Mexico's school lunch program

Brownsville Herald:

While some schools endeavor to bring meals like mom makes to their students. At Franklin Delano Roosevelt Elementary school in Matamoros, moms are brought to the school to make students meals.
“Who better to make them lunch,” reasoned Principal Maria de Los Angeles Galvan Tapia. “They’re cooking for their kids, so obviously they want to feed them well.”
Out of necessity more than careful planning, moms at Franklin, as the school is known across the city, take turns cooking lunch for 550 hungry children.
Without government funding for a school lunch program, schools in Mexico employ a variety of low cost alternatives, usually on the parents’ dime.
At Franklin, parents have taken up the cause of organizing meals for their students. Responsibilities for the week rotate among parents, mostly mothers.
On a typical sweltering morning in August, Soledad Treviño, Carmen Ortega and Socorro Gutierrez hurriedly assembled lunch in Franklin’s kitchen.
On the menu were eight pepperoni pizzas, dozens of taquitos, a table covered with small Styrofoam bowls full of nacho chips and a bubbling bowl of queso on the side, two dozen kilos of tortillas and a cooking pan full of eggs and chorizo.
A microwave, gas fired stove and a refrigerator are the only appliances in the otherwise decaying kitchen.
“The pizza will be gone first,” Treviño said. “Tacos will probably be next. By the time lunch is over this will all be gone.”
Treviño is the president of the group of sixth-graders’ parents, and Ortega is secretary.
Before the first day of school the more experienced parents gather the novice parents together for a crash course in school lunch responsibilities.
Each grade elects officers who assign a group of five or six moms to cook for a turn of one week. The school year runs from late August through the first week of July, so moms are sure to have lunch duties several times in the year.
Treviño and Ortega are old hats on the lunch beat, stocking up on the week’s rations over the weekend. They are sure to make back their investment by week’s end, despite offering meals for just six pesos.
“It needs to be cheap,” Ortega said. “We don’t want to sell them something expensive that they couldn’t afford.”
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As someone who likes Mexican food the story made me hungry. It is interesting to see how people cope with something many of us take for granted.