This issue came up for us last year when our daughter was in Kindergarten. She attends a school with a fancy (albeit, super healthy) lunch program with all local/organic ingredients. They serve lunch in her classroom "family style" and she DESPERATELY wanted to be one of the 'school lunch kids' so she could have the grown up responsibility of serving herself and passing plates, etc. She even wrote id down as a "NY Resolution" last year. So cute.
Well... one look at the cost of $6.25 PER LUNCH, with a minimum commitment of one full month at 5 days/week and we said, "Sorry sweetie, that's just WAY too much for lunch. We make healthy food too, but for a lot less". She persisted in her interest and we finally agreed that if she wanted to save up her own money ($25), we would pitch in the rest ($100) for her to have school lunch on the last month of school (last May). She scrimped and saved and offered to do chores for the neighbors and got her $25 together by April. I cannot tell you how proud she was to walk into the school office and hand them her envelope to pay for school lunch.
Long story short, she enjoyed the experience of lunches all through May (and also learned that roasted vegetable quinoa salad is no more appetizing to her served family style at school than it is when we make those types of things at home...). But after the month was over, she was content to go back to packed lunches. We used the experience as an opportunity to talk about whether or not she felt the value was worth the cost, etc. It led to a lot of interesting discussions about the cost of healthy foods, etc. While I appreciate healthy food and we have no MMM-worthy grocery bill, its still hard for me to fathom people who spend that much on school lunches.
