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These are my opinions, but they are based in years of personal experience working in all departments of a turkey processing plant that did thousands and thousands of school lunch orders, so take that for whatever you think it's worth.
Firstly, I'd like to point out that whenever the lines run "School Lunch" orders, all of the workers KNOW that it's school lunch food. Everything runs slower and people pay very, very close attention to the little details that occasionally get overlooked on commercial orders, like wattle on turkey neck skin, broken bones/joints that are supposed to be whole, or the occasional pin feather still attached. You would be shocked at how much more careful people are when they know that this is the stuff their own kids and grandkids will be eating. I was a line leader, so I've seen my share of workers who can be a little negligent in order to save time, but that does NOT happen for school lunch--newbies were lectured quite thoroughly by their own peers about how careful we had to be with those orders, because every single worker in that plant had at least one child or grandchild eating school lunch. I'd imagine that since factory workers are not generally rich people with kids in private schools, this is likely true for the majority of meat-packing plants in the US.
Second, most of the "quality" differences between commercial products and school-lunch products are negligible. Some commercial buyers require extra inspections, but it's really more about avoiding lawsuits than anything else. I highly doubt that there's any significant benefit to the extra inspections done on top of the basic number that the USDA requires. Really, there are only so many inspections you can do before they become redundant, but redundancy looks good in court and can be bragged about in advertisements, so many commercial buyers require it. If they want to pay the extra cash for it, hey, that's fine--but the government isn't going to pay for extra inspections that don't make much difference in quality. As for using "older" birds, please understand that commercial buyers want to be able to advertise their stuff as "the best of the best," even if the difference in quality is so small that most people probably couldn't tell the difference unless they were doing a side-by-side taste comparison. It's more about being able to charge twice as much to the consumer for a "premium" meat that's barely better than the "regular" meat than any serious quality difference. Let me tell you a little secret that the industry REALLY doesn't want you to know--there is no difference at all between "brands". When we change brands, we change bags--not birds. It's the exact same turkeys and chickens whether you're buying Perdue, Butterball, Honeysuckle White, Round Hill, Shadybrook Farms, Tyson, or the store brand. We stop the line (with the same birds still on the belts) change the packaging and labels, and then start it up again. Rarely we'd run great big breeder hens and toms and cut them up for pet food and such, but even with those, the difference in quality is mostly just that breeder meat is a tiny bit tougher than regular turkey meat--probably not anything you'd notice if it was ground up into chicken/turkey patties, or cooked in a soup or stew, or if it was baked with butter, oil, or gravy--all of which are common ways that schools prepare food. Nutrition-wise, there's little if any difference at all. KFC just likes to get the younger chickens so they can charge you three times as much as what they're actually worth by pretending that there's some HUUUUGE difference in the quality.
Third, please keep in mind that school lunch meats get "graded" FAR more stringently by the USDA graders in each plant than commercial stuff does, and USDA graders have no qualms whatsoever about raising unholy hell if they find something wrong with a school lunch order--even if it's something as small as a B-grade breast in the A-grade tub. I've had graders make us empty out an entire 4000-lb tub of school lunch skin-on turkey thigh meat because they found a tiny bit of gristle in one tub. I've had to unpack whole pallets of 40-lb wax freezer boxes of meat because one box's weight was slightly off and we had to find it and fix it. They are REALLY stringent about school lunch orders--much more so than about any other orders, to be honest.
I really don't see anything there to feel terribly concerned about.
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