We were chatting about our REAL old school days, and what we remembered from then, and got on the subject of school lunches.
My experience: First grade was at a tiny town school – the entire town had pretty much been built in the previous two years, housing for a military base and the aerospace research company doing hush-hush stuff, out in the Mohave desert in CA. This would have been 1958 ish. The school didn’t even have a cafeteria, as in, a place to cook/serve food, just a lunchroom with picnic tables with attached benches. Everyone had to bring their own lunches, but you could buy those little individual square cartons of milk.
Dad got transferred to another plant in another state by my second grade. This was in a New England town, well over 300 years old for contrast. What I think of as a normal cafeteria setup, with stoves and ovens and lunch ladies and all. We got some sort of main disk, and a starchy thing, and a vegetable. Still the milk cartons. This was for some laughable cost, maybe 25 cents?, which we paid to a cashier every day. A couple years further along, you could also choose to buy an ice cream sandwich, I think that was ten cents more. The menu for each lunch was printed in the town paper, and you could always bring your own home made lunch.
It pretty much went on like that until the end of High School, with the cost rising really slowly. I can’t swear to it, but I think the basic lunch was 65 cents my senior year.
How about the rest of you? I’ve heard of some places where you paid monthly or whatever instead of daily, and at some point they started providing free meals for kids in hardship families.
What I’m also curious about is how much a ‘basic’ school lunch costs these days.
I remember when the pint of milk went from 5 to 6 cents. When I started in the mid-60s, we still got milk in a glass bottle (which we returned to a tray when empty).
I don’t recall what the lunches cost. Not much, though. Maybe $0.65 in the early days, and a dollar or so by high school.
I went to several different elementary schools. At one of them lunch was 30 cents. And it was strictly meat, potatoes (NEVER french fries), some kind of veg, maybe jello for dessert. Possibly canned fruit, like fruit cocktail. There was nothing even vaguely resembling “outside food.” No pizza, hamburgers, hot dogs, potato chips, or anything even close. Certainly nothing like sodas or iced tea. Milk to drink only. Possibly chocolate milk from time to time. No candy or gum sold at school.
When I went to an old timey Catholic school in the 8th grade, lunches were also meat and potatoes fare, but the 8th graders could walk to a little mom & pop store at the end of the block and buy candy. This was ~1961.
The high school I graduated from (Catholic, all girls) was at that time in the far-flung wilderness outreaches of San Antonio (now, of course, heavily developed and populated) and there was a cafeteria space, but no food service. Everyone brought their lunch from home.
California c1972, elementary school was .35 cents. Just milk was .10 cents. I would duck into the restroom on my way to the cafeteria so I could spend my lunch money on a comic book and a candy bar.
In elementary school, a half pint of milk was 4¢ - my mom had a penny jar from which we extracted our milk money every morning. That’s all we could get - everyone brown-bagged it. (Catholic school - no lunches for sale.) 1960-1968
I went to public school for high school and continued to mostly brow-bag it, but I think lunches were 60¢. I’d splurge and buy lunch when they had pizza, or what they called pizza. I think milk was a nickle by then.
My Daddy paid monthy. I wanna say $25 bucks a kid.
You could buy daily but you had to do it first thing you got to school.
I had to bring my lunch most days. I had snacks the nurse kept for me.
The school my children went to had a free lunchroom.(breakfast, too) While they were in Elementary.
Not that my spoilt brats would eat the free food.
My grandkids are in the same school. It’s based on income if you get free lunch, now.
Son-of-a-wrek tells the school every year his children do not have incomes. They should get free lunch pass.
It’s never worked.
He loves to walk out saying to his kids(loudly) “See, I told you theres no free lunches!”
I grew up in a tiny coastal village with only a hundred or so residents, so my school was too small to have anything as sophisticated as provided lunches. We brought our own. For a brief time we had a shop just down the road that we could buy a meat pie or fish and chips from, but after the school buildings were relocated a few blocks away that ended.
In High School (which serviced a wider region so had a budget) there was a school Canteen which had some basic foods like sandwiches and drinks, but not much. Prices are lost to history and would not be relevant to non-New Zealanders.
Elementary school was 35 cents, milk was 7 cents. I often brought instead a sandwich, bag of Fritos and some Hostess treat. In the warm months, we had ice cream that could be bought- popsicles and fudgsicles, also 7 cent iirc. One of my jobs was collecting the money, and my Dad taught me to look out for old coins- lots of Indian head pennies, Liberty dimes, buffalo nickels still around.
Yep about the same as we paid, a little earlier.
I had two issues with the lunches- one was the “Spring Surprise”- what appeared to be ancient army surplus green beans and such. Then, some of the kids started a ketchup fight on hot dog days, so the cooks just mixed mustard, ketchup and relish together- take it or leave it- I left it. ecch.
I think school lunches today should be at a modest price, de minimis, say a dollar. Maybe less.
In High School they had a half decent pizza.
I walked to-fro, it was 1.2 miles. (No snow, and not much in the way of hills)
My son is a freshman in high school. Lunch is free, subsidized by the state. That’s been the case since they reopened the schools after COVID. Before that, he was in elementary school. I think lunch cost about $3.
As for myself, that was so long ago I don’t remember what lunch cost when I was in school.
When I was in school, we had tokens for lunch. IIRC, they were squarish metal things with a notch in them. I don’t think they had anything stamped on them or anything like that. I’m sure our parents had to sign up for it in some way, and some parents might have paid monthly or the like, but I’m sure my family qualified for the free lunch program. And once a certain percentage of students at a school qualify for free lunches, they just automatically qualify everyone for it, because that’s cheaper than the bureaucracy to check to see who should actually qualify.
At some point, Mom realized just how bad the school lunches were (we’re talking live roaches in the meal), and so she started packing lunches for my sister and I. This continued through high school, where the lunches were better, but also actually purchased.
At the school where I teach, the cafeteria is a la carte, and a lunch might cost anywhere from $3, for a couple of cold slices of yesterday’s leftover pizza, to $8, for the “Signature Combo”. Customers (whether students or faculty) can pay cash, or can put money on their account, accessible by scanning their ID at the register. But that’s at a tuition-charging private school. There’s some sort of provision for students to get a free or subsidized lunch through government programs, but I don’t know all of the details (it’s probably implemented through the same scan-your-ID system, and probably a free-lunch student’s friends couldn’t tell the difference, which is a good thing, but I think there are some restrictions with it).
I really have no idea. I also remember some sort of token system but I didn’t know how it worked since I wasn’t part of it. My mother sent me to school with a brown bag with a sandwich and a sandwich baggie of chips and a juice box. and i was supposed to bring the brown bag and the baggies back home.
I’m pretty sure the milk was 3 cents. Picky-eater-me never got the school lunch except when it was hot dogs. So once every couple weeks I brought 25 cents to school. This was 1961-1966.
(By way of comparison, the kids are in middle and high school, and we let each one buy lunch once a week - for $5.)