As a French guy who’s spent a year in the US in my childhood, I can actually compare! That being said, I’ve also been in several schools in France and I can’t say the food has been uniformly good, there’s a lot of variation within schools of a same country (and that’s only public schools, I haven’t tried private ones). But while I can’t say that french school foods all tasted good (there were some I hated and some I loved), I can at least say they all looked like food and tried to be healthy and varied from one day to the next. It’s usually a small salad, a warm main dish that will usually have a meat, fish or omelette, some starch and some veggies, a dairy (cheese or yoghurt), a piece of bread, and a desert which is often a fruit. The actual taste changes a lot. Schools actually have a chef, but that doesn’t mean they cook everything from scratch, a lot of it can be unfrozen stuff delivered from various companies.
You’re right in theory, but it’s Spez we’re talking about. I tend to consider that the following is a rational reaction to Spez preparing to take any action about anything in any context: