School VS Prison Food

A large portion of children who attend public schools are unhappy with the school lunches that are available to them. School lunches can be purchased, or, if the student’s family is struggling financially, they can get one for a discount or for free.
In the Salem-Keizer school district, elementary school lunches cost $2.20 per serving, while middle and high school lunches both cost $2.70.
Public school lunches have evolved greatly over the years, becoming much more nutritious and healthy. In the early 1900s, public school cafeterias did not offer much for any kind of lunch. Over the years, people started to become more and more concerned about nutrition in their food.
During the great recession, children started to heavily depend on the school lunches for their main source of food. This hurt the government programs that supplied it, considering that food was so expensive at that time.
In the 1940s, Margaret Mead, a revolutionary in school lunches, suggested that school lunches be different. She created guidelines for them, such as the appropriate amount of calories a teenage boy and teenage girl should have daily, along with the new theory that children should be exposed to different types of food to broaden their palate and culture.
“I believe school lunches are really not all that bad,” Alexandria Clark 17’ said. “It is not like they could feed the children unhealthy meals.”
Prison food, on the other hand is far different from public school food. As one could imagine, prison food does not have very good nutritional values, is served by the inmates, and some prisons take pride on how gross their food is. An average prison meal costs about $1.50, and $5.00 for the whole day for a prisoner. That is about half of what it costs to feed an individual who is not in jail or prison. With cheaper costs, comes lesser quality in most cases, and prison food is definitely cheaper than public school foods that have healthier parts. Public school lunches are made to be as healthy as possible for as little as possible. Food served in prisons, however, is meant to keep the prisoners alive for as little of cost as possible.