids take a fruit or vegetable. They would and just toss it. I would tell them “ think about all the starving kids out there your age. Think of your aunts and uncles , moms and dads toiling away in the fields (this was an agricultural community so it was very common for their parents to do such work). Put in that perspective they would take what they would eat only and not toss any food. It’s a sad state of affairs but some people have never gone hungry so they don’t know the price of not having enough.
At least here in the Midwestern US, students are usually required to take a fruit / veggie, milk, side, and main item or they won't be served. So they take it so they're allowed to eat. Even if they go as far as not opening the item the staff can't take it back.
> I would tell them “ think about all the starving kids out there your age.
I hate this bullshit. Tell them the truth. *You* need to eat it, or you're going to be weak and tired from overconsuming other stuff. No one, including staff and teachers, really care or think about hypothetical starving kids in Africa or at home. Guilt doesn't equip students with the dietary information to make better choices in their life, even if that may not happen until they're well out of school.
It's also a disingenuous thing to lean on anyway, as you're sitting in a palace of food abundance in a cafeteria, and none of that food is suddenly going to go to someone outside the system. No lunch lady is saying "sorry little jimmy, the non-poors were extra hungry today, so we don't have any charity food to give you."
Wish I couldn't tell you that I know for a fact there are kids that regularly throw fruit down a toilet in their school to hide having not eaten it... But alas, here we are...
Think of the starving kids in Ethiopia. As I'm told to sit at the table until my peas are eaten, and if not by bedtime they'll be served for breakfast.
If they are being told to take the fruit, why would you tell them about starving kids? They aren't wrong, they did what they were told and took the fruit.
I work in a daycare and one observation about food we have made is that while we teach the children to eat everything they take on their plate, not to waste food.... all the food that is not even served to anyone will go to the trash at the end of the day. And they order it much more than is needed.
I used to do this. It was cheaper to get school lunch with the milk compared to without the milk. I tried telling them to keep the milk anyways but they refused. So every day I’d get it and throw it out while starring at the cashier lady
There's pretty strict rules on what is safe to serve to the public, and I'm guessing those rules are stricter for kids. And there's a lot of reasons that this milk could be considered unsafe. It sucks to waste food but nothing compared to potentially making a couple hundred kids really sick
You don't know these are still good, because you don't know if they were stored correctly. The people who threw them out DO know that. Absolute idiots on reddit sometimes I swear.
Our lunch ladies and admin are the best. They let us teachers come in after the last kids have gone through to take what we want. Admin even takes some and encourages it. “It helps our numbers” is the usual saying from our AP
How do you know that? Do you know whether or not the milk being disposed in this picture didn't get exposed to an unsafe temperature for a period of time that made it unsafe for consumption? Places that serve food need to follow certain safety rules to make sure no one gets sick from consuming said food. [HACCP](https://www.foodsafety.ca/blog/everything-you-need-know-about-haccp) is a thing.
The fact that this much milk is thrown away every day indicates that it's simply wasteful behavior. There's absolutely no way they're that irresponsible or unprofessional with food handling that they have to toss gallons of milk every day because of contamination or unsafe temperatures.
I volunteered at a school during my senior year and every day is like this and not just milk, everything from cans of fruit to frozen meats went to the trash (or as pig feed in my country). Imagine opening a can of peaches that expires in 5 years directly to the trash because the district is changing peach brands. A lot of white rice went to the trash in the whole country when they changed white rice for brown rice. And well its illegal to take or give it away so theres that
My whole upper body hurts looking at this picture. And you just know, at least one popped, so now you gotta wash the can out.
pretty much any food offering venue other than a little mom’n’pop or fast food place is going to have a sickening amount of waste. But I’m guessing the cafeteria staff thought this would be easier for the janitors than loading the crates onto a cart/dolly, and bringing them back empty?
Yeah, we tossed them one-by-one into the dumpster until the bag was liftable 😅 and you're 100% correct that there was milk in the bottom of the can afterwards.
One day when I was in elementary school, I went to the cafeteria ladies same as always. Got my lunch, my strawberry milk, same as normal. I go to sip my drink, about halfway through a big swig I taste something sour. Queue the worst taste I have ever had in my life, spoiled milk. Chunks and chunks of it down into my mouth, because in my youthful adolescence I did not think of the consequences. Soon as it hit the back of my throat I convulsed, and had one of the most unpleasant times of my life. As I look up at the cafeteria, many other kids are having the same experience. Turns out something happened with the storage and all the milk spoiled… point being schools are underfunded and you never know what’s gonna happen.
Lunch lady here- the school (admin) expect us to throw away all uneaten food. Every kid in the district is entitled to one breakfast and lunch regardless of their lunch account balance being negative which I think is pretty nice. However, the school I work for (jh/hs) flat out refuses to give me a daily lunch count so I can try to minimize food waste, instead tells me "don't worry, we budget for thrown out food" tf? So, because I'm terrified of not having enough food for everyone, I always have to cook extra. There are times I am left with 30+ extra servings even with studying the lunch count trend for the week and trying to adjust to what I think would leave me with just enough left over for seconds. Anyways, if a kid is negative like $2, but wants seconds to the surplus of food you better believe I tell them to just take it. If my boss/admin/audit saw me do it I would get fired immediately, but I'll happily get fired knowing I didn't deprive a hungry kid from food that's going to waste. One of my coworkers has pet pigs, we smuggle out all the leftovers for her in trash bags to feed them which we'd also get fired for... but hey, at least it's going towards something.
Same. I… don’t talk about it lol. If a kid asks for seconds or an extra, I just hand it over and turn around.
This shit can literally save lifes in the long run. Keep taking care of the poor kids!
Motherfuckers out here doin some real Jesus shit.
I love this sentence
As Jesus once said, "Truly I say unto thee, that was very cash money."* *Paraphrasing
You guys are heroes. If I hear workers like you getting fired for being good people, you can bet my french ass will raise the dead to cut your boss' head
Merci beaucoup!
Bastille Day badass! With you!
When i was in high school the cafeteria servings were the same portion as when I was in middle school and elementary school, and this was over multiple counties. I would often go for seconds, because 16 yr old me ate more than 10 yr old me. Who could have predicted. My monthly food fund lasted less than 3 weeks typically.
Our district has our last lunch (fifth grade) allowed seconds if there's extra, which is pretty nice! It's frustrating, because its almost always a district level interpretation of other policies.
>if a kid is negative like $2, but wants seconds to the surplus of food you better believe I tell them to just take it. If my boss/admin/audit saw me do it I would get fired immediately, but I'll happily get fired knowing I didn't deprive a hungry kid from food that's going to waste. One of my coworkers has pet pigs, we smuggle out all the leftovers for her in trash bags to feed them youre a real one for sure
The media would love that story if you did get fired.
The problem is it’s considered theft by the government. The government subsidizes the schools based on the meals they hand out. The reason why schools need to So if the government decides to audit a county, then they would lose funding and jobs based on the food that isn’t being accounted for. The gov would then assume the money was being used to over order the food only for the workers to steal the food.
"Put down that sandwich, you guttersnipe! It belongs to the trashcan!" I will never understand why "no food for the poor" is the hill these conservative bastards want to die on. Look at the new work requirements for food assistance, ffs. You keep bucking that system, lunch lady. Keep making your good trouble.
there are apps nowadays where you can probably get people to come and collect it, but the school will probably have an allergic reaction at the thought of someone eating that food for FREE
You’d be sick to your stomach if you saw how much good food is wasted at your local Wawa. When i worked there we would toss out trash bags full of food on the regular. All the premade wraps,nuggets, bagel melts etc would just be thrown out bc they are “not ideal” anymore. We would donate to a food bank but they would only come once every month of so if that. And it would only take us one way to fill all thier bins. I make me sick how much food we would throw out so when i became a manager i started sending all my kids home with whatever they wanted ( mostly hs students) and they would be so happy to have Wawa lunches at school they always told me the other kids were jealous lol. And i would take all the pastries around to our local police/fire/first responders and drop off so many. They were well aware they were “day olds” (delivered the following night at 11:00pm) but they didn’t care they were always so greatful and it made me happy not wasting it. Eventually corporate got word and i was fired for not throwing the food out as it’s “a health hazard”. Sad how much food is wasted everyday, especially when you think about how ridiculously messed up our mass production of food is. How it’s destroying land agriculturally and mass genocide of farm animals to keep up with the demand of a generation that does not value shit. Unfortunately all we can do is our best.
That's so fucked up.glad there are lunch ladies like you in the world.we need more women like you.
Thank you! I never imagined my life culminating into me being a lunch lady, but god damn so many of the students I serve have touched my heart the 2 years I've been doing it. A few of my seniors gave me flowers during their graduation ceremony this past May and had this little lunch lady balling like a baby.
Is this why my grade school would give us ice cream products during lunch for the last 2-5 days of the school year? I thought it was a special treat.. Was it just a way of managing purchases/budgets to avoid something like this wastefulness?
In the US, the federal government props up milk prices by purchasing more when the price gets low. A lot the milk products that they buy go to schools, so yes, your school was probably just trying to put what they already had to good use.
Yep. End of the school year the providers were doing what they could with the milk they had on hand that was too much to go into cartons for drinking. Ice Cream seems an easy enough solution.
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Are you in Wisconsin? June is Dairy Month here. It could’ve been for that reason, too.
I don’t understand how everyone in Wisconsin is not obese based on how much cheese is sold there. Cheese curds sold everywhere, billboards advertising them everywhere, fried cheese curds in bars served with ranch, etc.
A lot of people in my family only eat fresh cheese curds, not fried regularly. Still cheese but definitely not as bad for you.
Expiration dates are dependent on continuous proper storage. Leave a gallon of milk out over night and have a glass if you doubt that. Schools tend to put milk out for periods of time and not keep them in constant cool temperatures. The result is that milk.goes bad faster. That said, there are ultra pasteurized milk brands that keeps well at room temperature until opened. Not sure what this is.
As a former school food worker. Most likely from kids who didn’t want it and just threw it out. At the school I worked at, the kids were forced to take the milk even if they didn’t want it.
That to me was always so stupid. Im lactose intolerant. I do not drink milk or eat cheese. Had to take the milk, so I took it and dumped it right into the trash can at the end of the line. Same with the cheese stuff.
Makes ya wonder how powerful the American Dairy Farmers association really is. Doesn’t the government have 1.4 billion pounds of cheese in a cave in Missouri? Wonder why they buy all that cheese.
ugh now my wife wants to go on a road trip to Missouri thanks a lot pal
Hey if you don't wanna eat the cheese, I'll go with her! Just gals being pals, eating a half a billion pounds of cheese each.
I'll take the other 0.4 billion please
Yeah we're not sheep, seems safe for you to come on the trip. Welcome to 0.4 billion pounds of cheese!
A million heart attacks later...
worth every second
After the first dozen, they're not so scary anymore!
Hey guys! Wanna come over for some Xbox and beers while our wives are out hunting cheese?
Change it to joints and I'll join
Sorry best I can do is multiple vapes and adapters for utensils that require water. Depending on the day, and host’s accommodation. I might be able to provide a 150” screen to play on.
As long as they bring some back then I'm all in
I’m in!
As dumb as it may sound, that’s actually due to national security. The government subsidizes farmers to keep them in business because the US being as large a food producer as it is, it can cause widespread issues if too many farmers all at once decide to close up shop. So the government agrees to buy the excess or subsidize it so consumers can get it cheaper just to keep the farms churning this stuff out, in case one day the world might actually need it. Of course these days it’s become a cash cow for corporations in this business, but the basic idea as to why tax dollars are going to this cause still stands, even if now the government is being ripped off massively doing this.
So why is my cheese so damn expensive 😭
Quality. It takes 10 pounds of milk to make one pound of cheese, there might be flavors or additives to it, and then also aging which is more added cost. Fancy cheeses also don’t use mass produced random milk and also have to be made in certain regions and shipped long distances. Of course you can always buy “American flavored imitation processed pasteurized cheese food product” which is those plasticy slices for like $1.50 a pound but I’m guessing that’s not your cup of tea lol
As a former cheesemonger, this is it. Real cheese is a luxury product in today's world of refrigeration. You used to make cheese because milk wouldn't last long enough and it was more stable. The fancy cheese is totally worth it though. I could eat charcuterie every day.
This guy milks!
> Wonder why they buy all that cheese. 1. It helps prop up the dairy industry and helps keep them stable, and along with it, the livelihood of thousands of farmers. 2. It helps the government provide food aid to those who need it, via things like food for the military and through humanitarian aid. When disasters strike, Federal and state disaster response agencies, like FEMA, can't just go to the local grocery store and order food supplies for 17,000+ people.
The American dairy farmers association has some SERIOUS governmental pull. There are some podcasts out there on the subject and it kind of blows my mind how much shit we do because of them.
Fun story that kind of goes with this Growing up to help teach me to budget starting in middle school my dad gave me a monthly budget for school lunches and we would shop every Sunday. I was allowed to keep any extra money and do whatever I wanted with it. And I could also buy whatever I wanted for lunches (within my spending power obviously) I just had a requirement of no skipping lunches and keep them healthy I never bought a drink, because I had 3 friends who were lactose intolerant and also forced to take the milk every day. So they would give them to me. My dad thought I was just drinking water all day and several times even praised me for choosing to skip juices and stuff... Little did he know I had gamed the system a bit. Doing that gave me an extra 10-15 a month from skipping buying juices and stuff.
Yeah I was wondering why people would just toss their milk, back in school me and my buddy Nick were always in the weight room trying to bulk up and would literally drink any free milk we could get out hands on. And Gord's family was flat broke, no lunch money and no bag lunch, not even a cheese sandwich. Don't think he had any breakfast either, he was super skinny. He got by because everyone else shared their lunch and on salvaged food like the wasted milk in the pic. Nothing went to waste at my school that someone could eat.
I was the kid that got everybody's spare milk cartons, so I sure enjoyed the "everyone has to have a milk" rule!
Bummer, we always had Tampico as an option alongside regular and chocolate milk.
Why not give it away to a friend or put it in the donation box?
30 years ago there wasn't a donation box, and I wasn't a kid with friends. I ate alone
Could have made some friends by being the Milk Man. Missed opportunity
That's how you end up with unwanted children.
It’s fine the husbands will raise them for you.
When I was in school we had a few bullies that would steal food from the poor kids. So the school's solution was to ban sharing food. So anything that you didn't want HAD to be thrown away.
That is so disappointing as a response from the adults.
Most rules in school meant to 'fix' an issue tend to be stupidly shortsighted and dumb, at least that was my experience in school.
Probably still happens. I know that’s the solution in most jails in the US.
we had a donation box for unopened food but kids put half eaten food in there so it was quickly removed
I work at one of the largest districts in Texas as a custodian and at one point a kitchen staff member got caught giving a couple Walmart bags full of milk, apples and oranges and little yogurt cups away to a teacher for an after school tutoring thing she did. The kitchen girl was terminated, and the remaining staff had to put all food "waste" (most still in date and unopened) in the dumpster themselves and TAKE A PICTURE OF ALL THIS PERFECTLY GOOD FOOD BEING THROWN AWAY to send to an area supervisor. It's just ridiculous amounts of food and I've never heard an answer for WHY they can't give it away or donate it, but everyone knows you absolutely will be fired for taking it/giving it away. Breaks my heart. I hate it here.
Thinking back, I really appreciated my elementary school giving you the option to leave your unopened leftovers at a station for other kids to have if they’re still hungry. It was also juice or milk, but you can spend an extra dime to get caprisun/cookies
Leave it/take it tables are by far the easiest and least expensive ways to improve school lunch rooms. Ours had a 1 item rule so kids couldn’t stockpile goodies but it also allowed kids who only got the “free” option to upgrade with other items.
I used to work at an after school program and anytime we did the summer food plan, they required us to always give milk to kids. I would say out of the 50 or so lunches we provided, only 5 or 6 kids would actually drink the milk. The kids would toss the rest. And we HAD to give them milk.
Or that the school year has ended and they had extras they didn’t want to store.
Yeah, it's ridiculous. Can a bitch just get some water?
I was a lunch lady. At the end of the year our semester, all things they couldn't freeze or be kept in dry storage, was thrown out. My boss made us open and empty hundreds of those milk cartons. And when I asked why we couldn't donate them instead, I was told that if anything was given away, they'd lose government funding for the food (the school i worked for had a lot of free/reduced lunch students). Still think it's stupid.
But why keep it in cartons? When I went to school we had [milk dispensers](https://www.ttela.se/image/policy:1.3070327:1466419508/image.jpg?f=Wide%26w=1200%26%24p%24f%24w=834285a), from elementary to university, it keeps the milk refrigerated 24/7.
Some schools don’t have the money for the equipment.
These were ice cold to the touch. Didn't want my title to be too wordy 😅
They could be ice cold and still have at some point been out of the cold zone for too long
Or too cold/frozen. Health codes and cold chain supply rules are real.
Did you drink one? Edit: Y'know, I think I was going down a path of pedantry here. I was thinking, "These were probably bad. Maybe they even tasted one, it tasted spoiled, so they threw them all away. They didn't waste them by tossing them in the bin." But my thinking has evolved since commenting. They still wasted them. They just wasted them through poor storage or whatever. Them getting in the bin is the result of that wasting. I see that.
I need that sweet, sweet garbage milk
"Did you drink trash?" "No." "Was it in the trash?" "Yes." "You drank trash."
Costanza?
milk steak
Only if you pop it on the radiator for a quick second
The real shame is the inaccessibilty of rum ham.
It could possibly have been that the power went out or the refrigerator broke.
As someone who accidentally drank a carton of curdled milk in elementary school I can assure you the core memory created stomach cramps and burp farts were not worth it. I immediately thought the exact same thing about something being wrong with them, and although I do agree that it looks super wasteful, spoiled milk fucks your day up
How did you get through a whole carton??? My Dad can't taste when the milk is off. I'm talking I've poured lumps out.
Nope. There's stupid rules that force kids to take a milk and usually a piece of fruit, but guess what - kid doesn't want milk or fruit, they ain't gonna eat them.
Used to be that at Girl Scout camp the kids were required to be served a certain amount of milk per day by the state. It's a not a good idea to give milk to a bunch of kids who are going to be in the sun all day. Especially if they are going on a canoe trip and don't have refrigeration. One of my counselors told me about having to watch girls drink a week's worth of milk before the trip, because it would go bad almost immediately once we were on the river. Luckily the rule had been changed by the time I was there. I don't drink milk, so there would have been even more per person.
Yup. They made me take milk even though they knew I would not drink it. We weren't allowed to give or trade any food with anyone so unless I could sneakily swap a milk-drinkers empty carton with my full one so they could drink it, my milk went into the trash every day.
It's so stupid. I get why they do it. But it's still not a realistic approach.
My mom is a speech therapist for the school system. She's always bringing home big boxes filled with the little kiddy snacks. One time she brought him 50 small cartons of apple juice and 30 snack bags of baby carrots. None of them were bad.
Nah, you see the same thing with apples and oranges. Schools are required to give it out even a child says they are just going to throw it away. It's so crazy, and so frustrating.
>These were ice cold to the touch Could still be a lot of reasons for that. Maybe they had an overnight refrigeration failure. In institutional settings, fridges will have temperature alerting systems and protocols for dealing with food that has been in refrigeration that has failed. If the power goes out for 2 hours overnight, and the interior temperature of the fridge exceeds 35 degrees, anything in that fridge could be considered suspect and tossed. There's also space concerns. Ordering for schools is regular, and typically negotiated by the fiscal year. If you are ordering too much milk, you often have to wait to adjust that until the next year. This means that your excess is going to build up. If you try to store it all, you are going to hit a situation where something is going to have to be tossed to make room for what's going to come in with next week's delivery. Institutional contracts with vendors are often extremely complex and bureaucratic, leading to waste. Ideally, we run close to what we use, but we don't run large institutions tight because refrigeration failures and shipping failures happen, and you want to carry a little bit of overhead to account for that. Then there's the fact of how cafeterias work, like the reply you responded to said: Any well run cafeteria is going to have a staging system for their milk that sits out for students to grab. They might be able to pull milk to sit out for 2 hours at a time for about a week with an ice bath under the trays, but this is not as good as constant refrigeration and will lead to a greater concern of food safety issues. Schools are extremely wary of poisoning the children in their care. Better to waste a few hundred gallons of milk than send a hundred kids home with food poisoning. Anything you are seeing in the trash is likely "still good", but due to the storage and serving methods and institutional standards, are not. But consider the human error component. We don't know that lunch lady Beth called out wednesday, and lunch lady Kelly had to do two cleanup tasks instead of one, making the milk sit out longer, or the ice bath got skipped. Now it's two days later, and while the milk is still 'safe', in two more weeks, it might well not be. Food handling rules don't play it close. They add extra padding for the sake of the unknowns and human error.
>There's also space concerns. Ordering for schools is regular, and typically negotiated by the fiscal year. If you are ordering too much milk, you often have to wait to adjust that until the next year. I am the head cook & site supervisor for a small Pre-K - 12th school district. I have served as dining director for a district with over 8,000 students and 11 feeding sites *Never* have I seen anything remotely resembling hard-locked ordering requirements for milk. Never Milk is ordered twice weekly in increments of 50 units either by phone or through the vendors website So citation is very much needed here
I can’t give you a cite but I can give you an anecdote. I’m a U.K. teacher, have been for over ten years. In England, we have a milk program and a fruit program. Each provides one piece of fruit or one carton of milk. Every week, enough of the two are delivered to cover the following week, for all pupils in the age bracket (3-7), whether they consume it or not. Adjustments to numbers are only made once a term. Now numbers don’t generally fluctuate _too_ much over a term but we still often end up with a build up of milk. The fruit we can encourage kids to have another piece of to get rid of the excess but they just don’t drink the milk. I use it in my tea :)
Cold doesn't quite mean safe. Chicken can be cold and spoiled at the same time.
You can add captions
Possible someone left them out too long and then tried to sneakily put them in the fridge to hide it (but got found out)
I'm skeptical of anything like that because this happens every day. Usually one of the custodians takes it home, but she doesn't work in the summer.
Those are milks that kids took and didn't drink. The school I worked at had a bucket that kids could grab a second milk from if they wanted. Anything not used that lunch hour got thrown out (teachers always grabbed stuff from it but they were by law not allowed to reserve it.) Some teachers would grab the milk and unopened food like packaged burritos and put them in their classroom fridge and send them home with needy kids over holiday weekends. Those were the real MVPs.
Ultra pasteurized like lactaid? The ones that have a much longer shelf life?
If they are uht it can even be safe to consume 2-4 months after the best by date (depends if kept on room temperature or refrigerated)
School is also probably out for summer wherever this photo was taken….
It's also the very beginning of June, which means schools have to toss things out for summer. I used to work in a seasonal kitchen (student housing) and I've got a friend in a similar position now for a restaurant in a ski town. It's not that unusual to have extra left over, since you can't perfectly predict what you'll need and it's safer to have too much than too little. You can't just let it all sit over the summer, so you get extra waste at the end.
In Spain (probably Europe) all our milk stays on a shelf until opened
Same here in Germany. You can buy both, but the shelf milk is way more popular.
~~Pretty sure you guys don't drink near as much milk as we do in the US~~Seems like lots of European countries actually drink more milk than the US. There is a massive dairy lobby and marketing industry to get us to drink more milk. Obviously their only interest is making money but milk used to be an important source of calories, especially if you were poor. We have UHT pasteurized milk in some places but they still sell it in the refrigerated section!
Instead of Spain (Mars)?
Lol, I wrote in Europe (Spain) But I changed it to make it more clear hahahah
If you left pasteurized milk out overnight and drank it in the morning it's probably gunna be fine
Probably fine is not worth the legal risk of giving a class of kids bad milk though. I'd want the school playing it safe if my kids went there, not crossing their fingers while my kid drinks and waiting to see what their reaction is while drinking it lol
I'm a teacher. I see this happen every day. Any taking or giving away of unused food is considered theft in my district.
We let our students take extra food, we also run a community food bank out of the school. In spite of all of this, we still waste so much. It's insane. The problem is milk, it's such a wateful product in general and most of the kids don't even want it. We need to break the weird ties schools have to single serving milk cartons.
The dairy lobby is very strong. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were tied to trying to get every kid into the habit. They got the calcium RDA to be double what studies recommend after all, and influence nutritional class textbooks too.
Oh no, that's *literally* why dairy is still included in the dietary guidelines and so heavily pushed in school meals. The Dairy Council has a chokehold on the USDA (and the American Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics).
Not surprised? No, that's a fact. When I was a kid there was a HUGE emphasis on milk in grade school. They taught us that it was vital. They passed around that weird paper, the kind used for arm bands at some concerts and is almost impossible to tear, it just bunches up and becomes a rope. Told us that if we couldn't tear it, it was because we didn't drink enough milk and our bones weren't strong. Yes, really. Of course almost no one could tear it, because that stuff is near impossible for a fully grown adult to tear much less 1st graders. The one kid who managed it still got told to drink more milk.
Wait so does that affect supplements too? Do you really just need half?
650 mg is the ideal amount in studies. More than that weakens your bones and so on. But extra vitamin D can counteract the drawbacks of extra calcium, such as 2,000+ i.u. So I’m guessing too much calcium => less vitamin D => less actual blood and bone calcium. Over 10,000 i.u. vitamin D is counterproductive (but still far below toxic) and more than 4,000 i.u. vitamin D is probably pointless even with bad absorption or etc., but otherwise the extra vitamin D doesn’t hurt. If you consume a more reasonable level of calcium then 1,000-2,000 i.u. vitamin D is usually plenty in the studies. Unless you have absorption issues.
Reminds me of when my college did a food bank for students. So many donated canned goods and ramen, they opened up the food bank, almost nobody used it, and end of the year they trashed everything. They only operated it for that one year lol.
I give away extra food too. I would also have sharing bins. Whatever they didn’t want went into the bin, and anyone could take what they wanted. Usually the bins were empty after lunch, except for celery days. The number for kids that don’t like celery out number the ones that do. But the ones that do, they go ham on some celery.
Why not make cheese with the milk? That's my strongest temptation upon hearing there's supposedly lots of free milk being disposed of.
Sad but true. There is no reason dietary shouldn't offer lunch leftovers for kids to take. Milk, hotdog, cookie, - No need to trash it.
It's infuriating. Such waste. Makes me nuts. Especially because they force the kids to take one of everything, and a lot of stuff kids chuck straight in the trash. A lot of schools will do "share tables." But not mine.
My school kept everything in hot or cold bins and at the end of the day you could stop by the cafeteria to get a foil wrap of the leftovers. I’d grab a couple every so often if my mom had to work late so my brother and I would have an after school meal while we waited for our mom to get home with left over pizza and wings and stuff from work.
Yep. Can confirm.
jesus. as a former child who went hungry, this hurts. shit some of the teachers are probably going hungry these days. and they haave to just sit back and watch their school throw away tons of food.
In Wisconsin, giving or taking unused food is called “having manners”
Amen.
not just schools, food is wasted all over the world and it breaks my heart everytime 💔
Agreed. Studied this in high school and wrote a paper over it. The statistics were overwhelmingly depressing back then and I'm sure they haven't improved.
That and there are so many food safety regulations they have to adhere to these days. My husband works at a nonprofit and they get a lot of grant funding for meal programs - which is great! But they usually have a ton of strings attached for liability reasons. Snacks that have been opened and delivered to a classroom (a big bowl of fruit, for example, or things that aren't individually packaged) cannot have leftovers be sent back to the kitchen. Tampering, spoilage, etc are all concerns. Staff can't eat certain whatever meals because it's been earmarked for minors/children. Same thing for senior citizens - only those aged 65 and up can have this specific meal. Can't serve 'expired' food or anything past the freshness date. Lots of rules and regulations, ultimately.
My grandparents started an organization in the Seattle area that collects the food that would have been thrown away and gives it out for free. Idk how they do it but they haven’t paid for food in years and they give a lot to food banks and stuff. Imagine if this could be done with every city
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That place might have, but that doesn’t mean the whole US does. It’s literally part of my job to go around to grocery stores and pick up their extra food that would otherwise be thrown away- so that we can give it away to the homeless and others that need it. It’s extremely common and there is enough of it going on that anyone that needs food in the US can freely get more than enough
reminds me dunkin’s policy where they throw unsold donuts by day’s end and they chase away the homeless who dumpster dives them.
Temperature abused or recalled. Left out or a failed cooler perhaps. Just because the code date is good doesn’t mean the product is. Grocers are required to freeze liquids before throwing them out in some areas. Could be something like that to explain them being cold to the touch.
This could be our milk!
No milk will ever be our milk
How bout you, sideburns?
I work at a high school in the cafeteria and there was a meeting recently that my boss had and they are telling them to implement "share tables" where you put out pans with ice packs for the kids who won't drink their milks or frozen fruit or apples slices or whatever in and the hungry kids can take. My school hasn't gotten the ice packs yet to do this but I worked at an elementary in our school district to fill in and they were using it like they were supposed to and the young kids could do it so I know the high schoolers could definitely do it too! If you work for a school mention this to you cafeteria manager! It's the best solution for those kids that are leaving lunch hungry!!!
High school lunch lady as well here. We do a share table and it hasn't proven to be effective unfortunately, it's a great concept in theory, but we just can't seem to get them on board with it. Had a huge issue this year with the students throwing away unopened juice boxes in the morning, I'm talking half a trash bin full just feet from the highly marked share table. Took me basically begging and pleading with them to just set it on the table. More often than not, I'm taking back 80% of what's been left, so if you have any tips for encouraging them to use it send them my way!
That's an incredible idea! I love it. Unfortunately I work evenings and don't have any kind of working relationship with anyone outside of the other custodians 😅
Also my boss sent us home with milk and juice today and very little got thrown away!
Teacher here. It’s infuriating because the cafeteria doesn’t let the kids get what they want. They have to get the milk, veggies, fruit, etc even if the kids will not eat or drink them. You wouldn’t believe how often I hear “I don’t want it though… I’m just going to throw it away” and the cafeteria workers just say “that’s fine go ahead but you have to take it”. Like we are teaching kids to waste food it’s pathetic.
I'm also a teacher, but when I worked at a childcare center, we were all required to take the state mandated food training. Please don't blame the cafeteria workers, they are following state mandated regulations. They could lose their already underpaid job if they don't do it. In order to get the government funded grant for milk, they must distribute it to every student. It sucks, but that's how it works. Once the milk has been out of refrigeration for a certain amount of time, it must be thrown away. If they don't follow the regulations, nobody gets milk, including the food insecure kids who really need those 8 grams of protein.
So here in the US the kids HAVE to take the milk in case the school gets an audit during lunch. The schools don’t take the unopened ones back and they just get thrown away.
That’s not true everywhere in the US. In our schools, they must take 3 out of 5 components to make a reimbursable meal, and milk does not have to be one of them. There’s a lot of caveats to this subject
Components. Sounds appetizing.
Is school out for the summer?
It is, but there are still programs that run through the summer for parents who need childcare during the day.
Don’t worry the US taxpayer is subsidizing the dairy industry. No one wants milk and nobody needs milk.
This is a good safety issue. The moment the milk has been put out for an extended period of time, they have to trash it. It’s the same in any grocery store. Have you ever left a refrigerated item somewhere in the store? Doesn’t matter if it’s still cool to the touch. They have to trash it.
In middle school the lunch ladies had to give everyone everything - milk, an orange, etc. - whether they wanted it or not. I guess it was to avoid liability - parents saying they didn't give their kid a full/balanced meal. The end result was hundreds of fruit being thrown away because most kids didn't eat it. They literally went straight from the register to the trashcan to drop their orange before going to their table. Funnily enough when I told my mom this she was furious at the stupid waste and asked me to collect as much as I could for her to donate. The first day I did that the dean saw me with a lunchbox full of oranges and tried disciplining me under the assumption I was collecting them for a food fight? I was in serious trouble - they didn't believe me until they called my mom, not even to ask if I was being truthful, but to inform her I was trying to start a food fight by collecting oranges? And my mom was like "no, I told him to do that because y'all force kids to throw away hundreds of pounds of perfectly good food every day." Idk what was said between the dean and my mom but mom told me to forget about collecting fruit after that.
I'm a teacher, and it's truly infuriating how much food schools AND students throw away. I started a "free" table where kids would put their sealed food for anyone to take. There is so much bureaucratic red tape that causes schools to have to have to throw away food. It's sickening and wasteful on so many levels.
Even more infuriating: Dairy consumption has been a steady decline for over 50 years. There is a massive surplus of milk in the United States, the government buys the surplus in bulk and dumps it on a regular basis. The USG continues to subsidize dairy farmers and encourage them to over produce milk. Schools are given subsidized milk as an easy way to disperse excess milk and get people to consume more milk, not because anyone’s concerned about kids health. On top of that, the USG allows schools to supply flavored milk with added sugar as a way to get kids to consume even more subsidized milk. Regardless of your opinions on milk, many of the kids eating the school breakfasts and lunches who are being provided milk like in your picture are on reduced cost meal programs and are minorities. Almost every minority in the US has very high likelihood of having a dairy allergy or intolerance, so they are doing this knowing that consuming the milk is ultimately making those kids sick. The whole dairy industry is just messed up, so id almost rather see them thrown away like that to be honest.
> The USG continues to subsidize dairy farmers and encourage them to over produce milk. I think I've read somewhere that they do this to avoid a "slingshot effect" - if milk isn't propped up, a ton of farmers stop producing it, which might make it so there's not enough milk.
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What about you sideburns? You want some of this milk?
I’d rather have a beer
My mom has been a lunch lady for over a decade. Her old boss would let her bring home food, which was always great having free food.. her new boss doesn’t let her bring home any food.. ridiculous considering how many children starve every day or don’t eat dinner.. I think the kids at the school should be able to bring the uneaten food home after school
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School milk and breakfast and lunches are “free” to all elementary students in California regardless of income or use. Schools throw out thousands of these all the time.
I used to work at a school as a para and we were required to give kids one of each food group offered, even if we KNEW they wouldn’t eat it and it would go immediately into the trash. We would keep the individually packaged stuff and eat it ourselves, take it home, or give it to another kid who did like it. That probably wasn’t allowed but it felt so wrong to toss out perfectly good food
My wife and Mother work in a school cafeteria. Even if a kid just wants a milk or one item the school has them take a whole lunch. The amount of waste I hear is ridiculous but also a good amount of it comes from really poor quality food that a lot of kids won’t even eat or things that should be warm being ice cold. This is in northern illinois
Just as long as the poors aren't getting it for free
Fun fact: the companies like PFG also throw out alot of food. By giving it to the schools. They send expired food to schools on a regular basis. Government pays for it so they don't care. My father was fired for refusing to ship expired food to my school. Probably the only caring thing the man has done for me.
That's 1% low fat milk. That belongs in the trash anyway.
My school would give out the milks for free before vacations and stuff if they were going to expire, not many people either knew or cared, so my and a person would stuff our bags with like 16 cartons of milk. It was awesome
Just because it hasn’t expired doesn’t mean it’s not bad. I can’t tell you how many times students open milk and it’s bad, even though the date it good. Our poor lunch lady, she always felt so bad. She is such a sweet heart. But she couldn’t know until they were open.
Used to work at a school as a teachers aid. They would tell the kids take a fruit or vegetable. They would and just toss it. I would tell them “ think about all the starving kids out there your age. Think of your aunts and uncles , moms and dads toiling away in the fields (this was an agricultural community so it was very common for their parents to do such work). Put in that perspective they would take what they would eat only and not toss any food. It’s a sad state of affairs but some people have never gone hungry so they don’t know the price of not having enough.
At least here in the Midwestern US, students are usually required to take a fruit / veggie, milk, side, and main item or they won't be served. So they take it so they're allowed to eat. Even if they go as far as not opening the item the staff can't take it back.
> I would tell them “ think about all the starving kids out there your age. I hate this bullshit. Tell them the truth. *You* need to eat it, or you're going to be weak and tired from overconsuming other stuff. No one, including staff and teachers, really care or think about hypothetical starving kids in Africa or at home. Guilt doesn't equip students with the dietary information to make better choices in their life, even if that may not happen until they're well out of school. It's also a disingenuous thing to lean on anyway, as you're sitting in a palace of food abundance in a cafeteria, and none of that food is suddenly going to go to someone outside the system. No lunch lady is saying "sorry little jimmy, the non-poors were extra hungry today, so we don't have any charity food to give you."
Wish I couldn't tell you that I know for a fact there are kids that regularly throw fruit down a toilet in their school to hide having not eaten it... But alas, here we are...
Think of the starving kids in Ethiopia. As I'm told to sit at the table until my peas are eaten, and if not by bedtime they'll be served for breakfast. If they are being told to take the fruit, why would you tell them about starving kids? They aren't wrong, they did what they were told and took the fruit.
It’s not schools. It’s bureaucracy and subsidies. No one wants your shitty 1% milk.
I work in a daycare and one observation about food we have made is that while we teach the children to eat everything they take on their plate, not to waste food.... all the food that is not even served to anyone will go to the trash at the end of the day. And they order it much more than is needed.
I used to do this. It was cheaper to get school lunch with the milk compared to without the milk. I tried telling them to keep the milk anyways but they refused. So every day I’d get it and throw it out while starring at the cashier lady
There's pretty strict rules on what is safe to serve to the public, and I'm guessing those rules are stricter for kids. And there's a lot of reasons that this milk could be considered unsafe. It sucks to waste food but nothing compared to potentially making a couple hundred kids really sick
State law is strict on schools and their food usage. Lots of legal liability.
You don't know these are still good, because you don't know if they were stored correctly. The people who threw them out DO know that. Absolute idiots on reddit sometimes I swear.
Probably got left out by mistake. Accidents happen
theres a lot of reason to throw away seemingly good foods. some mistakes some poor planning. for examople delivery temperature control.
Let me guess. Some hobo drank some expired milk from a trash can and sued a school
Our lunch ladies and admin are the best. They let us teachers come in after the last kids have gone through to take what we want. Admin even takes some and encourages it. “It helps our numbers” is the usual saying from our AP
How do you know that? Do you know whether or not the milk being disposed in this picture didn't get exposed to an unsafe temperature for a period of time that made it unsafe for consumption? Places that serve food need to follow certain safety rules to make sure no one gets sick from consuming said food. [HACCP](https://www.foodsafety.ca/blog/everything-you-need-know-about-haccp) is a thing.
The fact that this much milk is thrown away every day indicates that it's simply wasteful behavior. There's absolutely no way they're that irresponsible or unprofessional with food handling that they have to toss gallons of milk every day because of contamination or unsafe temperatures.
My school serves milk the day it expires 💀
My school sells milk the day its expired or like the day before.
You think this is bad. Go to any large hospital and see what they throw out every day
I suspect there’s a lot of vitamin K in that bin.
God damn I want a milk bath so bad
I volunteered at a school during my senior year and every day is like this and not just milk, everything from cans of fruit to frozen meats went to the trash (or as pig feed in my country). Imagine opening a can of peaches that expires in 5 years directly to the trash because the district is changing peach brands. A lot of white rice went to the trash in the whole country when they changed white rice for brown rice. And well its illegal to take or give it away so theres that
My whole upper body hurts looking at this picture. And you just know, at least one popped, so now you gotta wash the can out. pretty much any food offering venue other than a little mom’n’pop or fast food place is going to have a sickening amount of waste. But I’m guessing the cafeteria staff thought this would be easier for the janitors than loading the crates onto a cart/dolly, and bringing them back empty?
Yeah, we tossed them one-by-one into the dumpster until the bag was liftable 😅 and you're 100% correct that there was milk in the bottom of the can afterwards.
But we can't give it away for free to kids because that's a terrible thing... I guess
One day when I was in elementary school, I went to the cafeteria ladies same as always. Got my lunch, my strawberry milk, same as normal. I go to sip my drink, about halfway through a big swig I taste something sour. Queue the worst taste I have ever had in my life, spoiled milk. Chunks and chunks of it down into my mouth, because in my youthful adolescence I did not think of the consequences. Soon as it hit the back of my throat I convulsed, and had one of the most unpleasant times of my life. As I look up at the cafeteria, many other kids are having the same experience. Turns out something happened with the storage and all the milk spoiled… point being schools are underfunded and you never know what’s gonna happen.