School lunches.

Munchies & Crunchies #11-12
(Correcting the digits to offset entry 2.5)

Eh, no pics this time.
You know what this stuff looks like.
If I were a kid today, I could just snap cellphone pics.
In the 80's?
Not so much.


Edna Libby

My elementary school for grades 2-6.

I remember their menu in more detail because I was there for more years.

I don't remember lunches before that.
I think I brown-bagged/lunch-boxed it.
Yeah, I know I did.

Okay, I actually liked and ate all of this.
BUT, I threw up a lot, because I had a nervous stomach, and crowd noises fucked up my head, which makes me think I'm probably on the autism spectrum.
Crowds don't make normal people puke.
I'm glitch-y.
I don't puke anymore, but I value quiet, and small gatherings, and roaring noise still makes me tense up.
I'd never go to a fucking Superbowl, let's put it that way.

Anyhoo...

(*Came with tater-tots)

-Square pizza*
-French bread pizza*
-Steak-umms*
-Salsbury steak
-Veal parmesan
-Foot long hot dogs*
-Soggy hamburgers*
-Shepherd's pie
-Tacos*
-Green turkey on toast with gravy
-Ice cream scoop mashed potatoes with green turkey gravy
-Fruit cocktail
-Canned pears (half of whole fruit)
-Canned peaches (ditto)
-Apple crumble (with optional cheese stick, sometimes there'd be a tiny scoop of vanilla ice cream)
-Mud pie (vanilla cake with chocolate sauce poured on)
-String beans
-Three bean salad
-Mixed veggies (carrot cubes, peas, corn, a couple lima beans)
-Corn
-Peas
-Beets (yes, beets!!)
-Lima beans (goddamned right!)
-Butter beans
-Baked beans
-Milk
-Chocolate milk (once in a blue moon)
-Apples
-Fresh pears
-Fresh peaches
-Oranges


Sweetser

So, since this was a special school, there were WAY less kids, so they could afford real food!
On ceramic plates!
With real silverware!
These are just what I can remember.
There had to have been more.
I was only there for a couple years.

Yeah, always blew me away we were supposed to be crazy and/or "bad", kids, but they gave us real knives.
There was never a problem.
I think the stabby kids were locked up in some secret dungeon we didn't get to see.

Oh, and we also took turns cooking for the whole school!
So they gave us even sharper knives to cut shit up!

So...here's that menu...again...from what I can remember...

-Cheese and broccoli soup
-Vegetable soup
-Beef and vegetable stew
-Steak, mashed potatoes, and string-beans
-Pork chops, mashed potatoes, corn
-Fried chicken, mashed potatoes/tater tots/steak fries, and corn
-Ranch dressing and vegetables (for snacks)
-JIF peanut butter on celery sticks (ditto)
-Hamburgers (baseball cookout)
-Hot dogs (baseball cookout)
-Juice boxes
-Milk (in large washable plastic cups like you'd have at home)
-Orange juice (ditto)
-Apple juice (ditto)
-Cranberry juice (ditto)
-Water (ditto)


Bonny Eagle

By high school, the budget cuts, and suckling up to fast-food corporations was starting to creep in, so nutrition was starting to go to shit.

The kids were given the choice of what they wanted, and they chose shit.
When you're forced to eat what you're given, at least some vitamins make it through.

The theory was, teenagers are little adults ready to make their own decisions.
Aaaahahahahahaaa!!!

So, here's that nothing of a menu...

-Hot lunch was always fuckin' square pizza (supplied by a local chain pizzeria)
-Cold sandwiches on bulky rolls (alternate choice off to the side, no one ever took 'em)
-Chips (plain, barbecue, sour cream)
-Triangular real juice flavor-ice in wax lined cardboard instead of plastic
-Regular and chocolate milk (the white milk just sat there spoiling)
-Experimental bag milk (failed here, took off in Canada)
-Fresh fruit that no one ever ate


The little pricks didn't even eat the pizza half the time.
You could have fed a starving country with what the little assholes threw away.
Disgraceful.

I heard it got worse after I graduated, not just at my high school, but nationwide.
You see the shit on the news of Micky Dees and Pizza Hut putting restaurants right in the fucking schools.
I didn't know how good I had it with the elementary school cooks who gave a shit.
The food wasn't glamorous, or succulent, but at least we were getting balanced nutrition.
Bad nutrition makes you stupid, and stupid people vote Republican, and that's what the corporate masters want.
You don't need a tinfoil hat on, you can see it in the shrinking test scores, and the disintegration of democracy that rides right alongside it.

And you saw it in how Michelle Obama tried to fight it, and how the redneck yahoos screamed their fatso guts out in indignation.
"How DARE you force nutrition on our children?....like they did in the 80's".

Course, Reagan got the ball rolling on fucking with that with his "ketchup is a vegetable", shit.

Plus, I remember nutrition public service ads on TV, and nutrition lectures at assembly in elementary school.
By high school, that shit had largely been beaten and terrorized into fucking silence.

Now?
Fast-food has total domination.
You don't get nutrition advice until you go diabetic.

Just writing these lists out made me see the pattern.
It's fucking depressing.

You should see the school lunches in France.
Literal gourmet meals.
Plates and silverware like Sweetser.

America is a third-world joke.
And the corporate boot-lickers think that's just right and proper.

"Mike, why can't you just have nostalgia without it going dark?".

Because I'm just that kinda guy.
It's how I'm wired.


Previously-

Playing with your food: Ipso! (MC #10)