School Cafeteria Food

[MembersSchoolPizza]

The worst part about school lunches were occasionally had to have the cheese sandwitch they give out if you have no cold lunch and nor money in the school lunch account. It wasn't the most disgusting thing nor worst tasting thing but was still the worst thing to happen just because it exposed you as the poor kid.

Oh, that reminds me of how our school did that, in middle school. There was a table in the lunch room with loafs of wheat bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly.

There were two ways you were entitled to making a PB&J: If you were a poor kid who got free lunch, or if you were a paying lunch kid who had paid for his lunch. If you were a paying lunch kid who lost his lunch money (or got it taken by a fucking asshole named Brian, over and over again, thus causing you to spiral into a lifetime of associating the name Brian with assholes), you couldn't get a sandwich.

Stupid Brian.

 

[XYZpdq Jr.]

Oh, that reminds me of how our school did that, in middle school. There was a table in the lunch room with loafs of wheat bread and jars of peanut butter and jelly.

There were two ways you were entitled to making a PB&J: If you were a poor kid who got free lunch, or if you were a paying lunch kid who had paid for his lunch. If you were a paying lunch kid who lost his lunch money (or got it taken by a fucking asshole named Brian, over and over again, thus causing you to spiral into a lifetime of associating the name Brian with assholes), you couldn't get a sandwich.

Stupid Brian.

that's some bullshit
if it was just a couple of loaves of bread and jars of stuff per table and everybody went nuts that would be fine, but fuck paying for that shit

I dunno. I went looking for "school lunch grilled cheese" on google, and most of the results looked waaay better than what we had.

This is just a stock photo, but, seriously, this is exactly what we were served every other week, along with a styrofoam bowl full of watery tomato juice they were calling tomato soup.

Ver archivo adjunto 5091030

that still looks less-horrible than I expected, that's at least grilled enough to get burnt
I figured it was like "make toast, shove cheese in it, put it under a heat lamp"

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

that still looks less-horrible than I expected, that's at least grilled enough to get burnt
I figured it was like "make toast, shove cheese in it, put it under a heat lamp"

I don't think they were actually grilled, but I could be wrong. I suspect they were made on the omniversatile Standard Sheet Pan that that lunch ladies made everything on. Lay out a layer of bottom slices, put one slices of cheese on each one, put a top slice of bread on, and bake until burned. Maybe flipping halfway through, because I do remember they were pretty squished-looking.

I assume. Because they were always served on a sheet pan, with the lunch lady flipping one onto your tray with a spatula.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

My school had depressing rectangle pizza bread. About half of everything served in elementary school was ruined for me. Mostly because I associated that with being surrounded by hundreds of loud people I wanted nothing to do with. The color of the room was also really depressing.

Think it was a vomit inducing beige. I love pizza bread now, but the thought of eating anything that resembles that particular pizza bread just brings back bad memories. Tater tots are another one.

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

 

[Waifu Days]

@ZsaZsaBinks, you got to love that to the heart, made with love socialism home cooking the programming centers schools offer the childrens.

 

[MerriedxReldnahc]

Ours was pretty ass back in grade school, partly due to the fact that every primary school in the district had their meals made at one facility in the mornings, then packaged and shipped out to all the schools. The packaging was often questionable, I remember one meal that was spaghetti topped with a solid, lukewarm, brick of sauce with a side of plain white bread and a slice of watermellon. The watermelon was always placed on top of the bread so by the time you got it the melon-juice had fully soaked into your bread.

Other hits included the Soggy Brain Burger, where the burger bun has absorbed so much moisture it would shrivel and wrinkle on the bottom like a brain. Even the cookies were kind of shit, they were always hard and semi-frozen even though they were *apparently* fresh-baked.

My school used to do a program where third-graders (think 8-9 years old for non-murrican's) got to help out in the cafeteria for a while and I got to see first hand how shitty the whole deal was. There was basically nothing prepared on-site or even warmed, with the exception of the majestic Pizza Boat. This was a packaged store-bought product that was basically hollowed out bread loaded with sauce and cheese, and it was the tits. I brought my own lunch 99.9% of the time but I would often scout the "share table" for unwanted Pizza Boats and the occasional chocolate milk.

Middle school I only bought the occasional chocolate muffin but I was always warned to check expiration dates because spoiled food was common. I also was told that the pizza "tasted like ass, though sometimes it tastes like dick".

High school I only set foot in the cafeteria a few times but I remember a literal stampede during lunch on Baked Potato Day so apparently that was pretty dope.

 

[Sue Lightning]

I got it once in a blue moon, but I preferred to just eat at home , the only thing that was appealing was the pizza they would bring 7-9 boxes off to sell off for 5$/a slice , the sweet and sour chicken plain rice brought in by another company , the chick fil a sandwiches brought in water coolers and thats about it ,so nothing really from the school lol

 

[ZsaZsaBinks]

@ZsaZsaBinks, you got to love that to the heart, made with love socialism home cooking the programming centers schools offer the childrens.

I can’t even look at the thumbnail of that video because it’s so gross.

 

[ForgedBlades]

Same school district from kindergarten to high school graduation. The food was always good throughout and I actually have pretty fond memories of it. In grade school they used to serve this dish which was chunks of shredded chicken in a thick, almost neon-yellow colored gravy that they would ladle over mashed potatoes. Shit was awesome. They served it with slices of white bread and I would mop that gravy up like a motherfucker. In hindsight, that's probably what started my carb addiction.

In high school I really liked the cheese tortellini they would serve on occasion. The tacos were usually pretty good too. They also baked cookies on-site that were pretty incredible. Portion sizes were always shit, but you could order a "double lunch" and they would make you up two plates. The worst was when you were in the late lunch period and they didn't have enough left to let you get a double.

From what I've heard they moved away from the system I had where you had a choice of one of two entrees or a deli sandwich and now it's more of a food court style.

 

[Magicicada_septendecula]

I rarely ate school lunches, but most of my experiences with it were so unmemorable that the only things I remember eating from the school were the bland cheese pizza and a dish they called "chow fun", which was some bland noodle dish.
Hope I'm not giving away too much information here, but I worked briefly on a mobile application for a multinational food and facilities management conglomerate that helped cafeteria customers order food during the pandemic without ever having to touch or even see anyone else. This company probably made not only your school lunch, but also your university cafeteria food, your workplace cafeteria food, and your prison food if you were incarcerated. If you eat at some institution's cafeteria, it may be one of the few places where it's worth it to go with the food from a brand name you know like McDonald's or Starbucks. The actual food is theirs, we just handled the facilities and payment processing. If it's some off-brand looking place selling burgers, tacos, or coffee, then it's likely one of our "concepts", and the food is more or less the same stuff as the slop in prisons and ghetto schools, maybe with a slightly better presentation.

 

[Alex Hogendorp]

Thankfully the people at my high school cafeteria were actually passable chefs and I never threw up when eating those meals. In fact I actually wanted food from there. Every Friday, the would offer Poutine dishes and they do taste pretty good. They usually have them prepared before lunch. Their best one in my opinion is a Caesar Wrap with buffalo sauce. Caesar Salad became practically the best kind of dish in my opinion and it was only a few years ago I first had one. I honestly think I struck gold with this one as it was practically the antithesis to the stereotypical school lunches that looks like something you would get at Air Koryo when flying to North Korea.

 

[Professor G. Raff]

Every now and then I think about the cheap hamburgers my early elementary school served. They had that unique artificial taste and for whatever reason they gave me a strange feeling in my upper back between the shoulder blades... I don't know how to explain it since I was so young, but for whatever reason the phantom memory of it has stuck with me. Near the end of elementary school I went to a private Christian school a couple years where we had so-called 'hot lunches' in styrofoam cartons and ate them in the classroom and it was weird, but the food was better quality... they didn't build a cafeteria until years later.

I don't remember anything specific from Middle School outside of free peanut-butter sandwiches that where probably designed to choke you to death to reduce government spending... that, or buy a milk carton.

High school I recall having slightly better food. I would often get mashed potatoes and gravy and put it inside a roll cut in two with chicken nuggets to make little sandwiches. There where actually quite a lot of options and they started selling Chick-fil-a sandwiches at a point. I also got absolutely ripped off on up-priced zebra cakes.

 

[Seymour Duncan]

The government mandated free lunches from kindergarten to high school and the quality was variable, though it was always made on the cheap. Sometimes it was truly vile like anything involving hotdogs (to this day I still can't eat the cheap ones), the soups were a complete crapshoot on how they were prepared (sometimes you'd get a genuinely tasty bowl, sometimes the potatoes had a crunch to them) and sometimes it could be surprisingly competent. During high school, we'd sneak out across the road to dine at the local trade school that also had free lunches because the quality was several heads and shoulders above the dog vomit they served at the high school and it'd always have lots of free space, missing out on the stupid chair hogging games was always a plus.

For what it's worth, I'm pretty sure that the pizza place two blocks down could sustain itself from high school teachers alone, let alone all the other students trying to escape the wonders of sausage soup.

 

[Plantation Barbie]

The school lunches I had growing up weren't particularly bad, but they weren't nutritious either. Especiallyin high school. Choices were mostly between a sad hamburger with a squished bun, a pizza that tasted like cardboard (both with a side of French fries) or a separate line that served mostly chicken nuggets with a side of mashed potatoes and some sort of vegetable.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I got out right before Obongo got elected and his "wife" fucked everything up, so I had a great school lunch/cafeteria program in high school.

Fiestadas are still the best Mexican pizza ever

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

One meal - or, really, type of meal - that stands out in my memory is"roast <x> dinner".

Sometimes it would be beef, but more commonly chicken, and around the holidays it was often turkey. But whatever the meat was, the format didn't change:

1. One icecream scoop of mashed potato
2. One ladle full of "roast dinner", which was about 1cm cubes of strangely spongy, probably reformed meat, swiming in gravy that was different colors depending on whether it was beef or poultry, but mostly just tasted like salt.
3. One spoon full of "vegetable", usually peas, sometimes if you were lucky corn. The corn was always bettter.
4. One bread roll, the cheapest, tiniest, mass-produced bread rolls warmed under a heat lamp you could find to serve.
5. Whatever they could scrounge up for a dessert. The best option was always "fruit crumble", I think they called it, which was just canned pie filling with some bits of crappy streusel on top, but was still tasty. If you were less lucky, it would be fruit coctail, and if you were really unlucky it would be jello.

It doesn't sound like much, describing it, and yet, it was actually one of the better options, and I distinctly remember looking forward to it. I think maybe because it actually felt like a meal, not just a collection of whatever could be made cheaply and easily and kids would choke down. There was a cohesion to it. It was basically on par with a really good TV dinner, or something you might expect to see in a nursing home or in a hospital, but it still kinda felt like someone was trying, you know? You got it usually about every other week, but you would always get the roast turkey dinner at least 2-3 times in the couple weeks before Christmas and Thanksgiving.

That and the pizza are the two that I really remember standing out as actually looking forward to. We had the same rectangle style pizza as most schools in the midwest had in the 80s and 90s, I'm pretty sure it was frozen from Schwans or something, but it was good enough. It was hot and greasy and if you were lucky enough to get the taco pizza you were in for something that actually tasted pretty good. At least as a kid.

 

[Gimme the skinny]

I miss our middle school mashed potatoes and gravy. I may need to dye out the greys and sneak into the cafeteria just to get some one day. It’s better than any kfc or other soul food type mashed potatoes.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Every now and then I think about the cheap hamburgers my early elementary school served. They had that unique artificial taste and for whatever reason they gave me a strange feeling in my upper back between the shoulder blades... I don't know how to explain it since I was so young, but for whatever reason the phantom memory of it has stuck with me. Near the end of elementary school I went to a private Christian school a couple years where we had so-called 'hot lunches' in styrofoam cartons and ate them in the classroom and it was weird, but the food was better quality... they didn't build a cafeteria until years later.

I don't remember anything specific from Middle School outside of free peanut-butter sandwiches that where probably designed to choke you to death to reduce government spending... that, or buy a milk carton.

High school I recall having slightly better food. I would often get mashed potatoes and gravy and put it inside a roll cut in two with chicken nuggets to make little sandwiches. There where actually quite a lot of options and they started selling Chick-fil-a sandwiches at a point. I also got absolutely ripped off on up-priced zebra cakes.

Ah yes, the cafeteria school hamburgers, the most mystery of meats. The hamburgers always had a weird, distinctly bad smell about them, no char on the meat whatsoever, it was clear they were from a warming bin. I'd imagine that they were pre-cooked and then probably boiled or something later. Burgers cooked in an oven are very much edible, I have no idea how exactly they mangled them.

In general, cafeteria food started out bad (the pizza was rectangle-shaped with no pepperoni, etc.), got better as I aged into older schools with better options, then quickly got worse again as new state and later federal laws changed school lunches.

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

When my Pa was growing up in 1950s Appalachia (he's quite old, probably gave me spergers) he said the food they served in school cafeterias was as high of quality as home cooked food, was the same sort of food too. Basically, it didn't matter if he was on a Navy ship, in school, at home, or whatever, it was home/country food.

By my time the cafeteria was trash, mostly this cheap little pizza squares and sometimes a sort of McRib ripoff and other stuff. They basically just fed kids cheap junk food, but not even good junk food like fast food restaurant quality. Sometimes I brought sandwiches and such, but it wasn't because I actually hated the food. Actually can't remember any of it besides the pizza, must have been other stuff but probably garbage all the same.

I eat a lot in the college cafeteria now, just because the price of cooking has skyrocketed but our rates were grandfathered in. It sucks, theyve got lots of stuff but it's always the same stuff. The cafeteria is horrible about serving yuppy faggot food that nobody but me will even touch, bland food designed to be as inoffensive to as many as possible (so, like, boiled brussel sprouts, steamed cauliflower), and then what the students actually flock to is junk food, soul/Southern food, and of course things like the taco/gyro/oriental stations. The burger patties are so rubbery and un-meat-like that they're just awful, but I do love that I can sample things like tofu without having to buy it/make my whole dish it (tofu is NOT, regardless of what anyone says, an acceptable substitute for meat, I regard it as a side dish with meaty characteristics) and I love their beyond burgers. I have literally never seen someone touch a beyond burger besides me, but they'd be so expensive to buy on their own.