Not necessarily. Almost all high schools in China require that you eat at the cafeteria and you're not allowed to bring your own lunch from home. (I hear they're being less strict about that in the last couple of years after a lot of corruption in school cafeterias made the news, but it's still pretty rare). And school days in China are really, really long. You have to get to school by 5:30AM in some provinces and don't get home until 10PM. If lunch is at noon, you're staying hungry for 7 hours at a time. For teenagers going through a growth spurt, that's pretty long. I get pretty hungry after 6 hours of no food. Not to mention, I always get hungrier faster if I'm using my brain a lot.
The cafeteria ladies get to take home any leftovers at the end of the day that the students didn't eat, so a lot of them are known for trying to keep the best parts of the meals for themselves. Like in a green peppers and pork dish, they'll carefully shake all the pork out of their ladle before giving you a pile of just green peppers.
And free lunches don't necessarily exist in China. If they're offered at all, they're offered as a part of need-based scholarships, and a lot of poorer kids don't apply for those because the process is extremely humiliating. But most of the time, there's no free lunch program at all, and poorer (or just stingier) families just won't give their kids enough money to eat. So there's a lot of kids only getting the free soup from the cafeteria. (It's called free soup, but it's more like free broth. It's almost all water and there's hardly any food bits in it at all.)
Damn. Are these hungry kids from boarding schools?
Not necessarily. Almost all high schools in China require that you eat at the cafeteria and you're not allowed to bring your own lunch from home. (I hear they're being less strict about that in the last couple of years after a lot of corruption in school cafeterias made the news, but it's still pretty rare). And school days in China are really, really long. You have to get to school by 5:30AM in some provinces and don't get home until 10PM. If lunch is at noon, you're staying hungry for 7 hours at a time. For teenagers going through a growth spurt, that's pretty long. I get pretty hungry after 6 hours of no food. Not to mention, I always get hungrier faster if I'm using my brain a lot.
The cafeteria ladies get to take home any leftovers at the end of the day that the students didn't eat, so a lot of them are known for trying to keep the best parts of the meals for themselves. Like in a green peppers and pork dish, they'll carefully shake all the pork out of their ladle before giving you a pile of just green peppers.
And free lunches don't necessarily exist in China. If they're offered at all, they're offered as a part of need-based scholarships, and a lot of poorer kids don't apply for those because the process is extremely humiliating. But most of the time, there's no free lunch program at all, and poorer (or just stingier) families just won't give their kids enough money to eat. So there's a lot of kids only getting the free soup from the cafeteria. (It's called free soup, but it's more like free broth. It's almost all water and there's hardly any food bits in it at all.)
Thanks.