Did anyone else get the creepy thick cheese sandwiches? I know lots of kids loved them but they always freaked me out.
It was like they baked a pan of those really fibrous, institutional rolls with some off-brand Velveeta in the middle. They’d cut them into rectangles and these sandwiches would stand 3-6" high. They were weird!
Elementary school in the 70s-80s was frozen meals in foil trays. I think you had a choice between “A” lunch and “B” lunch (say chicken patty vs salisbury steak). Junior high was the same except we also had a nacho & shake station. A lot of kids just ate fifty-cent nachos five days a week.
High school (late 80’s) had a menu line (Monday’s spagetti, Tuesday’s chicken nuggets, etc), a pizza line and a hamburger/hotdog line. We also had a pay-by-weight salad bar and I remember some desert station that I never used. Oh, and vending machines for juices and snacks. I mainly remember high school lunch because, my senior year, they changed vendors to someone who was terrible. Small portions of ill tasting food for about 50% more money than the previous year. It was so bad that the students staged boycotts where everyone either sack-lunched it or stripped the vending machines bare. After a month or so, the lunch vendor admitted that they vastly underbid themselves and couldn’t afford the contract so they were trying to make up their losses through portions/cost. The school board terminated their contract and rehired the old guys and everyone was happy.
Elementary school lunch in my mind will always be salisbury steak. I have never heard of anyone willingly eating this “food” outside of school lunches.
School lunches in the 1970’s were actually prepared on-site by the cafeteria ladies in my district. They did only the one meal a day during the school year and none at all in the summer. By contrast, where I now teach we serve two meals a day during the school year and lunch during the summer recess.
The quality of the food back then wasn’t bad. If there was anything wrong with the food, it was only that it was a blander than I liked. Portions were also a bit smaller than teen-aged boys can eat, so we used to fill it out by taking a lot of the white bread and butter. A few things they made were actually remarkably good. Two that stand out in memory are the meat loaf and something called a pizza burger which was neither a hamburger nor pizza.
Don’t know if anyone here’s ever heard of 'em, but our school had the dreaded “Mexcian Hats.” It was a piece of bologna that was fried, with an ice-cream scoop of refried beans in the middle. When the bologna fried, it curled up around the edges, and with the beans I guess it was supposed to look like a sombrero. A real sombrero probably would’ve tasted better.
Yeah Pam, me too. Hot lunches in the '50s weren’t so hot. I remember that for a quarter you could get the “Special”. Lots of meat loaf and such. The whole lunchroom smelled of cooked carrots. To this day I recognize that smell. 
I hardly ever got lunch from the school while I was there but in Australia in the 1960s and 70s if you ordered lunch from the “canteen” it worked like this. In class you handed in a brown paper bag with your order on it and the money for lunch in the bag. Before lunch someone picked them up and brought them back to the classroom.
The choices? Sandwiches or rolls and pieces of fruit. So in high school lunch may be a salad roll, a ham cheese and tomato sandwich and an apple. Neither canteen at primary or high school sold any crap - no chips, no sweets…just no junk food at all. As far as I recall all we drank at school was water from the “bubblers”, I don’t think the canteenb sold drinks. And no hot food even in Canberra.