Question du jour

[vanillafluffy]

If you ate school lunches as a kid, what menu item did you most dread seeing on the week's menu list? Or, if you more often brought a lunch from home, what did you hope wasn't inside your lunchbox or bag when you opened it up? What made this item so revolting for you?

Mostly, I brown-bagged it. Sometimes I'd have school lunch (You could sign up ahead of time, and I'd nag my mom if there was something "good" on the calendar). I avoided the Salisbury stead, but I adored fish sticks. And it seems to me that the chicken was pretty good. Alas, somewhere around seventh grade, they stopped cooking in the cafeteria and brought in pre-made meals ala TV dinners.

Unfortunately, my mom wasn't terribly inventive when it came to lunch. Peanut butter, peanut butter, peanut butter! (and jelly). Not every day, but an awful lot. It was years before I could eat peanut butter after grade school! Or, worse, a slice of American cheese between two slices of white bread. Ugh! Nasty yellow wax! Sometimes there'd be leftovers, like a roast beef sandwich, or meatloaf. Those were the good days!

I liked tuna, but she was always worried that it would spoil if the weather was warm. This was long before the days of insulated coller bags and those plastic freezer cubes. I did have a wide-mouth thermos, but it tended to leak, so that didn't get used much.

And now I'm craving fish sticks, which I don't have on hand....

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Comments

[fufaraw]

The smell of the vat-sized kettles the cafeteria made tomato soup and tomato-based vegetable soup in lingers, and sickens me to this day. H stole two sets of industrial-plate silverware from his college dining room for our first apartment, and I couldn't use them--they tasted the way the cafeteria smelled.

I used to dread my mom having packed a hard-boiled egg. I was too lazy (found out later it was ADD and lack of focus) to peel the egg at lunchtime, so to "protect" it she packed it in an egg-shaped and sized aluminum tea ball. So by lunchtime the slick eggwhite was streaked with black. Yeah. NSM. We didn't have lunchables and fruit cups, so it was PBJ or baloney and cheese (one slice each, with mustard and mayo) on white bread, and an apple--usually a windfall from our own tree, small, wizened, bruised, and totally unappealing. I skipped a lot of lunches, hunger being a more pleasant companion than nausea.

[vanillafluffy.livejournal.com]

For some reason, my mom didn't do a lot of lunch meat, and the only kind of bologna we ever had was lebanon (which I love). I hardly ever got dessert in my lunch, unless it was right after Halloween or Easter (candy) or heading into Christmas (cookies). Even then, my weight was an issue.

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