Were YOU aware that the Department of Defense funds school lunches??
https://www.dodea.edu/education/student-services/wellness/school-meal-program
I will be the first to say that I had no idea that the DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE funded school lunches. My question is why?! I was aware that state funding went to school lunches, and USDA federal dollars went to school lunches, but WHY does the DoD fund school lunches?
Turns out, the DoD is the gatekeeper of what food your schools can purchase, and from whom.
A little surface digging leads you to this page: https://www.aafes.com/about-exchange/school-lunch-program/
This page outlines how to become a contractor WITH the government to provide food for school lunches. Also, recognize the LINQ program? That is the lunch funding program that most public schools use. The program you load money into for your kids school food. Also a DoD product.
And another link: https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2016/10/27/usda-foods-local-roots-dod-fresh-connects-farm-school
My question is still why does the Department of Defense have anything to do with children’s school lunches??? Who are they contracted with? Is the food full of a bunch of chemical GMO garbage crap? I bet they aren’t partnering with local mom and pop farms to bring farm to table fresh fruit/veggies. I watched a video of a school sending back bananas because after 2 WEEKS the bananas were still green and hard, unusable. Those do not sound like natural bananas.
Settle down Beavis. The DoD funds school lunches for DoDEA schools. The DoD has schools to serve the children of Service Members stationed overseas. Like when I was stationed in Japan. My son went to school run by DoD that was on the Air Base. It makes sense that DoD would have all the programs that civilian School Districts in the US have to serve the students. The small island where we were had farms on it. There were no cows, so no fresh milk. No grains (including rice) grown on island, so no baked goods. There was an underground pig farm. I met the owner. He attended K State to study underground pig farming. The tropical fruits were locally sourced. The DoD also issued the contract for the school busses, imported teachers from the US, and ran the school libraries. When we moved to Alaska there were schools on the Air Base. They were run by the civilian Anchorage School District. I doubt the lunches were much different (except for the quality of the fruit) than the ones in Japan.
The DoD has nothing to do with the school lunch program at your neighborhood elementary school. Unless you are stationed at a base overseas. People are lazy. I would bet that while the DoD has its very own regulations for all that pertains to school lunches, they did not write them. They most likely copied the existing regulations and just replaced whichever Federal acronym appeared there with DoD.
This is not some sinister plot to have the DoD in your school's business. It is to nourish the children of Service Members overseas. As far as contractors go, it is probably a good thing that there are strict standards for quality and verified supply chain for foreign food contractors supplying meals for the children of our military overseas. To act otherwise would be irresponsible and negligent.
I looked up the bananas episode. This involved a civilian school district and had NOTHING to do with DoD.
I got a bunch of those non-ripening bananas from Walmart once. I kept waiting and waiting for them to turn yellow. They never did. It finally turned into an experiment, to me. I think I finally threw them out after 2, 2 1/2 months.