I’ve heard that food served in American schools is bad because of the fact that it’s either fast food corporations taking the spotlight or outsourcing the labor to third party contractors (the same ones who make food for inmates across prisons) but fed towards kids.
Yep, that’s actually the case for them. As comments like: “the food kids are fed at school is exactly prison chow” are said. The company under contract makes the same “slop” inmates eat then ship that at schools for kids (seriously, what are they feeding them?)
In comparison:
- How good is cafeteria food at school in your country?
- Is the food quality actually good as if it’s “home made”?


As a French guy who’s spent a year in the US in my childhood, I can actually compare! That being said, I’ve also been in several schools in France and I can’t say the food has been uniformly good, there’s a lot of variation within schools of a same country (and that’s only public schools, I haven’t tried private ones). But while I can’t say that french school foods all tasted good (there were some I hated and some I loved), I can at least say they all looked like food and tried to be healthy and varied from one day to the next. It’s usually a small salad, a warm main dish that will usually have a meat, fish or omelette, some starch and some veggies, a dairy (cheese or yoghurt), a piece of bread, and a desert which is often a fruit. The actual taste changes a lot. Schools actually have a chef, but that doesn’t mean they cook everything from scratch, a lot of it can be unfrozen stuff delivered from various companies.