Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
this post was submitted on 19 Jan 2025
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Finland. Afaik only Finland and Sweden have free school food today, but this might be a Western brainworm take. I've no idea about AES countries for example.
School lunch is currently written into law and the law has been in place since 1948. It started from a law where the kids took part in picking the food with their teacher for a five year period outside the school hours to gather food for this, some schools had gardens and stuff too. This produce was then used to make collective meals. After the five year start period it has been fully free and paid for by the municipalities and the state.
When I was in school we would still go out to pick berries with our teacher that were then used in the school kitchen to make the lingonberry and bluberry jams for the winter. Everyone had to pick a small cup of them so it was nothing like the original giving away of labor time outside school hours.
I've not yet found a recount of the history of the school lunch from a leftist pov, but I can bet this is a result of the deep struggle here that began from the strikes in 1905. After the war our fash had lost and were probably more eager to give out things like this to the proles.
The schooling system and its role in nation building and homogenization of the proletariat here is a complex one where consessions and control are sometimes hard to tell apart, especially since today everything in history is stated in a way where they say things like "in 1948 Finland wrote a law that ensures school lunch for everyone" and none of how we got there and who was this for gets adressed.
I was guessing Sweden (the lingonberry jam and right to roam). I was close!
I started reading the Under the North Star series by Vaino Linna, about the struggles of Finnish history. I've read book 1 so far and plan to read the sequels. I was an au pair in Finland too, many years ago. I loved it and would have loved to stay there but health issues combined with the fact that the nordic countries aren't that easy to move to, made it impossible. I would definitely like to learn more about Finnish history. I keep intending to watch The Unknown Soldier too.
Oh that is very cool.
You should definitely watch The Unknown Soldier. It is one of the rare war movies that doesn't glorify war. The writer was a leftist and his sentiment about the war is a lot clearer in the original book, but later prints and the movie too are pretty heavily bourgeoisie-washed. Other great leftist authors are people like Lauri Viita, but pretty sure he was never translated. On marxist.org there are also amazing writings by commies from here that are all also in Finnish, but they can tell you the leftist history of this country, the war and how we ended up where we now are.
OT: I will add that the right to roam law in Finland is very different from the Swedish one and the Finnish one is the most expansive. It originates from the time where the various peoples living here had no concept of landownership and people would just take up a spot in the forest and live their life there (slash&burn farming) and when you moved on from a spot, it was again free for anyone to live in. As a result all sorts of foraging and sleeping in the wild is allowed and nobody can announce anything as private property even if they own it. In Sweden it was more like "you can spend a night in the lords lands and eat one handfull of nuts from the tree, but then you need to move on".
What do you mean, later prints are bourgeosie-washed? Do you mean that they changed later editions of the book? If so I will have to see if I can find an old copy one day. I would love to read more from Finnish writers, it's too bad most didn't get translated. It took me about 15 years just to find a translated copy of the first Under the North Star book. It only got translated into English once, many years ago and all the copies got sold and never re-printed. After years of searching I found a library with a copy.
I would love to read more about how Finland came to be the way it is, it seems to have such an interesting history. I wanted to learn the language too (it sounds lovely) but I don't have the energy to take on such a task and there aren't that many resources for learning it. I learnt a little Swedish many years ago and there seemed to be a lot more resources for learning Swedish at home, very few for Finnish.
The bourgeoisie very much took on the nationalistic project and the works of Finnish authors and kind of claimed them. The original print Linna wrote was never published as it was as the publisher demanded parts of it to be censored and the local bourge press turned the book into a moral panic as it went against their narrative. The original book name would be just "A War Novel" and today you can find it printed under the name Sotaromaani. In it he takes clear stances againts nationalism and militarist for example and these are things that have been purged from The Unknown Soldier. There is a study about it here in Finnish that might be translatable. Linna also personally held some anti-Soviet brainworms and some of these were also purged so it's complicated as well. But later the book and the movie both have been heavily utilized to advance nationalism, militarism and russophobia even though it was the Whites who used to hate this book.
It's a shame that most if not all of the actual leftist history here is these days underground or only in Finnish. But I do know that O.W. Kuusinen also wrote in English and these works can at least be read online.
Thanks for the tip, I will check out O.W. Kuusinen when I have the energy. Too bad I can't read the original A War Novel. I clicked on the link but it won't translate the page. Do you know any other good novels or non fiction about Finnish history that are available in English?
There are so few that I can't think of any that aren't heavily impacted by anti-communism. If you search for communism in Finland there are studies and writings, but most are not really representative of the working class or are just bourgeoisie propaganda. It's pretty difficult to find this material even in Finnish so it makes sense.
But if I ever come across anything, I'll make sure to post it on Hexbear.
Have you read the Under the North Star series, or seen the films?
I have, first times as a kid. And some theater productions of it too. I used to watch the movies with my grandparents often, such fond memories.
What do you think about whether it's true to what Vaino Linna intended? Did they change it at all like they did with the Unknown Soldier?
Honestly not sure, but I can try to find out. I'll get back to you with this one.