Have school lunches always been this appalling?

I just got my stepdaughter's February breakfast and lunch menu. (She lives with her mom during the week so it's up to her whether she buys or brings lunch.)

Here's a week:

Hamburger, bun, tater tots, American cheese, apple wedges
Corn dog, peas, "physedibles" (???), orange wedges
Popcorn chicken, french fries, peaches, dinner roll
Sloppy joe, bun, tator tots (yes, this one is spelled differently), grapes
Chicken nuggets, green beans, brownie, banana half

And here's breakfast the same week:
Poptart (choice of strawberry or blueberry)
Ham & Cheese muffin
Cinnamon breakfast square
French toast sticks
Cin....sational! (sic) Roll

Juice is served with breakfast, and milk is served with all meals.
This menu helpfully states it's "black history month" in a prominent font, but there is nothing on the menu that suggests celebration of same (which I suppose isn't necessarily a bad thing, given what this lunch program offers normally).

For the entire month of February, there are two meals that can remotely be described as exotic (if you're my grandma, circa 1952, and just discovered canned chop suey) (Chicken Teriyaki, chicken tacos), and one pasta dish repeated twice (mac & cheese). Pizza shows up twice (in addition to the monthly pizza hut fundraiser), and something breaded and presumably fried shows up 7 times. There is not a single salad, or vegetable beyond peas, green beans, carrots, and corn. Beans other than green beans are not on the menu in any form. On days where french fries, tater tots or "tri-tators" are served, there is no vegetable. The fruit variety is a bit better.

My elementary school didn't have a lunch program, so I have no means to compare--but when I was in high school there were a variety of choices, good and bad. Hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza and fries were always available, but we also had a salad bar, sandwich line (where I remember getting a turkey/swiss pita with "all the vegetables, please"), and regular school-lunch-type entree/starch/veggie/fruit/milk (which I remember being sub-par, taste-wise, but there was variety and "tater tots" and french fries were not considered vegetables.)

I understand school lunch programs are woefully underfunded, but what exactly are we teaching our kids by feeding them a steady diet of the same crap that shows up the Applebees children's menus? No wonder we can't get her to eat anything here. She's apparently stopped recognizing food as food.

(And don't get me started on the Scholastic booklet she threw at us last night...8 pages of movie-tie ins, Disney princesses, and stickers.)

Thank God they would rarely appear on our lunch menus-I went to parochial school back in the 1970's, and we had fish every Friday...

Tater Tots? Are they those greasy balls of potatoes?

They're not necessarily greasy if you bake them, but they are if you fry them.

There is nothing with fish on the menu at all (not even fish sticks/nuggets--:puke:-- or tuna salad).

but we never got them in school lunches. Corn dogs were carnival food. In fact, we never got anything deep fried, and this was in the south!

We got the hamburgers on the white bread buns, but only with the usual condiments, no cheese. I remember "fries," but they were roasted, not deep fried. A favorite was "chicken and rice," which must've been made like Depression chicken soup in the old cartoons, the chicken being dragged through a little hot water and then the water thickened to form a gravy to be poured over the rice. It actually was one of their better offerings.

Pizza was in a square hotel pan, tomato sauce and yellow cheese, nothing else.

The junkiest stuff in the caf was a freezer with ice cream bars, but we didn't get those until high school.

"Mexican Hats"

Thank goodness, the dreaded corndog rarely made it onto our cafeteria platters-however, about once a month we would all get, what we kids called, "Mexican Hats".

This consisted of a thin piece of baloney with a scoop of mashed potatoes on it, with a piece of cheese melted over the scoop of mashed potatoes.

Anyone else ever have these in school for lunch?

I went to a Catholic grade school and, I have to say, the lunches were usually pretty good and nutritious, minus the corndogs. We *never* had French Fries or hamburgers.

I forgot about the Mexican Hats, though.

That sounds utterly disgusting.

But I would eat the potatoes with the melted cheese! Hot, steamy baloney is pretty gross. That is why they are called cold cuts.

I will have to look for the soy corndogs-maybe I would like them if I gave them a second chance.

is tasty (caramelized onions, toasted thick bread..)

I hear ya though...limp, hot baloney is NOT something to dwell upon

elementary school since the 60s

I remember we had an occasional hot dog day (early 80s), but that was about it.

School Breakfast And Lunch Program. My wife works at a homeless/runaway shelter for kids and you won't believe the paperwork to get the USDA reimbursement money. You have meet their requirements-which are geared to sugar over fat calories-i.e. it's better to give the kid 400 calories from sugar than 200 calories from protein and fat. Unless you use one of their preapproved standardized menus you have to submit each recipe and meal plan for "nutritional" analysis and approval. You can't give them certain items more than 3 times a week, you have to measure each serving with a 4-oz. Spoodle. They figure a 1/2 cup each of milk and juice is enough-and that milk is supposed to both go on your cereal and be a drink too. This crap is her biggest headache. And each meal and serving has to be documented or else. Since idiot son took over the requirements have gotten stricter and more and more regulations piled on. Once she was written up for using an outdated form-the only difference between the old and the new was an additional check-off box that didn't even apply to her facility in the first place. The $685 approved software package that you were supposed to use was the most user-unfriendly POS I've ever worked with. I ended up using a $20 Mastercook and my WordPerfect to generate all the forms they wanted. The recipe printouts had to be laid out in the way they wanted, not like every other recipe you see. Any recipe you ever see has the ingredients on top, the instructions underneath and the nutritional info on the bottom. The USDA way was to landscape the paper, put the ingredients on the top left side, the instructions on the right side and the nutritional info all the way across the bottom.

I was responsible for tracking all the data for the reimbursements and doing the filings. The coated foods were oven-ready and were never fried in our cafeterias. The food that was offered was pretty bad regardless.

Small, rural town. About 50-60 kids per grade. My Grandma was head cook for her last several years there. I used to go in early just so I could stop in the kitchen and see her. It was coincidently about the time the rolls would start coming out of the oven. Made from scratch, every day. All the food was like that, tasted good and was good for us. Main dish, roll, vegie, and 'desert' or fruit and milk (friday was chocolate milk day!). My favorite (and almost everyone else's) was Chili and Cinnamon Roll day.

Then several years ago, the USDA made the guidelines much stricter... less fat, sugar. Food prices rose, but the budget didn't increase... by the time my kids were going to the same school, it had become bland and mostly prepackaged. The swill they are serving now is far worse than that... I don't let my kids eat that crap.

I remember them being good and also cooked by the lunch staff. They made a chocolate chip cake that was light as air and I haven't seen anything like it since. Then somewhere along the way, someone decided the meals must be uniform across the county. That's when it went downhill. They weren't free to cook homestyle meals. But we never had corn dogs or tacos or Chinese food. I remember fish portions, hamburgers, and casserole things.

My kids like school lunch, but yes, it is pretty appalling.

Coffee-type-cake with a crumbly topping. I really need to E-mail Gram and get the those recipes. :)

back in 1964 to work in the school cafeteria. Grades 1-12 were all served by the cafeteria and most of the meals were made from scratch. They had to order ingredients in advance and as a result, the lettuce that was shipped at the beginning of the month had grown slimy by the end of the month. I was not allowed to throw it out, but had to strip off layer after layer of rotten lettuce until I eventually found some edible portion near the core. The meals were very repetitive, but instead of pizza and tater tots, we had beans and cornbread, meatloaf and mashed potatoes, franks and beans, beef or chicken stew, Salisbury steak, and mac and cheese with 'fresh' salad or cole slaw, cabbage sometimes appeared as a vegetable, but the veggies usually came from giant cans of green beans, corn, or peas and diced carrots. About once a quarter, we had hamburgers and maybe once or twice a year, fried chicken (home made). I worked an hour before school started prepping veggies (peeling real potatoes, for instance, or cutting up celery, onions and carrots for stew, and then a couple of hours after school picking over the beans for the next day and putting them on to soak, stripping the yucky lettuce leaves off, but mostly washing the big pots and sweeping and mopping the cafeteria floor. We had our choice of plain or chocolate milk for 2-1/2 cents per cup. Fruit was a lot more scarce, but we did have applesauce and peaches from cans. Sometimes the local farmers (my grandfather included) would donate apples, pears, plums, or whatever was a good crop when school was in session. Another big treat was when the lunch ladies made yeast rolls for lunch. No matter what else was served that day, everyone lined up to have one! What smells more heavenly than freshly baked bread? I'm so sorry your little girl is relegated to fast food lunches. No wonder there are so many lunch room lady jokes these days. No one cooks! That's a scandal. P.S. My Neighborhood Youth Corps job paid $1.25/hour. I brought home more working part time at school for minimum wage than my both parents did working full time (Mom $5 for a 12 hr. shift cooking at a diner & dad working on commission selling orange 'drink' from door to door-approximately $12/week). Lyndon Johnson and his War on Poverty is just ONE of the reasons I am and will always will be a Democrat.

Edit for clarity

We never had hamburgers or hot dogs. As Warpy says, corn dogs were unheard of carnival food of later years. We had what was considered nutritious food back then. It wasn't really nutritious by today's standards but it was homemade, all cooked on site by the lunch ladies. My mom and my best friend's mom were two of them in elementary school. And parochial school it was so fried perch on Fridays, which I absolutely loved. I can't remember ever having anything I didn't like.

High school was public but pretty much the same. Except that every Wednesday was Pizza Day. The lunch ladies made those, too, and they were awesome! Everyone came to the cafeteria on Wednesday.

I can't ever remember having ala carte choices at any point in school like they do now. And, of course, there were no Taco Bell and Pizza Hut counters in our cafeterias like there have been around here in the recent past, and may still be. I think that was to keep the kids from sneaking off campus at lunch time, not sure. Never had breakfast served, either. That was something you ate at home before getting on the bus.

I graduated high school in 1976.

my grandparents were in charge of the food at home and they were Irish immigrants whose idea of culinary cuisine was-boil the root vegetables, boil the meat until it fell apart, then then boil some potatoes to go with it.

Frankly, I prefered that over corndogs. I have a memory of a girl smearing ketchup all over a corndog and munching down on it. Disgusting! Corndogs were considered a big treat, however!

I graduated from gradeschool in 1979.

at the state fair and that was when I was a teenager, maybe in my 20's. Then in the last decade, they were all over the grocery stores. We eat the Morning Star Farms Corn Dogs (soy) and they are really pretty good. Can't tell the difference from the real thing. I do like corn dogs but only with lots of mustard.

I only remember corn dogs from the county fair. They were greasy and delicious (as a kid!)

...at least since the long-ago days in the 1960s when I first encountered them. Prior to that I'd been to parochial schools that had government-subsidized milk handouts but no on-site meals, you went home for lunch or bagged it.

My mother was delighted when we moved to a district where school lunches were provided, because she didn't have to pack lunches anymore. I, on the other hand, nearly starved until I figured out what would survive in my locker and brought crackers, chips, cookies and other edibles and stashed them. Eventually I made my own lunches; by the time I was in high school I was sneaking off-campus every day to eat elsewhere.

Mystery meats, pasta and sugary tomato sauce, tater tots and tri-taters, mashed potatoes made from gypsum powder and salt, canned pseudo-vegetables gray and watery, pudding comprised of wallpaper paste, sugar, and food coloring, canned peaches swimming in heavy syrup, orange plastic cheese glopped on everything... these and other horrors have all been around for fifty years and more.

Why?

Simple. Look at the relationship between the big agribusiness corporations responsible for industrially-produced foodlike substances, and the US government. That's the deal they cut. The corporations wouldn't oppose well-intentioned efforts to provide school kids with a decent meal or two every day, as long as the actual calories shoveled onto the trays came from their machines, purchased in huge bulk by local school districts and catering contractors at highly inflated prices artificially "discounted" to look low, based on government subsidies. A nice racket for the corporations, the well-intentioned politicos who could say they were feeding kids who might otherwise go hungry, and the schools which no longer had to maintain individual catering operations. No one suffered but the kids shoveling in the corn, soy, and high-fructose corn syrup in escalatingly repulsive guises every day.

The moral: Teach your kids to appreciate actual food, and to detect and reject industrially-produced foodlike substances, and PACK THEIR LUNCHES.

Their future health, weight, well-being, and wholesome lifestyle depends on it.

reminiscently,
Bright

And yet people wonder why children are growing obese and they had to rename adult on-set diabetes to Type II.

I can't pack her lunch for her (she lives with her mom during the school week)...we probably would, at least most of the time, if she went to school with us. I downloaded a recent menu for our local school district (we're in nearby cities) and it's marginally better--a bit more variety, more whole grains, baked and mashed potatoes...salad, celery, cucumber and dip, "Wisconsin blend vegetables," beans and rice--but there's still dog/nugget/pizza way too often (as well as uncrustables and hot pockets :scared:).

...in her life, making an effort. What scares me are the ones for whom not only is it their only meal of the day, but they have no one around who understands how bad it is.

When my best friend's kids were in school, it helped a lot to spend time with them exploring the economics and the whole culture of advertising, 'de-bunking' it, if you will. Getting the kids to do the legwork as a sort of scavenger hunt-- "Who benefits from getting people to believe advertisements? How true are advertisements, really? How can you tell if an advertisement is true or not?" Starting with some really obvious examples and real-life experiments ("sea monkeys" was a great one...)

By the time they were in Junior High they were cynical little buggers but they were also smart and quick to see through the crap being thrown at them. They could see through (up to a point) the various "buy this to be cool!" and other obvious ploys. Giving them the idea that it was subversive to 'find out for themselves' was also a successful strategy, they started reading stuff like Fast Food Nation on their own and became really obnoxious about mom and dad's eating habits! But annoying as it was, it was better than having them scarfing down crap...

Still, there's only so far you can go with that. Good luck...

hopefully,
Bright

It took her 75 cents (from her own coin purse) to realize the machine was rigged. "It'll never work!"

To be fair...I know her mom cares about the crap, too, but her mom is also overworked, underpaid, and doesn't have the time or money to pack lunches that the extremely (and variably) picky five-year-old won't eat. There are two of us here, and we have the luxury of weekend custody, which means we can prepare proper meals and deal more easily with the consequences if she refuses to eat. (We offer the choice of: eat what's offered, or go to the kitchen and get fruit/yogurt/bread/leftovers/etc., but we're only cooking once.)

from what I remember. I wasn't allowed to eat breakfast there because it was just sugar though I was allowed chocolate milk (parents had to give permission). Lunch choices were grilled cheese, hot dogs, hamburgers, fried fish stuff, pizza, fries, tater tots, nasty canned veggies, canned fruit (fruit cocktail was the worst).

I think if I didn't like to cook I'd be eating crappy food (and had parents who cooked real food for us). Sort of amazing that I didn't turn out getting fast food all the time.

ETA I graduated from HS in 1992.

...where the school has its own garden tended by students, and local chefs are recruited to cook lunches for the kids. I think it is in the third year now, and widely praised. Kids begin to feel a real ownership for the food, and are willing to try everything.

or one of the chains. But yeah, that looks like most of the school lunch menus my kids had.

I had a great school lunch in high school too. You could either have the basic lunch, or burger/fries, or a salad. I don't remember a sandwich option. Not the best, but there was the option for something healthier. That was back in 1974.

And pop tarts, cold ceal and doughnuts for breakfast - I never did understand that and that's been the breakfast menu from the beginnng.

Check and see if they have a Farm to Cafeteria project in your district, maybe that would help.

http://www.nffc.net/issues/fnf/fnf_12.html

I'm also rather astonished that anything so utterly practical and SENSIBLE is actually being put into action. That rocks!

ones that my children were offered in school. When I went to school, most of the meals were cooked from scratch and most were pretty good. Things had changed a lot when my kids went to school in the 70's, 80's.

I was a horrible kid, would use the money to buy cigarettes instead.

Only days I would eat was when they served chili dogs. Everything else was gross. The pizza was always soggy.

:hippie:

because one of my friends found a greasy spoon diner that would serve us beer in the back booth in paper cups with straws.

We used to get tanked on empty stomachs a couple of times a week.

Our school lunches were prepared by the "lunch ladies." Usually it was a sandwich, canned or fresh fruit, milk and dessert which consisted of maybe cookies (2 or 3 cookies) or ice cream. The ice cream came in these blocks that were the size and thickness of maybe a half of a VHS tape and they were wrapped in cardboard. And we got milk. Once or twice a week we would have a hot lunch which was usually macaroni and cheese or some kind of pasta and sauce with a little side salad. Our school had absolutely no vending machines. If you got thirsty, you drank water from the fountain. We could buy candy during our lunch break. It was penny candy or sometimes it cost 5 or 10 cents and things like licorice, taffy, Mary Janes and other things I rarely see any more.

Damn, I guess I'm old!:wow: I am going to turn 50 in March. But I'll tell you what. I wouldn't want to be a kid in this day and age.

exactly like mine, except we always had a hot lunch and there was no candy to buy that I can recall. I'll be 50 this August. :hi:

Only one serving of green beans the whole week - and not a salad in sight. That's a depressing week of meals. Pop tarts for breakfast? That's a sin.

last weekend when DH and I were at the grocery and saw a nice little display of whole grain pop tarts. These people will try anything!

including Bento porn...I am just to effing lazy most of the time...this stuff has to take major work and planning

see for yourself...I want a box, and I want more energy:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/mrbento/
http://www.c4vct.com/kym/bento/recipes.htm
http://www.cookingcute.com/recipes.htm
http://www.kitchencow.com/
http://www.flickr.com/groups/71213028@N00/
http://www.airandangels.com/bentobox/gallery.html


See how fascinated I am...I could have provided dozens upon dozens more

I think most kids will eat things if it is served up in an appealing manner. These are delightful! Hell, grown ups too!