No children here, and the article didn’t give the average price of lunch. Google tells me it’s about $3.
Not to deviate too much from the article, which seemed to focus on how school lunchrooms have adopted outside payment options that use a Ticketmaster inspired fee model, but the lunch “base price” at least is better than I had expected.
The “back in my day” price was 85 cents in the mid 80s to I believe $1.85 by the time I graduated high school in the late 90s. For it to have ok not gone up about 50% since sounds better than the price increase on many other things, especially with food prices of the last few years.
It’s cheaper than the cheapest fast food meal and much less than my cheapest meal at work, while likely being nutritionally somewhere between the 2.
Any of you with kids have a more accurate real cost of feeding kids or more stories of these odd payment schemes?