Kids Lunches today vs. 1970

My high school was good back in 03-07. With your lunch you’d get a free trip to the salad bar on a little boat tray. I’d just ask whoever wasn’t eating it if I could make a salad and put it in with theirs. They’d let me do it and I’d load up a nice salad. Lost a lot of weight but had no money for lunch as it was expensive. Always filled me up though. Lo carbs good way to stay in shape.

Grade school they had pizza and hit dog days on like Tuesday and Friday. I rarely had that. It was a sandwich and a piece of fruit. Apple, banana or grapes.

High school had lunch every day if you paid for it. The chicken and gravy over mashed potatoes was good.

But I'm a 70s and 80s and can't really speak to 1970.

If it matters, to me the biggest issues are chemicals and pesticides. Then the freaking GMO things.

michelle obama changed school lunch forever by removing fresh and catered options in schools that could afford them and majing sure all kids were eating severed and blended goat penis with asshole of cows.

Your message really touched my heart. So very sweet.

1975:

Springcreek Elementary School Piqua Ohio

Lunch ticket was 80 cents

My favorite was:

Chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes
green beans
salad
chocolate cake

Butter and jelly sandwich ( hated peanut butter back then, still don't care for it much. )
A tiny amount of potato chips in a baggie ( No Zip Lock back in the early 70s ) and a couple of cookies. Chocolate milk ( Mom made it ) in a thermos.
My lunch box ROCKED - it was a yellow Snoopy's dog house with a Peanuts characters thermos. No one else had one.
EVRYBODY had a lunch box. The school lunch was always healthy and tasted okay, meats and veggies, but everyone carried a lunch box anyway. It was The in thing to have I guess. Plus many of the kids lived in rural areas - couldn't afford the school lunch.

Anyone ever have to dig through the lunch dumpster for an orthodontic retainer? Seriously 4 or 5 inches deep in the old milk. Memories.

Feed them shit dumb them down, more slaves needed!

Wow, I graduated from high school in 1969, so missed the 70s. Elementary school was probably good, but I lived a block away, so always went home.

Jr. high and high school had great food. An entree of real food, salad (no salad bar, but a good tossed salad), a couple of veggie sides, and a dessert. In high school, there were always several choices of entree. Had to skip lunch half the time to keep from gaining weight.

It's disgusting that they "feed" our kids the way they do. Horrible. And avoidable. It's just another reason for parents to keep their kids out of the public indoctrination centers.

pretty much my experience.. for me 1953 thru 1965.

Lunch at my elementary school in the mid-60's wasn't too bad. All fresh prepared and smelled delicious all day until lunch. I think they got a cheap/free deal on spaghetti noodles, though. No piece was over 1" long. We dubbed it 'maggots in meat sauce', but it tasted OK.

Middle school food was bordering on horrible, I took a bag lunch from home 90% of the time.

High school, forget it. The food was awful and expensive. Bag lunch or the Dairy Queen across the street.

I went to work at a K-8 elementary school district in 2001. At first, I was amazed at the quality of food coming from the cafeteria kitchens. All prepared fresh and very appetizing.

Then came Moochelle Obama's mandates on school lunches and it all went downhill. The cafeteria staff were pissed, because the students were throwing away most of the food.

I can't blame the students or the staff. When I retired in 2018, it was down to the point of heating up the FDA-approved frozen garbage. 90% of it went straight into the trash.

I don't miss working there.

I went to schools during the 1960s and my memories of school lunches aren’t terrible. Back then there were lunch ladies in the cafeteria that actually cooked hot meals. Friday’s were always fish because of the Catholics.
High school morning break they would make a coffee cake that was fresh baked warm and delicious. Don’t remember much else but it wasn’t that bad.

I’ve been to my kids elementary school for their lunch hour and their food is way better quality than when I went in the 90s

Was in school from 90's early 2000's and it was gross then. It is literally boxed bullshit.

We had speghetti Wednesdays and Fish Sandwich Fridays at my school in the late 60s and 70s. And there wasn't any chocolate milk---only white milk.

Good topic....

I remember getting a 2 pack of hostess cupcakes and a 3 inch square brownie ice-cream sandwich for a buck.

I loved those damn ice-cream sandwiches...

that's the same stuff they had in the 70's. lots of hamburger concoctions. I swear a cafeteria lady was probably
the inventor of hamburger helper. they also had cake with pineapple topping and made huge peanut butter cookies. the
peas were still crunchy. i don't know why.

Our lunch ladies actually cooked real food when I was a kid in grade school. Wtf happened?

the 1990s were great.

we didnt have racism. we knew it was wrong, and no one did it.
we didnt know what islam was, other than some black rappers were muslims.
gay was fine, but not over the top.


then 2001 happened and fucked everything up.

school lunch was fantastic in the 1990s too.

Y2K was real after all. it all changed, and all got fucked after that.

Last Edited by Rufus Juice on 10/22/2019 09:00 PM

Peanut butter & jelly sandwich, or bologna sandwich, or pickle loaf sandwich. Carrot and celery sticks, or an apple. White milk.

I never got chips or fritos. Occasionally got a cookie. I was always envious of other people's lunches. My mother was a health nut in the 60's who made us eat plain white yogurt and wheat germ.

When I bought lunch it was usually fish sandwich and peas, or grilled cheese and tomato soup, or sloppy joes.

My grammar school didn't offer a lunch program either, so we all brought our own lunches. I remember baloney sandwiches, American Cheese sandwiches, Braunschweiger sandwiches, tuna fish sandwiches, egg salad sandwiches, and chopped olive sandwiches (chopped black olives, a dab of mayo or Miracle Whip, and a sprinkle of onion powder on some sort of toast). A piece of fruit (I really liked tangerines) and sometimes one of my Mom's homemade bran muffins with raisins and dates in the muffin. On cold days soup in the thermos. On Thursdays it was Hot Dog Day, for a quarter you got a hot dog with bun, a tiny carton of milk, and a little tub of ice cream with a neat little wooden paddle for a spoon. For 35 cents you could have TWO hot dogs but still only one milk and ice cream. There WAS a vending machine where we could get Fudgecicles and Creamsicles (ice cream covered with orange popsicle material) for a dime IIRC. This was late 50's - mid 60's.

Sometimes it might be somebody's birthday and their Mom would send cupcakes and we'd get to have them when we'd all settled down after lunch.

I'm sure that without being obvious about it, the teachers kept an eye out to be sure that everyone had some sort of lunch. We all had lunchboxes with our names on them, and when we got to school in the morning we'd set them on a certain shelf (so we wouldn't get into our lunches during class or morning recess) so it'd be easy to check that everyone had a lunchbox.

That's not the point. In a capitalist system, the goal is for the food service company to maximize net profit. So your only questions should be "is the food service company maximizing their net profit?" and "is there anything the food service company can do to lower costs and increase net profit?"

It was a real shock to me the first time I saw an actual fish up close. Until then, I'd thought that fish were these rectangular sorts of beings with heads and tails which swam around and then got covered in breadcrumbs.

Well, to be fair, kids aren't really all that epicurean under most circumstances.

??? Only the poor people got it free. The rest of us paid.
The food always sucked, but they made the bestestest chocolate cake in the whole wide world. In HS, I usually skipped lunch unless they had chocolate cake.

Some of the schools are quite stern about this; I recall seeing threads about how they'd taken some little kid's lunch and replaced it with a school-approved cheese sandwich.


Before I retired, I worked with a teen-age diploma/GED program at a local community college. Each weekend I'd bake cookies to bring on Monday. I'd keep up with which kinds the kids liked and try to hit all of them at least once during each term. This went on for nearly 10 years; I even had students come back and tell me that the cookies were the only reason they'd be at school on Mondays, and a few admitted that sometimes those cookies were all they'd had to eat that day.

Suddenly one day I was told by my bosses that I could no longer bring homemade cookies to school. It was very difficult not to take it personally, not to see it as an accusation that I provided something unsafe to my students.

at least you had identifiable entrees. We had "mystery meat" and "all-purpose patties".