It was hideous, and never turned up on the menu again.

For my continued sanity.

Disgusting beyond anything else she ever forced us to eat.

My mother just could not cook. My father was quietly thankful when I took over the cooking at age 12

I'll never forget the day they served grape jello with lima beans in it. Thank God I usually brought lunch from home.

creations with crap floating in it should be outlawed.

Those were at the end of the line, I usually took a pudding or a cookie. The food at my school wasn't that bad.

Strawberry jello with banana slices and orange jello with crushed pineapple and shredded carrots were my favorites.

slices of pepperoni.

Half a burger bun, with hamburger and tomato soup mixed in after being browned, and a 1-inch square of American cheese.

(Nowadays called cheese food.)

Oddly enough, I saw the same thing years later at a "taco stand" in small town Kansas. Their "hot sauce" tasted like ketchup, and the cheese was American.

A layer of ground beef swimming in grease, topped by a layer of mashed potatoes.

How yummy!

(NOT!)

It was a a scoop of chili on a bed of fritos with cheddar cheese on top. There might have been lettuce under there too.


And when I say "scoop" i mean that literally - as in "ice-cream scoop". They scooped it out of the pan and plopped it down on the Fritos and it retained its' shape!

It was my favorite day of the week.

No matter how much I thicken it, I cannot duplicate the chili scoop. I'd be eating frito pie every day if I could just figure that out.

Basically it was a few chunks of diced bird meat (allegedly turkey) in a mushroom soup sauce served over egg noodles.

And yeah, it was in Bumfuck Mississippi. What's it to ya?

"Isn't it cool we have constructed a society where we can all have a conversation about what we were fed in an organized institution designed by the gov't. to ensure we had an education? AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!"

Okay, back to your regularly scheduled lunchroom comparison.

Our school cafeteria used to serve breaded fish patties smothered in some kind of thick, creamy tomato sauce. It looked like thickened canned tomato soup.

It was truly disgusting.

a baked half of a hotdog bun topped with cheese served with tomato sause.

It's actually popular there in general. It's a big green salad with steak strips, french fries and gravy on top. I ate a few but it was sheer gutbuster material. And sometimes oddly delicious.

Made with canned prunes and dried milk powder. It was light purple and just plain nasty.

One day some kids dared the class clown to eat all the prune fluff on the trays at a couple of tables. I'm not sure how many servings of prune fluff Walter ate but the tale that went around school was that the janitor found him in the restroom at 6 that night...

to have gone to a one-room schoolhouse (with a woodstove in the middle of the room) when I was young... I would bring tuna sandwiches from home and toast them on the woodstove for lunch... yummy!!

I mean our cafeteria was expensive...like $5/day for lunch (and that didn't include a beverage) but we could order off a menu and the food was good. We were the last class to have a soda machine, they pulled them the following year in favor of bottled-water and juice machines. You were entitled to 1 half-pint skim milk a day for the asking but that didn't come from the cafe, it was from the student commissary down the hall. If you were well-behaved you got to eat at the principal's table in the faculty dining room. (For free, much better-still food) I was never well-behaved, by-design. Who wants to eat lunch with a 70 year old nun who insists on speaking Latin?

Weirdest things we were ever served were ham and havarti grilled cheese, churros and the day we had a multi-disciplinary lesson on the Depression and the cafe "slummed it" by serving mac-n-cheese, meatloaf with mashed potatoes and chili dogs. There was also the tacky once-a-year "Travelin' Taco" special on Cinco de Mayo. (A Travelin' Taco is a bag of Nacho Cheese Doritos with pico de gallo, cheddar cheese, sour cream, seasoned taco meat, guacamole and lettuce.)

took the supplies sent to us by the district and treated them as just that. Supplies.

Mostly we ate balanced home cooking style things.

There was the one day that they accidentally put cinnamon in the cake batter instead of cocoa powder, then in a fit of inspired madness they went ahead and put in the cocoa powder. It became a regional hit for a few years.

Ted Allen hosts it and it is basically a competition where chefs are given unusual and exotic ingredients to cook with.

One show they had lunch ladies on and they were the sweetest, most conscientious chefs, they just wanted to make healthy and tasty food for the kids. It was a very touching and upbeat episode.

Those lunch ladies were awesome.

It was something called "mystery meat," which was actually a sort of lumpy "meat" gravy with the occasional blob of fat, served over mashed potatoes. We always suspected the meat was roadkill.

I moved from Maryland in 7th grade, so when I reconnected on Facebook with friends from those years, I asked them if the remembered it b/c it was an experience I had been unable to share for all these years.

I kid you not.

were based around massive amounts of US Agricultural surplus foods - dried and canned goods, packaged "cheese" product. As odd as some of the presentations were, I have to believe they were better for us than the processed microwaved food many (most) school lunches are based on today. Our schools had actual kitchens.

The cafeteria ladies were not amused.

The problem wasn't so much weird, as badly made.

I was so traumatized by their version of mac-and-cheese that I still can't touch the stuff.

there were signs in the bathrooms "flush twice, it's a long way to the kitchen". We also had a student boycott -- and that was before student boycotts became common-place. We were on Huntley-Brinkley that night.

In order to make it go further, they added canned spinach and prepared oatmeal. Absolutely bizarre.

a hamburger about the size of a silver dollar and cold greasy french fries that might have seen the inside of an oven for thirty seconds.

I'll never forget the milk containers: heavily waxed paper, no built-in spout but a quarter-sized hole punched in the top with a disc of the same waxed paper jammed in as a stopper.

In high school, I never went inside the cafeteria. I liked the fifty-cent burrito I could buy at the snack bar. They still sell that burrito at AM/PM and 7-11. I get one every now and then for nostalgia's sake. Disgusting and delicious.

so the nuns thought that you cleaned your tray and you got dessert

A slice of white bread with cheese food and a hotdog placed diagonally across, folded over (I guess that was the "wink&quot ..the whole thing toasted..so like a grilled cheese with hotdog..In college I had a toaster oven in my dorm room and made those a lot...