I read an article recently about the latest trends in school lunches - vegan, organic, wrap stations, basically all the stuff we didn’t get when we were kids.
What were your school lunches like?
At my school we actually looked forward to corn dog day, because that was one of the few things that tasted good. I myself got the nachos, with the freakishly yellow “cheese” sauce, and a Hostess pie chaser almost everyday. Not healthy, I know, but much more palatable than the sauce covered doormats that passed for pizza, the burgers that tasted like shredded up tires and the overly sweet roadkill-like sloppy joes.
And don’t get me started on their lame attempt at PC-ness, Mexican Day - burritos that looked like someone literally took a dump in them and taco salads that were swimming in orange grease.
We actually had really good tasting school lunches. Not good for you, mind, but tasty and delicious. I’ve spent the 15 years post graduation trying to find a replica of the chicken patty sandwiches they served. The taco salad (Tuesdays!) remains a fond memory, likewise impossible to duplicate. The pizza was always very tasty, and quite filling, and the fries golden brown and delicious. Burgers weren’t the most popular offering, but they were cooked just fine, and we did have a nice bar of toppings including actual lettuce, tomato slices and onions to put on them.
Vegan wraps? I’m not sure our lunch ladies would have known what to do with them, except to deep fry them and slather them in sour cream.
Our school lunches weren’t great, but weren’t horrible, either. My worst memories are pizza day, which was Tuesday. You were given a rubber rectangular piece of crust that was covered in what looked like greasy dirt, and then topped with cheese the color of lard. For sides, you got whole kernel corn, a salad consisting of iceburg lettuce and julienned carrots, and fruit cocktail, which was pears and a slice of peach.
The pizza was the only offensive part of the meal (and was made worse by everyone eating it with the French dressing meant for the salad), but the salad and fruit cocktail were laughable imitations of the real thing, and I only like corn when it’s creamed or on the cob so I spent most Tuesdays hungry.
I liked Fridays, though. It was (soy) burger and chocolate milk day.
In one school district I lived in the lunches were prepared on-site and were not that bad. I can barely remember what we had in elementary school, but there was a set lunch each day (e.g. “today is macaroni and cheese day!”) and I remember it all as being decent enough. In middle school we had some choice of what to get, and I remember that in addition to the rotating daily meal option there were hamburgers and fries and such.
We moved to another state when I was in middle school, and in this district food was prepared off-site and was pretty bad. The daily meal was called a “pre-pack” because it came in a little foil-wrapped box. Sometimes it was impossible to tell what a food item actually was – there were mysterious meat products and even slices of a cooked mystery fruit. There were also a few a la carte choices, such as ice-cold bagels (wrapped in foil, I guess preserve the coldness), fries, cookies and brownies, dried-out salad in a plastic container that had apparently also been frozen, and extremely greasy pizza. I’d become a half-vegetarian by then, and although I still ate chicken and fish the daily pre-pack was usually pork or beef so I wouldn’t get it. My oh-so-healthy vegetarian lunch was usually a cold bagel with cream cheese and fries, or sometimes the very greasy cheese pizza.
High school was pretty much the same, even worse after I transferred to a small magnet school. We would get the pre-packs because that was what kids on free and reduced lunch got, but very little of the a la carte offerings…and some of those we got were old. The supplier would actually send us wilted salads and things, I think it may have been stuff left over from other schools. I usually just brought a sandwich and got chips and candy from the vending machines.
I miss the little spicy potato bites.
Our lunches were pretty decent - good burgers, good spicy chicken sandwhiches, even good veggies, most of the time. And, of course, on Wednesday, every cafeteria in the city of San Antonio serves enchiladas, and damn, they were awesome!
The pizza did suck, though.
I wish I could have my high school’s enchiladas again. They were a tasty jumble of chili, cheese and tortillas, baked in layers like a casserole. They were so dense I could never finish an entire serving, but they were delicious.
In elementary school (30 yrs ago) I loved the pizza much like I loved airplane food later in life: terrible in any other circumstance, but mouth-watering given the lack of alternatives. Like Lamia’s school district, our school lunches through the whole city were pre-set and prepared on-site. You would check the local paper to see what the week’s lunches would be. Although I’m sure the ingredients weren’t of prime quality and the preparation was institutionally bland (you’d never see a fruit or vegetable unless it came out of a can), I would make a wild-assed guess that overall it was healthier than what you see in most under-funded public schools today, with the exception of those with fresh salad bars and vegan wraps and such.
Another favorite item was “Bunzas,” a non-trademarked ripoff of the local favorite “Runza,” a German-Russian meat-pie sort of thing. I liked the school version better than the restaurant one. We also had a variant on pizza called “Fiestada” which was basically a hexagon-shaped pizza made with a somewhat enchilada-style tomato sauce and topped with cheddar cheese. This was our school’s attempt at ethnic cuisine, long before they dared attempt anything as exotic as tacos or nachos, and I loved them. And of course the tater tots. You just can’t go wrong with tots.
In high school we had a soft-serve ice cream machine, and it was like I had moved to Disneyland - I couldn’t believe I could have ice cream every day. By then taking hot lunch was like totally uncool, so my usual lunch was a brown-bag PBJ and I’d buy an ice cream for a quarter.
I ate at the school cafeteria in the 50’s. I remember applesauce, jello, beans and weenies, creamed corn, and peanut butter sandwiches. There must have been more than that – and there must have been some meat – but I don’t remember it. Maybe meat loaf? Milk was the only drink available.
I don’t know if it was prepared on-site. The kitchen was big enough, so maybe it was.
I went to Catholic school, both elementary and High.
We had no on-campus lunches for sale. Everybody brown-bagged it. Well, in grade school, you could buy a milk ticket at the beginning of the week for a quarter. That was good for a half-pint of milk every day that week.
I remember only the peanut butter goodie and the five-cent carton of milk.
In high school, we could get a burger lunch option: nasty burger, fries dripping with grease, and a chocolate shake.
I remember the hexagonal Mexican pizzas from elementary school! Of course, they weren’t called Fiestadas–that sounded too exotic.
My grade school had lunches made on site, but nearly everything came from a can or a large box in the freezer. (My aunt worked in the cafeteria, so my brother and I sometimes got a glimpse at its secrets when we were waiting for her to give us a ride home.) There was usually some sort of sandwich on a bun (or the rubber pizza rectangles), some kind of starch like tater tots or a perfectly circular scoop of mashed potatoes, a canned fruit, and a canned vegetable or a salad bar featuring shredded iceberg.
One highlight, though, was their generic version of the McRib sandwich. Without cues from the onions or pickles, I don’t think I could tell them apart.
We also had breakfast food for lunch about every other week or so–pancakes or French toast (that was something they did well), sausage links that were only as bad as the ones in your average diner, reconstituted eggs (I didn’t eat eggs anyway, so that was okay) and a little foil-topped container of orange juice. Giving kids access to maple syrup made for some catastrophic messes, though.
My high school had food on-site, but it was also the kitchen that sent out food to all the other schools in the district every day. There was a standard “hot lunch” line that was subsidized and cheap–that was used mainly by athletes and people who got free or reduced lunch–and then there was a salad bar and lots of unhealthy a la carte stuff, like little baskets of fries and chicken nuggets, wrapped cheeseburgers and chicken patty sandwiches, a big cooler of soda, and a big rack of candy, cookies, etc. The cookies and scones were baked fresh every morning, so if you got to school early you could get a hot, melty chocolate chip cookie and a five-cent carton of milk for breakfast. Yums.
We had Fritter Fridays, too, which were pretty crazy. Said fritters are chicken fritters, better known as really good chicken breast strips with a thick fried-chicken-type breading, and they were so popular that the line for a la carte stuff would stretch almost out of the cafeteria on Fridays. Mmmm. An order of those, a cup of barbecue sauce, and a bottle of some kind of Snapple, and I had my weekly fix.
I recall the chicken & noodles, every other Wednesday, was fantastic, as was the every-other-Thursday spaghetti. The pizza was decent enough.
Actually, most of the food was pretty good, except for those weird days when they served bean soup, or stewed tomatoes, or some atrocity from which any self-respecting child would recoil in horror. That wasn’t often, thank goodness.
Growing up, I always liked our school’s burritos. They were deep fried and topped with cheese sauce. Maybe today they’d be called a chimichanga? Mmmm…
The most popular food by far at the school I work at is ‘chicken rings.’ They serve them once a week, and the lines are always packed on that day. They are a little like chicken nuggets, only shaped into flat rings (kind of a ‘washer’ shape).
I suffered through school lunch as little as humanly possible. There is one concoction that will haunt me until the end of my days. Hot dogs cut lengthways down the center with two scoops of mashed potatoes on top of that. Then there was cheese melted over it. It doesn’t really sound like it should be the most offensive thing ever, but I didn’t like hot dogs to begin with. The mashed potatoes were utterly horrid in every way mashed potatoes could be horrid. And the cheese didn’t look like real cheese.
Our school lunch menu was laid out a month in advance, and we were all given calendars at the top of the month to take home. For a few years, we qualified for free lunch, and mom made us eat it, though I never really did. I’d drink the milk and eat the dessert, but I was pretty much revolted by everything. Which is really strange, because we weren’t allowed to be picky eaters. My parents didn’t give a fuck if we didn’t like something. We’d eat it or we’d go hungry, and that was the end of that. I didn’t have any problems with any other food, but I couldn’t deal with the cafeteria.
Elementary school was a long time ago, but I remember:
[ul][li]Green hot dogs. No, really. They always seemed to have a greenish tint to them. They didn’t taste very good either; like Farmer John or something. (I don’t like Farmer John hot dogs.)[/li][li]Spaghetti. Better than Spaghetti-Os, but still rather institutional. The pasta was only an inch or two long, perhaps because little kids couldn’t be trusted with normal-length strands.[/li][li]Fish and tater-tots. Your basic frozen-food breaded fish fillets and frozen-food tater-tots.[/li][li]Tacos. Those nasty pre-formed shells like you get at Taco Hell, with seasoned meat and lettuce inside. Served with refried beans.[/li][li]Meatloaf with mashed potatoes and brown gravy.[/ul][/li]That’s all I specifically remember. There were probably gas-station/mini-mart-type hamburgers, and other things. There was the main course, potatoes with the meat, a salad made of iceberg lettuce and little else, a bun or garlic bread (with the spaghetti), a dessert (usually fruit salad or pudding or a brownie), and milk.
I don’t remember the cafeteria food in jr. high. High school was similar to elementary school, but ISTR there were other choices like sandwiches. Or you could order a burger or snacks.
I remember my favorite school lunch from elementary as being chicken fried steak day. I didn’t really care so much for the steak, but we had REAL mashed potatos and yeast rolls made at the school. Those were great!
My daughter has refused to eat at the school cafeteria since about second or third grade. I remember the day she quit eating there. She said “The chicken nuggets taste like mold and they’re pink in the middle.” Her school has mostly premade food items provided by a large corporate-type food supplier that also provides food at sporting events and other large venues. She won’t eat food at those places, either.
I have always wondered if she was exaggerating (and she’s not one who usually does that) or if they really did serve her old, undercooked chicken nuggets. Yuk.
For some odd reason, we were asked in elementary (like, after attendance had been taken) how many people wanted a chicken patty (raise hands) how many wanted mac & cheese (raise hand) how many wanter a burger (raise hands).
I felt guilty if I’d changed my mind by lunch time, but it never stopped me.
In middle and high school, the food was frozen, but not bad - on par with, say, Tyson frozen chicken tenders and patties. However, we had a stellar salad bar that few kids were interested in. Not organic romaine or anything - usually green leaf and iceberg, but a ton of veggies, beans, and hard-cooked eggs.
We had one delicious hot meal (the only one I’d eat) that was called “italian dunkers”. They were literally a hoagie bread openfaced and smothered with mozzarella and pepperoni to form a makeshift pizza. The sauce was watery, yet supersweet. They were toasted - perhaps Subway stole their idea. I wouldn’t put it past them. Yum.
We did the same thing at my medium sized Catholic School, most likely to cut down on waste. We were given different colored scraps of paper depending on our choice. A kid could always get a tuna sandwich or PB&J if they didn’t like the main choice. However, since I came from a large family where my individual tastes were not catered to, I was not a picky eater, I usually tolerated and mostly enjoyed the usual school lunch. I especially enjoyed the big square school pizza- the sausage was cubed, there was usually some hamburger thrown on top that was chewy and the crust was flour-y- it was like a giant Totinos.
I grew up in Australia. We didn’t have cafeterias, we had canteens. You put in your order in the morning and picked it up at lunch. The food was standard canteen fare - meat pies, sausage rolls, sandwiches, cheesy bread. I remember a lot of kids getting canteen lunches in primary school, but by high school everyone just kind of brought their own food. We ate outside on the school grounds, which was great. I remember being crammed into the gym for lunch at my Canadian elementary schools and it was a noisy hell.
Yes, I too have not so fond memories of those soggy rectangles. How they got away with calling those abominations pizza, I have no idea.