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The story
A photo of a school lunch served at an elementary school in Sapporo was posted on 5ch’s “Anything Live G” board, sparking discussion after parents complained it looked far too meager. Rather than focusing on the menu itself, the thread centered on budget shortfalls tied to outsourcing lunch kitchen staff to private contractors and to free school-lunch programs — and it eventually spiraled into a generational dispute over whether limited funds should be prioritized for children or the elderly.
What people said
Nothing but carbs and processed meat
So it got outsourced to a private company, but of course once labor and utility costs went private, the lunch budget itself didn't change at all — a completely absurd setup
The quality of the lunches tanked hard, and I just thought, seriously, how stupid can you be
Outside opinions that dismiss real skill aren't worth a damn
Thinking calmly about it now, cooking for hundreds of people every single day is brutal work
And since it's going into kids' mouths, you can't cut corners either
It was precisely because it was public that this vital infrastructure work could run without worrying about profit
I get doing it for the kids, but we don't need to do it for old people too, right? It's literally the Children and Families Agency
Re: #33
What I wrote there too — the complaint was that the city's finances were tight while civil servants were getting huge paychecks, so it got outsourced to a private company
But what's actually straining budgets is mostly social security spending on the elderly, obviously, and I'd guess that's true to some degree in pretty much every municipality
In the end we protect elderly people who aren't producing anything anymore, and all the strain gets passed down onto the young and the kids
This old chestnut again — us washed-up middle-aged singles should just speak up and say 'please let us pay more singles tax' to expand the school lunch budget
We're going to rely on the taxes and labor paid by other people's kids once we're old, so the least we can do is this much
Neither having kids nor raising them, and then balking at even paying enough tax to feed them properly — that's just way too shameless
Seriously, making things harder over something so unnecessary
Expanding the school lunch budget is obviously what's best for the kids
If you do thaaat, some kids won't get properly nutritious meals, like, their lunch ends up being just a sweet bun or whatever
Well, you can just write those cases off
That's on the parents
Giving a kid just a sweet bun for lunch should get reported as abuse
That just makes the 'parent lottery' painfully obvious, so it's no good from a fairness standpoint (oyagacha = the luck of the draw on which parents you're born to)
Before worrying about fairness, I feel like you should just properly make your own kid's lunch
This is happening because there's no public money, so reporting something that minor
isn't going to get anyone to act
If you can't even manage to feed your kid properly, then maybe don't have kids in the first place
That's exactly why they should expand the school lunch budget so everyone gets a full meal
Scrap the Children and Families Agency and pour that budget into public elementary and junior high lunches instead
Fine by me?
The Children and Families Agency is just a tax-wasting outfit anyway — it didn't even exist back when I was a kid
People end up buying bread because they don't have time to make a packed lunch
That's exactly what school lunch is for
Saying you don't have time to make a packed lunch is just the parent being lazy
My mom worked full-time and still got up at 5am to make breakfast, a packed lunch, and dinner
Why do we have to spend tax money on parents who are just slacking off
Well, obviously
The fact that free lunches turned out like this is a result of catering to that minority who don't pay
There are parents out there who are just slacking off, and that's exactly why tax money needs to be used
It's not for the parents' sake
It's for the sake of the kids stuck eating the fallout of losing the 'parent lottery'
That's exactly why — get rid of the Children and Families Agency and redirect that budget to school lunches
They just shouldn't have forced free lunches through in the first place
Background and Key Points of This Debate
School lunch budgets and operating structures vary by municipality, and there’s a structural issue at play: when meal preparation is outsourced to private contractors, rising labor and utility costs don’t get reflected in the lunch budget, which tends to drag down menu quality. Free school-lunch programs have spread to many municipalities in recent years, but when the pool of recipients grows without the total budget growing, the per-student food budget gets squeezed. The thread even veered into funding debates like ‘abolish the Children and Families Agency’ and a ‘singles tax,’ but what went unmentioned is that the school lunch budget is small next to social security spending overall, so it’s not something a simple reallocation would fix. The real divide wasn’t over whether free lunches are a good idea, but over the generational conflict of whether limited funds should be prioritized for children or for the elderly.
*This article is compiled and summarized from the 5ch (Anything Live G) thread “[Photo] Parents Flood Sapporo Elementary School With Complaints After Lunch Turns Out Way Too Awful lmaooooo.”
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