School Lunches

In My Humble Opinion
1

Our 2 teenagers, Mr. Lyllyan and myself frequently find ourselves in discussions of school lunches. Mr. Lyl rememebers them as wholesome nutritous meals containing real food. The 2 teens absolutely love the school lunches, but then they have quite a choice…pizza, salad bar, potato bar etc…
I hated school lunches. The only meals that really stand out for me where the days when we were served cold spam, processed cheese,english peas and a roll. The only reason that stands out is because everyone would poke holes in the spam and cheese with their straws and shoot it across the cafeteria.

Did I attend high school during a bad period in school lunch history? What are you views?

2

My kids attend a small K-8 in an affluent California moutain/foothill community. Amongst children with names like Kaweah, Sierra and Darci, they choose between the salad bar, regular lunch or vegetarian entree. K-8.
I ate off metal trays where every thing that could be scooped onto it with an icecream scooper was scooped. But I also got peanutbutter and honey sandwiches on white bread. I don’t think these kids have ever SEEN white bread.

3

I went through school from '57 to '70 and thoroughly enjoyed the lunches served in the cafeteria. In high school, they did not have the variety nor vending machines they have today, but you could get ice cream bars, chocolate milk and cups of soda. The food was very good and the cafeteria had a cook who hand made the most delicious biscuits! Back then, they served beef stew frequently, which is something, oddly enough, rarely found anywhere today and it was delicious!!

The kids today who gripe about their 50 different selections need to get a kick in the butt! The soda and snack machines need to be taken out and the menu reduced in half. We never had ‘special’ diets for various religions, though fish was served on Fridays along with two other types of main dish. No Hindu, Islamic, Vegan, Kosher, nor organic diets. Yet, the selection was varied enough for everyone.

The food was cheap too! In grade school it was 50 cents for each meal (breakfast, if you wanted it, and lunch), milk was 5 cents a container. In high school, it was $1.50. Milk was 10 cents.

I did, though, get very tired of the Jell-O fruit cocktail squares.

4

When I was in high school, I loved the chicken patty sandwiches. Not the expensive sandwiches that came from the ala carte line; those contained actual chicken. I liked the ones that came from the regular, $1.35-for-entree-two-sides-and-some-milk lunch line. They were greenish grey on the inside. They didn’t taste like chicken, but they didn’t really taste like anything else, either. They were just the green-grey chicken sammitches, and with a dallop of the mayo that had been sitting out on the condiment table through 4 lunch shifts, they were heaven.

My mom now works for the school system, and she brought home one of my beloved sandwiches a few months ago. I was crushed to find that the real-chicken, ala carte chicken patty is now the standard! I almost cried, because I had wanted one of the old sandwiches for almost four years!

All of the good food came from the ala carte lines, where a double cheeseburger cost $2.50 and a soda was $1.50. When I graduated, those lines had crowded out all but one of the regular lunch lines. Three stations where you could pay amusement park prices for pizza and french fries, but only one tiny line for the $1.35 full-meal line. And MarxBoy thinks capitalism is on the way out!

5

Those chicken patties can be found in many, little grocery stores and, sometimes, in Walmart. They’re chicken, OK, sort of, with a lot of filler and they are pretty good. (It was the mention of the ‘gray-green’ color of the meat inside that reminded me.) Mostly, they are breaded now.

Cook them and get a bunch of grease but they taste good! In hard times, like first moving out into my own apartment, I used to buy them by the box for a couple of dollars, which is a pretty good indicator that they’re made mainly from things like chicken butts, and scraps heavily laced with fat and filler. They were tasty, but over cook one and you had a real thin hockey puck.

6

I’ve tried some of the frozen chicken patties to which you refer (I belive Tyson and Swanson both make varieties), and the school patties were something else entirely. Sure, they were breaded, too, but it was just…different. Of course, if I’ve been buying Tyson and Swanson, I might be missing out on the true cheap-ass glory that was the cafteria chicken sammitch. Perhaps if I move down the food chain to the store brand, I can regain this childhood bliss. Thanks for the suggestion!

[sub][sup]Hijack over. Nothing to see here. We now return you to your regularly-scheduled thread.[/sub][/sup]

7

Well, there were the french fries at my H.S. which were so limp and soggy you could literally tie them in square knots. And then squeeze drops of grease out of them.

8

ahhh, school lunches. The memories of days gone by. All schools attended through high school were private Catholic schools, by the way.

Elementary school #1. I never ate lunch there. Everything was served with ice cream scoops, and it smelled nasty. We had a high school retreat there my junior year(after this school was shut down during my 6th grade year) and you could still smell the fine odors-kind of a sickly sweet smell. I forgot my lunch once, and refused to eat the cafeteria food. I went hungry for the rest of the day, even after the teachers threatened to call my mother. I remember green lumps, yellow lumps and cheese sticks. All on those plastic trays that were divided into holding cells for horror.

Elementary school #2 7th and 8th grade. Decent food. I actually ate in the cafeteria most days. Plus, there was a set schedule, so I could chose what days I was going to eat and when I was bringing lunch from home.

High school. Decent, ate in the cafeteria every day. Mom gave me $10 a week for lunch, and if I didn’t like what they had cooked, I ate a bag of chips with a diet coke. After lunch I headed to the bathroom with my friend Janet to share a smoke.

School lunches today seem to be much better, at least from what I’ve heard.

9

School lunches were the bane of my existance.

Growing up, I was in a free lunch program. No matter how much I begged, my mom would not pack me lunches when I could get a free lunch of school. As a result, I barely ate.

First off, I hate meat. I became a vegetarian mostly because I realized that there is no form of meat that I really like, and a lot of forms of meat that I can’t stand. Of course, thanks to America’s obsession with meat, every single one of our school lunches was meat based (and we didn’t get choices back then). I remember with fear the soggy square “pizza” with little greasy square bits of pepperoni. I remember the startelingly green hot dogs. I remember the fearsome creamed beef (ugh) and my least favorite, the pink slab of ham floating on a bed of grease coated eggs.

Our meals came a couple side dishes, too. Usually this was still-half frozen french fries, syrupy peaches or soggy string beans. I would usually try and eat these but they were rather small in portion. As a result, I spent most of elementry school hungry, with just a few bites of food in my system.

Even worse, is that I am lactose-intolerant, and can’t drink straight milk. Of couse the only drinks they offered us was milk. I had to pick through those “meals” with absolutly nothing to get the sickening tastes from my mouth because they wouldn’t even give us cups of water.

When I complained to my mom, all she said was “When I was little I always wanted to eat school lunches, you should consider yourself lucky”.

When I entered high school I started taking renegade trips to the store to pack my own lunches. I instantly gained ten pounds and stopped looking half-dead all the time because I was finally getting food in my system. The times that I didn’t get a lunch packed I’d have to eat school food (of course none of it was vegetarian, except nachos- even the salads had anchovies in the dressing). On those days I lived off chips and soda and felt sick all the time.

Having to eat school lunches are probably the only part of my raising that I resent. My mom just doesn’t have the appetite I do and she never understood why I need to eat three good meals a day.

10

But it sounds like you all had a choice. When I was in elementary school, there was no choice. Except on Fridays, when there was plain or chocolate milk. And soda! Hell, we didn’t even have it at home, much less at school! Vending machines?..found only in the hospital waiting rooms. The smell of Kraft Parmesan cheese never fails to bring back the memories of school lunch. Yuck!

11

Juniper200, I’m a vegetarian. I buy a lot of soy pattie products, mainly because I’m not the most ambitious cook in the world and hey, how long does it take to heat up a frikkin’ patty?

Anyhoo, Morningstar Farms makes what they call “Chix Patties.” YMMV, but damned if they don’t taste just like the chicken patties they used to serve us. At least I thought they were serving us chicken patties. Since discovering Chix Patties, I’ve sincerely wondered if we weren’t being fed fake meat back then-- not that it would bother me to think so, I’m just curious, only I haven’t got the first clue as to how to find out. None of the same people work at my old school anymore, and would they really keep track of menus from a couple decades ago?

I do have some related-to-the-OP stuff to add, hurray! Grades 1-6, we had hot trays and cold trays. You got one of each. Sometimes, there was soup in little styro cups. The only meals that really stand out aside from the “chicken” in memory are the pizza (small slab, started off bland but then when I was in 6th grade they switched to a nice spicy kind) and the beefaroni type stuff. The cold trays usually held lettuce, I think, and sometimes an almost tasteless cheese stick.

In junior high I brought my own lunch a lot more often, but I do remember that we had real plates & silverware. And the hamburgers were grayish. I never ate lunch at school in high school because we had an open campus and I was able to walk home for lunch pretty much every day.

12

The food at my elementary school was pretty good. Mondays were ravioli, Tuesdays were pizza rolls (better than the pizza they gave us in high school), Wednesday was chicken sandwiches (the real ones) Thursday was Grab Bag, and Friday was Mac&Cheese. Only the mac&cheese was nasty, we called it maggots and glue. Oh, and I never ate the vegetable, it always tasted like it had been run through the dishwasher. I don’t even want to know why…

13

I absolutely refused to eat school lunch in elementary school. My mom wouldn’t pack me a lunch, so I started packing my own when I was in 1st grade. There was just no way that I would eat that stuff. One time I broke down and actually did, and I had to rush into the bathroom and vomit it up.
We never had a choice of the food either, except on Fridays we’d get chocolate milk.
Middle school was a little bit better. On Tues and Thurs there would be some sort of “bar”, sometimes salad, sometimes taco, sometimes potato. That food wasn’t much better.
I would not eat the food in High School, because it was the same food they served in elementary school.
Then we moved, and the school I go to now sells chips, cookies, etc. I really still can’t eat the main entree, but I don’t have to make a lunch anymore. I can survive on the other little things they sell.

14

I’ll be a senior in highschool next year (so figure out for yourselves what years I was in Elementary and Middle schools).

Elementary school:
Choice of the main food item of the day or peanut butter sandwich on white bread. Up to 3 sides. Must include a serving of fruit and serving of vegetable. Main items included tomato soup, vegetable soup, beef stew, spaghetti, pizza, ravioli, lasagna, chicken sandwhich, fried chicken, “sub sandwiches”, coney dogs, fish sandwich, and numerous other items I can’t think of. They had a different one almost every day of the month. Sides would’ve been things like jello, macaroni and cheese, salad, pudding, stuff like that. It usually sort of went with the meal, spaghetti meant garlic bread, fish meant mac and cheese. Also got one carton of milk and one carton of juice.

Middle school:
Same as elementary school, except every day but Wednesday they’d have an “alternate” main food item you could pick.

High school:
You have the option of going the same route as elementary and middle schools, or you can go Ala Carte. Ala Carte consists of a main food item like round “personal pan” pizza, chicken strips, “pizza boats” (garlic bread with pizza sauce and cheeze mmmmmm. . .), taco salad, it’s generally decent food. They have one of those per day. Choosing the school lunch or the ala carte costs $1.40. The school lunch comes with juice and milk, the ala carte doesn’t. We also have a pizza stand which sells slices of pepperoni or cheese pizza with cheese-filled crust. Those are $1.00. They have pizza stix which are 8-inch long, one inch wide “hot pocket style” pastries with pizza filling for $0.50. There is a snack bar with small pretzels and cheese for $0.60, big roast beef and cheese sandwiches for $2.00, bagels and cream cheese for $0.60, numerous varieties of chips for $0.60, and numerous Little Debbie snack items ranging in price from $0.25 to $1.00. There are various ice cream confections for $0.50 - $1.00. Our school has an exclusive contract with PepsiCo. and therefore has just about any brand of pop you could want, as long as it’s manufactured by the Pepsi Corporation. Cans go for $0.60 and bottles for $1.00. That’s about it, I think.

Here’s the opinion section:
I usually buy school lunch. I find that it is the largest amount of food I can get for the price. I like the food. It’s not bad. Plus, drinks are included. If the provided lunch is one I don’t care for, I’ll go for either a slice of pizza, or a couple pizza sticks. I’ll then buy a couple cartons of grape juice ($0.25) for a drink. Sometimes, after I’ve finished my food, I’ll buy an apple pie or a brownie or something like that. I never bring my lunch to school.

15

Senior in high school, here.

Our cafeteria is split up into two parts: hot lunch and a la carte. With a hot lunch, you get the entree, 3 sides (one of which is a dessert, the other salad, and the third usually peaches or pears in syrup or something), and either a milk or a cup of juice. Cost: $2.00

A la carte can get you the same thing as the other side, but with either a cheeseburger, chicken patty (and I use the term chicken loosely), or a rib/meatball/steakncheese sub (the selection changes day to day). You can also get Domino’s pizza, or their home-made pizza with the side-dishes and drinks. Fries are also for sale. Cost: $2.00, $2.50 for pizza, $3.00 for pizza and fries.

There’s a salad bar, and a frozen yogurt machine, and a rack with chips/cookies/twinkies/etc. I don’t know how much they cost.

Snapples/sodas/bottled water is $0.85, 20 oz. juice bottles are $1.25.

The food quality is pretty good, unless you have 3rd wave, where everything is wilted and soggy (or hard, as is the case with the chicken patties).

I wish it wasn’t so expensive though.

16

I just want to say that me and a friend have decided to try to bribe an elementary school kid to smuggle us out some school pizza. Yep, the limp, rectangular pizza with the little pepperoni-type cubes on top. I loved that stuff!

17

I’m not even going to try to describe how bad our school lunches are. It would take me about an hour to list the bad parts and about an hour more to figure out where to start. I’ll just leave it at that.

18

I went to a small parochial school for part of elementary school and all of junior high, and a public school for the rest of elementary. The parochial school only had hot lunch once a month, at tables set up in the gymnasium. They were actually set up for Tuesday night bingo, but once a month they set them up early and we had hot lunch there. (We normally ate in the classroom.) There was one option, and you had to order exactly what you wanted and pay for it ahead of time. The food was usually okay, though I hated Hot Dog Day because the whole gym stank of sauerkraut, which was offered as a condiment. (Never saw anybody take it, but by gum they were going to offer it!) It was a nice change, especially having cold milk or orange drink instead of the stuff that had been moldering in the thermoses all morning.

The public school had one option, and your only choice was whole or skim milk. You could also just buy the milk. The meal came prepackaged from a central kitchen; you got one hot tray with your main course and any side dishes, and one cold tray with dessert, condiments, sometimes a roll and butter, and plastic silverware. Both trays came wrapped in plastic wrap. I rarely got lunch there because my mother said it was too expensive (55 cents), but once in a while I’d be allowed to get it on pizza day. Greasy pizza with just sauce and cheez-like substance, bizarrely addicting, and applesauce for dessert.

High school was better. This was a fairly small Catholic high school, but it had a real kitchen. There were two lines. One served hot lunch, which ranged from very good to inedible, and the other served junk food, which was uniformly bland but predictable. Sometimes there was also a salad bar option. No sodas yet, this was the eighties so Coca-Cola hadn’t yet finished acquiring the entire world - but we could get one pint cartons of Turkey Hill Iced Tea!

Norwegian schools don’t do hot lunches, so flodjunior has to pack his lunch every day. But the school provides fresh fruit for a snack at mid-morning, and milk or ice water to drink (pupil’s choice).

19

Most of the cafeteria lunch food was completely forgettable, except the cookies. Oh, but our high school cafeteria had the absolute best chocolate chip cookies. We would wait in line for half the lunch period waiting for new cookies, because they couldn’t keep up with the demand (and, no, they would not and could not make them in advance, because we wanted them hot).

20

I have fond memories of school lunches, heretical as that may sound. The quality varied but overall they were hot, balanced, tasty meals.
Sidenote: hunger lends spice. Due to a catastrophic divorce, my mom, sis and I were were grindingly poor through much of my youth. I mean not-enough-to-eat poor. At home we “ate poor”, with lots of inexpensive stews, soups, beans, cornbread, etc. (Forget packaged stuff; it cost way too much!) Those hot school lunches tasted fabulously varied and even luxurious. *

With that sidetrack out of the way, “the lunchroom ladies” did a fine job turning out inexpensive, tasty, nutritious food on a massive scale. They emphasized nutrition first, with an attempt at pleasing default “youthful” tastes, e.g. Wednesday was hamburgers and Friday was fish, but both were both were elevated by a tartar sauce of their own devising. (Parents used to buy jars of it from The Lunchroom for home use. A grateful flap ensued when the Head Dietician retired; her treasured “secret recipe” was published in the newspaper.) Their sublime from-scratch mac and cheese passed into obscurity, alas.

Fruit and veggies were canned but they were always served. Not haute cuisine but students got them shoved under their noses–and some ate them. Not a bad thing, IMO. Some attempts at nutrition failed dismally but passed into legend anyway, e.g. prune whip. (Prunes pureed with milk then blended with a sour cream/whipped cream mixture; the most charitable comparison was cow flop.)

One good thing about being dirt-poor-hungry at least once in your life: it teaches ya to respect food and BE GRATEFUL. I truly pity and croggle at finickers. There’s room for Jane and Michael Stern in an Alice Waters universe. Hell, even the sublime M.F.K. Fisher said so–so there. Food is a gift, even humble food. Accept what you’re given, at least try what’s on the plate and remember the world isn’t a dubious restaurant in need of criticism.

whew Didn’t know that rant was building up–and all in defense of school lunchrooms.

Officially a curmudgeon,
Veb

  • I’m not poor anymore but wouldn’t trade the lessons for anything. Money’s only a tool so jack up my taxes, folks, if it feeds kids. There’s a balance between “no soft drinks” whining and “ketchup is a vegetable” grinching.