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

[adventurat.livejournal.com]

In elementary school, I went home for lunch every day except every other Friday, we had Hot Dog Day, when I got a hotdog. The choice was "with mustard" or "without mustard".

I dislike hotdogs, now.

In high school I either took my lunch or (when I had money from babysitting) bought cafeteria food. It was garbage, of course. That's where I learned my dislike of gravy on french fries.

[thru-the-blinds.livejournal.com]

I've always loved tuna and my mom had no issue with brown bagging it for me. I quickly learned, however, that the lingering aroma in my locker wasn't worth it, which is the same reason I won't take it to work with me. Nothing like smelling fish in the office for days on end! LOL

On another note: my mother grew up loving Braunschweiger on bread and at least once a month she'd send my brother and me to school with the same. UGH. I can *still* smell that stuff in my minds-eye and I'm turning green even while typing this. I was happy to go hungry when I found that stuff in my lunch box!

[pwcorgigirl.livejournal.com]

Thankfully there wasn't an entree I couldn't bear to eat in elementary school, but the frequent appearance of turnip greens as a side dish was BLECH! Almost no one ate them because cooking them stank up the cafeteria for hours beforehand. The pizza we got was rather weird, kind of like a Bisquik hamburger pie instead of having a yeasty crust, but it was edible. The hamburgers were actually soy burgers, but put enough ketchup on anything and children will eat it. :D

One thing I loved about elementary school lunch was the desserts: a slice of cake or a big cookie every day. We rarely got desserts at home, so that was a major treat.

I usually brought my lunch in high school, as the food wasn't that good and the lines were so long that we had to bolt it down once we got our trays.

[ang5fam.livejournal.com]

There was no item on our elementary school menu that was bad~ the lunches were .40 per day, all homemade and wonderful. Fried chicken, rice with homemade yellow gravy, scratch yeast rolls and giant cinnamon rolls that we could smell baking while walking down the hill to school.
Once we got to high school, it all changed and we were in shock.
Some days, I would walk home for lunch since it was only up the hill just to get a break.

[chocolate-frapp.livejournal.com]

the school lunches where i went to school were disgusting. I always brown bagged it and felt sorry for the kids who didn't.

[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.