For about two months, Fed Up invited students across the country to snap and submit pictures of their school lunch. The campaign gathered 7,025 pictures and had more than 25,000 participants voting for whether the student should eat the lunch or toss it.
The campaign was meant to give young people a little power and encourage them to demand better food. (There were also handy tips!) The idea was to compile data about where the best and worst lunches were being served, too. But, based on a sample of the data, it’s clear that there’s not much difference between food that should go straight to the trash and food that’s worthy of being ingested.
Some of meals that got the most votes we saw for “toss it” were pretty bad:
But the really depressing bit is how the meal with the highest “eat it” scores that we found really weren’t much better:
The best you can say about this, really, is that the decent school lunch food is about equivalent to decent fast food. The rest is even worse.