School Lunches

[supton]

I was in grade school in the 80's in NY and lunch wasn't bad. Too long ago to remember. In the 90's in Maine they made some large portion from scratch, and it was pretty good (but as a teen I didn't exactly taste food as much as scarf it down). In high school it must have been like $10 for school lunch for the week? I struck up a deal with a poor kid. He got free school lunch. I'd buy his tickets for $5 and give him the tray when I was done so he could go back for "seconds". Worked well for me, I was able to pocket the $5 for an allowance.

My kids complained about school lunch, during the pandemic, but everything's upside down now. Daughter brings her own, but she's picky--but in a good way, lots of veggies, that sort of thing (plus she's allergic to dairy, cuts down on what she can eat).

 

[2strokeNorthstar]

My dad was an attorney and had his own practice. Despite making over a million dollars one year, he cleared his caseload, took a long sabbatical, took advantage of the system and my siblings and I got reduced school lunches.

Everyone in CA public school gets free lunch. Not sure how many want it. The best argument I ever heard was "the only other people that are required by law to be somewhere during a specific time is prisioners. They get their meals for free. Why don't kids?"

 

[Jdeere562]

Everyone in CA public school gets free lunch. Not sure how many want it. The best argument I ever heard was "the only other people that are required by law to be somewhere during a specific time is prisioners. They get their meals for free. Why don't kids?"

Not sure on the cost of lunch in my town. But I know they advertise free breakfast during summer when the kids are out of school. They need to do that for us old folks paying the tax bills. I live in a rural area, We don't even have meals on wheels available. I would gladly pay to get those. Probably regret it after finding nursing home quality food.

 

[nomas]

I don't remember much about the lunches . There were the rolls that everybody loved and the sheet cake . Some kind of spaghetti I think . Drawing a blank on the rest of it . This was in the 60's and 70's .

 

[Donald]

I don't think I ate lunch at school until we moved to the country and I had to take a school bus to school. All through 8th grade we would just walk home, eat lunch and then come back for the afternoon. The elementary school did not have a cafeteria.

In high school it was mostly sandwiches in the cafeteria. One day I got a hot meatball sandwich and one of the meatballs got loose and rolled down my white-ish pants. How embarrassing as a teenager.

 

[eljefino]

I remember the "pizza" being a 3/4 inch slab of bread with a thin layer of cheese and sauce. And somehow a lake of oil on it. Still edible. Figure the thick bread was to meet some nutrition requirement. I also liked the "taco boat" with real meat, more grease, and whatever else makes a taco. They still did veal cutlets back then, and veal parmesan too IIRC.

Trays came with celery sticks or carrot sticks which were universally tossed. A cheese stick was a treat though. Milk was 20 cents, I got cottage-cheese style solids in mine once. Chocolate milk became available Fridays in middle school then all the time in HS.

 

[AutoMechanic]

Well I’m not old but I remember the good school lunches (at least good for modern times anyway) when I was in like kindergarten thru second grade before they all changed. My mom is a lunch lady she has been since I started school and is now manager of an elementary school cafeteria. It’s nothing like what you describe at all in todays times. Her and my dad said in school they always had cartons not glass bottles of milk. Nowadays all they can have is 1% milk it’s nasty and now it comes in small plastic bottles. I could never drink milk at school but had to take it because we couldn’t leave the line without a complete lunch. There was separate lines for Al La Carte. After 10th grade I said to heck with it and mom packed my lunch everyday cause the food just got to be inedible for me. Sales have been way down since I left school is what my mom said. Probably because no one can eat it now.

 

[michaelluscher]

They always kinda sucked, and probably played a part into my poor relationship with food to this day
My experience is with whoever the lowest bidder was to the NYC DOE from ~2000-2014
With that being said, the oval/quarter loaf french bread pizza slapped, despite not being very good pizza

Taco/burger day was pretty much the best you could hope for
I was in middle/high school around the time that Michelle Obama was reinventing school lunch
Didn't work
Let's give a kid a TVP chicken patty sandwich on a whole wheat bun, with a milk and some lukewarm canned vegetable medley
...at ~10am

Combine that with general bullying and being a nervous wreck, and they wondered why I was puking up stomach acid like clockwork every morning
Try and help this girl out, packing/planning something that'll work out better for her

 

[chainblu]

I ate school cafeteria food in elementary and middle school. My memory of it was that it was good. I don't remember complaining. In high school, I thought I was too cool to go through the food line. I usually went to the library to catch up on my assignments.

 

[vavavroom]

Fifth form school cafeteria lunches included tikka masala, bangers and mash, chicken puffs (puff pastry filled with chicken), lasagne, various pasties (savory pastries), veggie burger, chicken breast and veg, spag bol, chicken korma, and the occasional fish fingers with chips (fries), and sometimes very bad pizza.

 

[Lubener]

I still remember the soy bean burgers served at my elemetary school back in the early- mid 70's. They were pretty good as I remember. I recall the entire meal price at the time was fourty cents.

 

[KenshinHimura]

Elementary was decent for early to mid 00s. we had both the french bread pizza and Papa Johns depending on the week. It was a rotating selection of sandwiches, vegetables and other sides. Middle school was the same rotating menu as elementary or you could get Pizza slightly better then the french bread or you could get a salad bar with bosco sticks. High school was similar to middle school but had a better salad bar. Only things that were worthy of remembering that was actually good was the pizza, cheese filled maxsticks and for desert, Hollywood Squares. The Hollywood Squares were the one thing that made buying lunch worth it.

 

[NYEngineer]

When I was in first grade, ( I actually remember this) the teacher took a count every day who had bag lunch, who was getting hot lunch and who was getting free lunch. We had a small housing project in town. Those were most of the free lunch kids. Anyway, after a few weeks of this, I figured free lunch sounded pretty good. It was the same as the hot lunch.
So, one day my mom asks me what I want for lunch. I said I'm getting the free lunch today. Don't worry about me. She looked completely confused but saw I was on a mission so let me have at it. Later that morning, the teacher takes the count. When I didn't raise my hand for bag lunch, she looked at me funny. Then I didn't raise my hand for hot lunch. She calls out Free Lunch and I raised my hand. She writes down the count and immediately calls me up to her desk. What are you doing? I want free lunch. That isn't for you.
She wrote a note in script which I couldn't read at the time and said give this to the lunch lady. The lunch lady read it and gave me a funny look. I'm sure my first grade mind confused a few people that day.

 

[PimTac]

Going to Catholic grade school starting in the early 60’s I ate the lunches the cooks made. They were not free. Each day of the week had its own lunch. Monday was hot dog and sauerkraut . Tuesday was Spanish rice. Wednesday was spaghetti. Thursday was hamburgers. Friday was fish sticks.

The same menu for pretty much all eight years I attended. After that I brought simple bag lunches like chopped ham sandwich.

 

[PF52]

I very rarely (or almost never) ate the school's provided lunches. I don't remember what the arrangement was, if there was some sort of quarterly billing for it or if we had to pay by the week or by the meal, or whatever, but my parent's perspective was that there was NO WAY they or I was going to pay for a prepared meal if I could bring one from home in a bag. So even on Pizza Day when all the cool kids were enjoying hot pizza (which smelled SO good!!) I was eating room-temperature sandwiches, Saltine crackers and bananas.

 

[paulo57509]

Good memories.....every day after roll call, it was the hot lunch and milk tally.

I was in elementary school in 1965-1971. Hot lunch (set menu) was 35 cents and ultimately peaked at 55 cents in 6th grade. Included an entree, some kind of veggies, dessert, a 1/2 whole wheat bread and butter sandwich and a 1/2 pint of milk. If you brought your lunch from home, a 1/2 pint of milk was 5 to 10 cents.

The food was prepared at one of the other district schools and was delivered daily to the other schools.

I liked most of the food that was served. The one thing I hated (to this day) was/is canned spinach. I was always served fresh, steamed spinach at home. Canned spinach is wretched. Worse when served with vinegar.

Sixth graders rotated work for a week in the cafeteria for free lunch; two boys would wash dishes and the two girls would help serve food. Lunch hour was separated by grade; 1-3 first hour, 4-6 the second hour. If you worked in the cafeteria, you worked both those two hours. Another perk was a lot of left overs still in trays came thru the dish washing area. Huge score on taco day.

Hot lunch in junior high was 65 cents, milk remained at 10 cents. If you wanted seconds, you had to wait until the entire line was served. I remember two or three of us going through the seconds line when it was oven fried chicken day. We'd go through the line, get chicken, exit and dump the chicken in to someone else plate at the exit and then go back to get more. We'd split the booty when the line ran dry.

In high school there was no hot lunch, only snack bar food; hot dogs, hamburgers, frozen cheese pizza and various sweets and liquids. IIRC, hot dogs and burgers were 50 cents, pizza was 40 cents for an ~8"x4" rectangle. It was all good but at that age, everyone ate like truck drivers so this isn't saying much. I remember puking cheese pizza in the afternoons during football practice.

 

[ChrisMU]

I went to the same public elementary in SE Wisconsin from 1987-96 (K-8) as my dad (‘66-‘74), and we both had a lot of the same teachers, as well as the same lunch ladies. The main two lunch ladies were around my grandparents’ ages (greatest generation or early silent generation). Those ladies sure knew how to cook. You could tell they really cared about the food they put out. By my time, it was clear that some of the food was at least partially pre-made, but the ladies knew how to doctor it up. For example, the basic canned ravioli had extra meat and cheese added. Other items, like the meat sauce for spaghetti, were definitely made from scratch. No canned/jarred sauce would have that much meat. There was a lot of variety. Usually the same dish wasn’t served more than twice during a month. Prices went from about $1.05 in 1988 to $1.40 or something in 1995.

When I went to my private HS in Wisconsin, the first couple years, the food was good, and made with care, but expensive (no state/federal funding). Prices were a-la-carte, so I’d order a main entree or hot sandwich at $1.50-$2.25 and bring my own chips and drink. When those ladies retired, the high school hired a company to do the cooking and managed to get some state aid, in exchange for banishing the soda machines. You could still buy 190-calorie HFCS-filled “juice” in 12 oz. cans, though. The quantity of food increased, but quality decreased. You could tell some of the food service workers were semi-illiterate or recently homeless, and likely placed there through some kind of state or county program. They were always polite, but I noticed the decline in food quality and few, if any, foods were truly made from scratch. Plates of food were typically $1.50-$2.25.

From what my 12-year-old son describes, any of those situations is better than the lunches now, here in Texas. He’s a picky eater, so I need to take his reviews with a grain of salt, but it sounds very pre-packaged, and typically a steady rotation of burgers, chicken nuggets, and pizza. He has stated the middle school food is better than in elementary.

 

[NYEngineer]

My youngest son, who's 19 now, was probably in third grade when one day, Michelle Obama was on television. I'm in the room with him when he looks up from what he was doing, sees her on tv and says I hate that woman. I thought to myself, ok... He's in third grade. What does he possibly know about Michelle Obama.
I said WHY don't you like her? He replies, she took away stuffed crust pizza from our school lunches. It was good. The new pizza is like eating a pizza box. Solid reasoning. I had to give it to him.

 

[football]

My wife and I make good money. More than enough to pay for my kids school lunches. Our entire school district gets free lunches from the federal govt. So my kids get a free lunch, even though we make deep 6 figures. Your tax dollars at work.

The lunch is aweful. My kids usually bring a lunch from home. We put money into their account so they can buy salads or alacart items that look better than the provided lunch.

 

[4WD]

Going to Catholic grade school starting in the early 60’s I ate the lunches the cooks made. They were not free. Each day of the week had its own lunch. Monday was hot dog and sauerkraut . Tuesday was Spanish rice. Wednesday was spaghetti. Thursday was hamburgers. Friday was fish sticks.

The same menu for pretty much all eight years I attended. After that I brought simple bag lunches like chopped ham sandwich.

I resemble that ! Looking back it was a great school …