Not all school lunches are bad. In fact, each school has the power to make at least one great dish. Whether that dish comes from instant potatoes or grade D meat is another question.
Earlier this month, Slow Food USA staged a series of potluck "eat-ins" at public schools across the country, in an effort to lobby the government to dedicate more money to school lunch programs. This comes just a few years after a similar movement in England, led by celebrity chef Jamie Oliver, who saw an opportunity to remake his image and improve the diets of British schoolchildren.
Now, whether the school lunch program changes dramatically or not, it's worth discussing the classics: sloppy joes, taco bars, french bread pizza (before the days of Elio's frozen pizzas), and breaded chicken cutlets (Serious Eats links to a vibrant discussion on Chowhound of).
My favorite was simple, wrapped in three layers of plastic wrap. A peanut butter and jelly sandwich on white bread -- the sugary taste of the grape jelly overpowering the peanut butter against bread sweeter than either. For a side, you'd have to pick the tater tots, toasted well on the outside with an interior nuclear lava quality that rivaled jalapeno poppers from the microwave or T.G.I. Friday's.
For dessert, a chocolate milk carton and a no-bake chocolate oatmeal cookie. (The Chowhound threads links to a series of recipes, if you've never experienced the dirty joy of a no-bake cookie.)
So, how about it? What item on the school menu had you skipping to school, counting down the minutes to lunch and the nice lady in a hairnet handing you your tray?
[Image via Flickr: Cornell University Library]
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I was lucky, my grandma was the head of food service for my elemetary school, back when the cafeteria was full of somebody's grandmas.
The big cinnamon rolls served with a bowl of chili, the hamburger pizza with yellow cheese (grandma used to even make it for us on Christmas eve at her house), sloppy joes on fresh-baked yeast buns, the beef and egg noodles...everything was worthy of consumption... except for the tuna pinwheel rolls..BLECCH!
I've seen what they serve at my daughter's school now, and it's no surprise that they prefer a sandwich or chef's salad from home.
Cafeteria? What is that?
I'm actually old enough to remember my elementary school before it had a cafeteria. The lunches were better when I brought a PB&J from home. After the cafeteria was built, life took a turn for the worse. Various kinds of inedible slop, made worse by the teachers insisting that we eat it ALL. And yes, they did use the completely stupid (even to a 5th grader) thing about starving children in China.
Matters improved a little in high school. My favorite? John Marzetti (or however it is spelled), a weak lasagna-like dish. And we had a separate snack bar, where I could buy a Valomilk. (They had little cardboard disks in the package....send in 10 of them and get a coupon for a free Valomilk, or some such promotion. I loved it.)
I've been a substitute teacher for a few years now. I have never, and will never, touch the school food. They do a better job nowadays, but I just can't get past my past.
The only half-edible thing ever served at a Kearney School (in any building, I went there K-12) was the chicken fried steak + mash potatoes + ROLL. With a huge emphasis on the roll. Man, those were good dipped in the mashed potatoes (which were certainly made from flakes, but they were servicable).
Oh, and the cinnamon rolls, too. Delicious.
Everything else - total crap.
I think back on what I ate for lunch every day of High School and it is pretty unbelievable. Every single day it was either tater tots or tortilla chips acting as nacho cheese sauce delivery systems. Pretty much nothing else... besides a Mr. Pibb or Cherry Coke. Wow.
The sausage cheeseburger. It was probably a 50/50 meat/filler blend, with whatever cheese they had lying around on a semi-fresh bun. Strangely, it was really good. It usually came with tots, tri-tators, potato patties, or potato puffs. These, of course, were all the same thing, just cut into different shapes.
We were spoiled in middle school, where there was an onsite kitchen. The food was pretty darn good. In high school, everything was shipped in on massive trays from a central kitchen, and it was heinous. Uncooked fries, buns that had gotten hard and stale from sitting in the holding tank too long...yeck.
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