Actually many of these menus don’t sound bad thinking as a child k-6 at least. My mother would prepare for my brother and me such dishes as borscht, liver and onions, lima beans, duck blood soup and other old country horrors.
Going to school for lunch was a joy for us usually. Actually my mother was a good cook and made many good traditional meals but when dad wanted something authentic? blech.
well, I can say I’m not afraid to try anything once as an adult. thanks mom.
Y’know, now that I’m bopping around on my district’s site, the breakfast menu really floors me. Not that a lot of kids use the bfast service, it’s more popular in the elementary schools I think, but balanced nutrition?
Poptarts, juice or milk
Chewy granola bar, juice or milk
Cereal or graham crackers, juice or milk
2 mini-bagels with cr.cheese, juice or milk
Yoghurt or muffin, juice or milk
That’s $1.25 ( 30¢ reduced) for elementary and $1.50 for middle/high school.
Elementary lunches are slightly cheaper than middle/high, at $2.15 vs $2.50 but either is a far cry from Stillwell Angel’s 60¢ I need to move!
My sister works for a neighboring district’s junior high cafeteria and it’s easy to see where the cost ineffectiveness of bureacracy plays in. For instance, salad dressing must be used or discarded the week it’s opened, which seems like a fine rule, but why order gallon jugs of it instead of normal sized bottles? Sis hasn’t bought dressing since starting work there, since the cafeteria employees often take home whatever has to be pitched. Salad pre-mix has to be tossed two days after opening, even though it’s the same preservative coated stuff we get in the local grocery store with a month-long use-by date, but why buy the largest size available if that’s the rule?
I’m intrigued by this whole concept of US schools providing lunch for their students. Is this a recent thing? If not, when did the practice start? Do other countries do it too?
My mom’s a lunchlady and there are all sorts of weird regulations and rules, that are either particular to that kitchen or are mandated by the state or district. Most are incredibly reasonable, like the five-second rule is that whatever’s been dropped on the floor has five seconds to go in the garbage. But there are other regulations regarding pricing and government funds that you have to adhere to if you want that funding or if you want the discounts from the supplier. The supplier they use might not carry regular sized bottles of dressing or bags of lettuce, and it might actually be cheaper to order in bulk from that supplier than to buy a smaller size somewhere else.
As for my former school’s lunch menus, they are as follows for a random week from April:
When I was in school, lo, these two years ago, it was $1.85 per lunch, but I see now that’s been bumped up to $2.05 for grades 7-12. K-6 is $1.70. Adult lunch is 2.65. Adults get slightly large menu portions and coffee or something like that. Reduced lunch is .40 for every group. (Adults don’t have this option.)
I’m not quite sure what a “brown bag lunch” is. It wasn’t an option when I attended. I know that a peanut butter sandwich with the offered sides was an alternative to the entrée, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it was a classic sack lunch deal. I remember the salads being offered every week in the high school. The salads were mixed lettuce (mostly iceberg) and assorted veggies. It came with a breadstick and choice of milk. The fruit salads are all fresh assorted fruit, with yogurt and a breadstick plus choice of milk. Grab’n’go is just a quicker line with a couple of extra options that I don’t recall at the moment.
All the canned fruit is served in light syrup, not heavy. Pickles, regretably, count as a vegetable, though you have to eat quite a few for them to count as a serving.
I can still give the carb totals from a meal from memory is anyone wants them. (I count carbs to figure out how much insulin to give myself at each meal.) I know that my doctors were never worried about my school lunches being unhealthy for me, but I was one of those fresh fruit and vegetables at every meal people. If I could have sweet talked my mother’s co-workers into it, I probably would have eaten nothing but fresh fruit and vegetables, canned corn and green beans, and the occasional chicken dish. My one weakness was pizzaburgers. Oh, yum.
There were also vending machines in the cafeteria, which had soda and milk, but you weren’t allowed to use them until everybody had gotten through the lunch line, unless you had sack lunch and needed a drink.
As far as I can tell from this link, the US school lunch program as it exists today started shortly after World War II, but local, state, and even federal school lunch programs had existed before that and had been expanded during the Depression. School breakfast programs were added later.
Not all schools participate, in particular small private schools often don’t have the kitchen facilities - but most do.
Norway has no school lunch program, although the Oslo Breakfast was invented for Norwegian schools. It consisted of a slice of wholegrain bread with vitamin-enriched margarine and a slice of cheese, milk, a carrot, half an apple, half an orange, and - urk - a spoonful of cod liver oil during the darker half of the year. Though this was discontinued a long time ago, I’ve heard tales from folks old enough to remember about The Dread Spoon Of Winter - including one man who says that at his school they just spread the cod liver oil on the bread to make sure everyone got it :eek: Now, kids are expected to bring their own lunches. Cookies, cakes, and candy are banned, as are potato chips, although for some reason sweet drinks (though not soda) are generally permitted. Milk is available at school and many schools also offer fruits and vegetables at subsidized prices.
On the other hand, our neighbors to the east, Sweden, serve hot lunches at schools and day-care centers (and most workplaces, too). And they’re not alone in Europe by any means - the BBC’s report on school dinners in Europe is still available on their website, it seems, though it was published some months ago.
Both my elementary schooler and my kindergartner here in Japan have school meals. The kindergartener gets school meals three days a week, and I have to send a lunch twice a week. (Obento, as it is called here.)
On Obento days, he gets sent with a TINY lunch box (so different from British lunch boxes designed to hold knobbly things like sandwiches, a whole piece of fruit, candy bar and a yoghurt.) It measures about 6 inches by four by about an inch and a half deep. Half is filled with rice, and the other half with a variety of single bites of stuff like omelette, sausages, a grape, a bite of apple, a slice of orange, a broccoli floret, a piece of lettuce under the “food” side etc. Nothing is bigger than a bite or two and no sweet stuff except fruit is allowed.
On school lunch days I have to send a plastic plate and his regular cup, lunch mat and chopsticks plus a large ziplock bag to bring the dirty stuff home in. Their meals cost 250 yen (about 2 dollars 50) and are not great in my opinion. One day a week it is Japanese and consists of rice, soup, green tea, a fish or meat dish and a vegetable. That’s OK. The other day it’s “western” and he gets stuff like potato salad sandwiches (ewwww!) and curry filled rolls, and other bread based monstrosities which a Brit would never dream of making, along with a carton of milk and a dish of greens - salad, boiled veg with soy (very western, that) or canned fruit.
The elementary school dinners are great. Same cost, 250 yen and you get a month’s worth of menus at a go, all with nutrition details and calorie count. The menus might be perfectly balanced but sometimes they have really weird combinations - bread rolls, stewed seaweed and tofu and carrot in soy sauce, milk jelly and shrimp salad all featured together on one day last week. There is a bread day, a noodle day and three rice days. Rice days have miso soup with them as standard. Lots of fish dishes, almost no fried dishes (though they are hugely popular when they do come!) lots of very Japanese dishes - squid and such features heavily. Also local dishes (in our area onions and potatoes - in other areas whale, dolphin, etc EEK) Whole dried fish with peanuts for a snack, but also lots of stuff like fresh fruit salad, and whole fruite with knives for the kids to cut and share amongst themselves. Our area also does ethnic food with Korean dishes regularly served.
My elementary schooler has a life threatening nut allergy, and is also allergic to eggs. He gets replacement items for all dishes which might be dangerous, all separately wrapped and delivered to avoid cross contamination.
Because of his allergies I could send him with his lunch from home but you cannot have lunches from home apart from that or religious beliefs. (My muslim friends had to provide lunches because of pork products in so many of the seasonings and sauces uses. The canteen was willing to remove all the visible meat and even tried to cut a lot of the seasonings but it proved impossible to satisfy the strict demands of my friends.)
Another interesting difference to me is that the kids eat in their classrooms - a group of kids each week is assigned lunch duty, and they go to the canteen or drop off point (we are a village school so have deliveries from the biggest school in the area) and pick up the wagon for each class. The kids serve the lunch (in white smocks, hats and masks, hilarious! except then we have to wash the damn things) and clean up afterwards. They are expected to cut fruit and do stuff that I would think would not be allowed in British schools now, but they are taught how to handle knives and I have never heard of a huge injury. The homeroom teacher eats with the kids - there is no concept of free time from your class, you are on duty from the time the kids come to school until they leave. During pee breaks and the morning meeting the kids - even first graders - are unsupervised. (They have jobs to do like unpack their bags, hang up their stuff and do a simple worksheet and woe betide them if they don’t do it! It does get done amid a lot of to-ing and fro-ing and chatter.)
One final comment - the menus even to a Japanese eyes are oddly combined, and an adult might not want to eat such stuff, but a HUGE deal is made of school meals here, they stress what fun it is, how delicious the food is, and how wonderful the “aunties” are who make it. They even sing songs about how great school dinners are, and 99% of the kids fall for it hook line and sinker, and absolutely love them. My kids are in the 99%!
NZ doesn’t and we love Marmite and chippie/cheese sammies 
An interesting programme to follow up is “Jamie’s School Dinners” - Jamie Oliver (of Naked Chef fame) is on the rampage trying to improve what british school kids are fed at lunchtime, and to get the govt to increase the amount of money that goes toward school lunch funding.
Before he got stuck in, what the kids were eating looked pretty frightful. The only veggies were frozen, mashed, processed potato products. The ‘meat’ was things like turkey burgers and fish fingers (fishsticks) and horrible fatty, salty things. The dinner ladies weren’t allowed to add more salt to meals, because of the amount of salt that was in everything already. It was absolutely horrible.
For my own experience, in suburban Adelaide in Australia (finished highschool about 5 years ago), it was much different. I went to public schools, so we had canteens but no cafeterias. Most kids brought lunch from home, though in most of my schools there were local shops nearby where we all racked off to to get hot chips and stuff for lunch. The canteen itself would sell things like pies, hot chips, icecreams and lollies. For kids whose parents put their money in sealed bags with their orders on the front, there was relatively healthy things like salad/ham sandwiches and rolls, or baked potatos with baked beans/coleslaw. But nobody got that stuff if they had the chance. My high school would offer vegemite on toast at breakfast time (before the first bell went), but kids would just head across the road to the local supermarket/bakery rather than buy that.
I am very lucky. The surrounding county schools charge much more.
My son went to a school out of our district for two years (long unrelated story) and everything was more there. The lunches were around 1.85 I believe.
The town I live in is very economically depressed. If they charged any more for school lunch I think the majority would have to apply for subsidized.
I always assumed U.S. schools, except perhaps for very small or very remote ones, provided hot lunch for all students for the last 50 years at least.
I can remember in the early 1950’s when my mother taught in a 2-room school in a then-poor rural area outside of St. Louis (Chesterfield), where lunches were supplied by the parents. Very soon, the district consolidated, combining several tiny rural schools into a modern building with an institutional-style kitchen. Since the consolidation put more people (grades 1 to 8) into the same building, hot lunches and a 2-person staff became practical. I’m pretty sure that there was no charge for the food for students or teachers as I don’t remember any money changing hands, and it was a full, nearly-home-cooked meal every day for lunch. We filled our trays at the kitchen counter, then went back to our desks in our regular classrooms to eat, which meant they didn’t have to build a lunchroom.
Ice cream bars were always available afterwards for a nickel extra, but no soda was available ever. The youngest grades were encouraged to buy ice cream bars and save the wooden sticks for counting exercises and to construct things with glue and paper.
And I remember the tiny, glass milk bottles that predated paper cartons. I gouged my knee on a broken one and still bear the scar today.
My school experience was much like the menu Susie posted. I remember really liking the food, too, especially on spaghetti day, as the cook made yeast rolls from scratch that the kids who brought lunch would trade for with their most highly prized items. It was $1.00 and we had punch cards that had so many meals on them, paid monthly. If we didn’t have any punches left and/or forgot our cards, we ate, but had to pay back into the system. Cash was also readily accepted.
I remember when they upped the price to $1.10, parents were upset, because the kids kept losing the dimes.
This was… 1984-1991-ish.
My local Elementary school serves, this week:
2
Teriyaki Dunkers w/Rice*
Pizza*
Yogurt Parfait
Hamburger
3
Chicken Chow Mien*
Rib-b-q*
Hot Dog w/Pretzel
Pizza
4
Chicken Patty*
Pizza*
Egg Roll
Tamale
Cheetos
5
Chicken Nuggets*
Nachos*
Spaghetti
Pizza
Treat
6
Burrito*
Pizza*
Parma Pasta
Quesadilla
I don’t know what the asterisks mean. The cost is $2.25, or $0.40 reduced price. The middle school menu is far more extensive.