Quote Originally Posted by David75 View Post
Strange how habits and culture can vary so much across continents.
I like having multiple things to eat in small quantities.
I love those restaurant where you get like 10 to 18 (yes 18) different dishes, in very small quantities.
You start thinking you'll never have enough to fill yourself, but around 2 third of the dishes, you start getting full... and it keeps coming and is delicious.

Now we are only talking school canteens.
I have to say that quality varies a lot depending on schools and cities. But there's really a full course and they try their best to give a balanced meal.
Also, tables are often organised to help socialisation, talk and eat is very important here in France, so much that many work meetings are in fact done at lunch time.
Reminds me of when I was being babysat by a woman from Ukraine in the 4th grade. I completely resisted the idea of eating the small pancakes that she was cooking instead of just large ones because I thought I wouldn't get full. She made me eat them anyway and it turned out I was wrong lol.

The school lunches for America look particularly disgusting, but still within the bounds of reality if they only chose poor schools. I work in a school in Chinatown and the lunches look like that. I'll take a picture of it. The meals in the schools I experienced are more similar to what Buff described, pre-packaged and cooked in bulk in a single servings size. It was a main dish and a drink, and maybe a bag of chips as extra. Hmm now that I think about it, I never really experienced the sampling buffet style of eating on a regular basis until I came to college.

The Korean/Japanese foods look just like what they serve in the plastic bento boxes at the Asian stores. There's so much food that it's hard to finish...

In the dining hall at the dorm in my college, there is a huge variety of foods, so one's plate could easily look the ones in France (without that weirdass fruit). Or Brazil or Italy or Sweden.

Now I just think they were trying to make America look bad.