I’m serious. Imagine walking too work, in my suit and tie, right through the heart of the financial district, carrying an orange Hong Kong Phooey lunchbox!
Want!
Well, I miss seeing my Grandma every day at lunchtime. She managed the elementary school cafeteria. (We lived next door, so it’s not as though I didn’t see her very much. But she’s been gone for more than 30 years.) Lunch was always free!
My favorite thing was the freshly made bread, served warm every day. With plenty of government surplus butter. (I do not miss the fish sticks–always offered on Friday for the Catholic minority.)
Everything was made fresh & must have been pretty good. I do remember that lunch at Junior High was quite a letdown.
I’ll let you borrow my Macho Man Randy Savage lunch box 
I always brown bagged it. The local paper would publish the menu for the week so you could decide which days you wanted to buy hot lunch and it named stuffed like “Johnny Marzetti”. Does anyone know WTF Johnny Marzetti is? 
Whenever I hear about bagged milk (usually when I’m in Canada) I think back to that short period of time around 3rd grade when they had bagged milk (single serving sized, of course) in the cafeteria. Brings back memories of kickball, crayons, spelling tests and multiplication tables.
That and I miss the massive amount of pudding they would give us. I don’t know why.
I make that stuff all the time. Basic bachelor chow, for when the wife is away.
you crack me up! Way Cool! I’d love to find ones from my childhood too!
It was really only my junior high that I even remember what they offered. And what they offered was huge massive amounts of carbohydrates. Delicious! Artificial mashed potatoes with brown gravy. The same with some sort of bizarre ground meat substance gravy. Humongous sweetrolls. Doughnuts with chocolate frosting. And it was so cheap that even a poverty stricken lad could afford it! I’m thinking 15 or 25 cents. I’m thinking I’m dating myself.
I had a Lance Link Secret Chimp lunchbox. I used it until it was rusted through and the hinges came off. I think I also broke the glass inside the thermos, too. In first grade I had a bologna and mustard sammich every day. EVERY DAY. My mom would try to get me to switch to ham or cheese. Nope.
Mmmmm, grade school cafeteria food!!! I was a catholic grade school child of the 70’s, the hey day of lunch ladies. Alot of the food was made from scratch and fabulous.
Peanut Butter Patties - These were by far the most popular item in our school. I think they had to start limiting their appearance as kids would just go nuts for them. I distinctly remember one day when some of the kids decided to make a giant PBP ball out of a bunch of them. It must have been the size of a basketball. I think that’s when the nuns decided to wait a few months before PBP’s reappeared on the menu.
We also had frozen orange juice in little paper cups as a “dessert” all the time. Sounds simple but we simply adored it.
White milk (yuk!) was free; chocolate milk (ambrosia) was a nickel.
I always remember having chili and home made cinnamon rolls. To this day I must make both and serve together.
Anyone else have to “take turns” working in the kitchen washing dishes and scraping plates? Ugh, that yummy chicken and noodles loses its luster when you are scraping the remnants into a giant trash can.
No, no, they weren’t packaged cookies. They were fresh-baked cookies.
Okay, they were always perfectly round, so they were probably “cut-off-a-cylinder” cookies, like Pillsbury (but they tasted better than Pillsbury), but they were baked fresh during the lunch periods, right there at the school, and people would stand in line for ages waiting for the latest batch to be finished, and they all sold before there was time for them to get cold.
Those cookies and the ubiquitous rectangular cheese pizza were the lunch staples of my teenage years
See my previous reply to this question. I’ll bet I’m right.
The one thing I miss the most is the pizza. Luckily, Mrs. Small works at a mental health unit that gets deliveries from a large food place (“insitutional only food”) and they often have the little square pizzas that are about to expire. If they have less than a week left on them, they send them home with employees. Probably the best time of the month.
I don’t know about other schools, but when I was in high school they got rid of our square pizza and gave us slices. Made me rather angry, but I’m not around there anymore.
Brendon
Could be, but I’m not about to call up the school or anything like that to find out. 
In elementary school I loved pizza bagel and french toast stick day equally. For some reason, the pizza bagels in elementary school tasted better than any of the frozen crap you can find in stores. This only surprised me because I had always assumed they were frozen. I found out in HS that my elementary school cafeteria staff made their own pizza bagels.
French toast sticks are just delicious in general. I think it has something to do with dunking greasy bread sticks into warm syrup.
In HS I was all about the made to order subs and the chicken fries. Chicken fries are at the culinary height of the junk food pyramid.
The high school I went to had a 4 night a week hostel I stayed at. Lunches were sandwiches, the most edible were the chips[sup]1[/sup]/vegemite combo!
What I never want to see again are the cold leftover boiled potato/pea combos :barfy smiley:
We would often get apples too, which I could imagine could replace ball bearings they were that hard. No matter how hard they were thrown at the junior kids (“turd formers”) they wouldn’t shatter :eek:
Dave
[sup]1[/sup] same as the UK crisps, not fries
There was nothing good in my school lunches, except the chocolate milk. And to this day, I don’t eat corn dogs (nor will I buy them, no matter how much my kid begs). There was a school-wide Incident with corn dogs.
My high school sold pretty good chimichangas though.
Help is just an Ebay purchase away! http://search.ebay.com/search/search.dll?from=R40&satitle=vintage+lunchboxes
Hm, the few years I went to public school in the US the caffeteria always had bread and butter [slices of wonder bread or some generic white sliced bread] so potato and gravy sandwiches, or spaghetti sandwiches were a sort of comfort food.
Also, the grilled cheese sandwiches and tomato soup. mrAru has perfected the grilled cheese sandwich to get that greasy feel and the slight burnt taste. It literally requires cheap sliced white bread, kraft american singles and buttering the bread before frying it up. It also has to be campbells tomato soup.
I can say that one of the private schools I attended had phenomenal food - everything from scratch, and the most phenomenal german chocolate cake with cooked fudge frosting. I asked a few years ago, and the frosting recipe is off the hersheys cocoa powder box and the cake was the classic miracle whip chocolate cake recipe.
Grr. I want a dome lunchbox. Like this one. The “suitcase” kind always squished my sammich.
I’ve been looking on line, and keep finding “collectible” lunchboxes. When you look at the dimention… They aren’t functional! They are 7"x3.5"x7". Hardly big enough for my sammich let alone a thermos.
Where the hell can I fond a proper sized lunchbox???
Hey, an A-Team lunchbox would be cool.
My elementary school had from scratch yeast rolls (the other schools were jealous) on spaghetti day. You’d get an extra roll, take out the middles (eat them, of course) then stuff the roll shells with spaghetti and make sandwiches.
Cooooooold chocolate milk rounded out the meal.
I loved my high schools chicken nuggets and mashed potatoes with the scary neon yellow chicken gravy, but the lines were so long with the football players getting triple portions (you could only get three at a time, then you had to go back through the line) that it wasn’t worth spending 2/3rds of your 15 minute lunch break trying to just get your food.
(yes, we had extremely short lunch breaks which included walking time across our campus, it sucked).