In a nutshell, it's capitalism at its worst.

Long story short, because giving students lunch on taxpayer money would be socialist, the USA decided to charge children to eat food made by the school cafeteria.

In theory this is good if you want to send your kid to school with food to eat, you don't have to pay for lunches that your kid won't eat, whether directly, or indirectly, through taxes.

In reality, kids, or more accurately, their parents, either can't or won't pay for the food that their kids eat from the school cafeteria, most notably the former.

Instead of simply not feeding the kids, they just accrue debt for eating the food prepared by the school for them.

Thus, school lunch debt represents the worst of capitalism. The kids, and/or their parents are being billed for the children eating food.

It's weird to me because I didn't go to a school with a working cafeteria (one that makes food) until highschool, and it was basically just a cafe in the school, you paid for what you wanted when you bought it from the cafeteria. No money, no food.

I was always sent to school from grade 1, with a lunch in hand because of this. I understand the convenience of having a school able to prepare and serve lunch to the kids, but I'm not aware of any where I am that do that. To be fair, I haven't been in school that wasn't a college/uni, for over 25 years. Maybe things have changed here? IDK.