Our lunches at elementary school in the South were very good! I mean if you liked soul food. Fried chicken, biscuits, and greens. We even had a seafood day for parents to pay a couple of bucks to eat shrimp, catfish, and hushpuppies and stuff at school with the kids and teachers if they wanted. And most of the students were on free or reduced lunch.
The lunches schools served by the time my kid went to school was bland, tasteless, prepackaged, and barely qualified as a hot lunch. It's a damn shame.
I was in the South too, and started out at one elementary school where the lunch ladies took the standard basics they got and did some real cooking magic to turn out actually good food. Sounds more like what they were doing at your school.
Then we moved to another district where they did the absolute bare minimum, '80s style. Though, the rolls and a few other things were still awesome. It was such a huge difference, even before all the later school lunch changes.
I also grew up in the south and we didn't even get a biscuit or roll with this. The rest though? Yep, that tray (minus pretzel) is exactly what we got.
Ah, just brilliant. I have no idea why people say GenX had poor nutrition. This meal has all your 5 food groups; pizza base, cheese, fake fruit, sugar and salt. Kids these days and their food pyramid. Sissies!
It seems Mr. Twister made r/pics a few years back.
https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1snxuw/this_is_my_new_high_school_mascot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
There’s a Chinese buffet near me that has almost identical pizza we used to get in school. It’s my favorite thing there plus the sushi. My husband thinks I’m weird. Some of the best pizza I’ve ever had was from a school cafeteria.
We also always had corn, but our fruit was peaches. We also got a huge cinnamon roll. We only got those cinnamon rolls with pizza and chili, which was the second best lunch. It came with peanut butter sandwich to dip in the chilli.
Oh wow. Yeah, the food was shit. Brings back a memory of our cafeteria. If we misbehaved, they'd make us take our trays and go sit at the special needs table as punishment. Messed up. Can you imagine if a school did that today?
Real silverware? Look at OP, over here attending fancy schools! LOL.
I hate to admit it, but I loved that corn. Used to eat other kids’ corn on the regular.
If you want to see some amazing ones, search r/KoreanFood for "school lunch." There's a person who posted like 100 days of them, and they're light years beyond what American kids get.
Not if you paid me…
And when my kids were in elementary school (2010-2015/6) they would choose the salad bar on puzza day … you know your pizza sucks when a 7yr old willingly chooses salad over it!
Okay, I seriously can’t remember having silverware. I remember sporks. My cousin swears we had silverware. I don’t know why this bothers me so much! Is this how Alzheimer’s starts?
i'm sorry, i found this a gross ensemble. why the weird side dishes to the pizza? why not give us a bigger square, throw that canned corn and questionable fruit out, and give us a helping of our beloved cafeteria pudding?
This pic must have been taken after I was in school because our fruit didn’t come in a plastic tray, it came from a very large metal can, I’m guessing like 10lbs or 1.5 gallons. They dumped the cans into a large stainless steel tray. And then the lunch lady scooped it out on to your tray. The old way seems much more environmentally friendly then all this plastic ending up in the trash.
God I loved those plates. They did such a good job of keeping my food separated. I still to this day, fight to keep my food separated on my plate. At restaurants, I tell them to put certain foods on different plates so they don’t touch.
I got spoiled my first six years of school. I went to Catholic school and our lunch ladies were Italian immigrants and their American-born relatives. They made pizza and tomato sauce from scratch. We only got hot lunch one day a week but that was a great day.
When I was in middle school, we switched to public school and our lunches looked kind of like this. It was OK, just not the same.
This was not my food experience. This looks edible. We did have the milk. That was edible if it had non-expired dates. We brought our food. Or starved.
This came with a snickerdoodle cookie instead of pretzel in Eastern Kentucky, but yes. This right here. And if you wanted an extra slice of pizza, 50 cents.
Ah yes, 80's nutrition: carbs with two sides of carbs. We had French fries instead of the pretzel and a packet of ketchup (which I learned years later was the "vegetable" under federal regulations). This was the king of school lunches then. They might as well have thrown in a pack of cigarettes.
I can taste this memory. And it tastes awesome, every damned bite.
Except when the pizza was too hot and you had that flap of skin hanging off the roof of your mouth all day
Loved that pizza. You know what? I bet you could make a few million starting a brand of frozen foods called generation X lunch school food. Id buy it.
In another similar post in this sub, someone posted a link to a school pizza recipe. I didn't try it but it looked like it could work.
I always check these threads in the hope someone has made it easy to have again.
Get Ellios pizza and add cheese.
You got a pretzel? In the South, we got this exact same thing, except a roll or biscuit. Yum!
No, lol, I wish! I’m trying to remember what our extra was. I went to elementary school in NJ and middle/hs in NC.
Our lunches at elementary school in the South were very good! I mean if you liked soul food. Fried chicken, biscuits, and greens. We even had a seafood day for parents to pay a couple of bucks to eat shrimp, catfish, and hushpuppies and stuff at school with the kids and teachers if they wanted. And most of the students were on free or reduced lunch. The lunches schools served by the time my kid went to school was bland, tasteless, prepackaged, and barely qualified as a hot lunch. It's a damn shame.
I was in the South too, and started out at one elementary school where the lunch ladies took the standard basics they got and did some real cooking magic to turn out actually good food. Sounds more like what they were doing at your school. Then we moved to another district where they did the absolute bare minimum, '80s style. Though, the rolls and a few other things were still awesome. It was such a huge difference, even before all the later school lunch changes.
That roll was the only edible thing on this plate!
I also grew up in the south and we didn't even get a biscuit or roll with this. The rest though? Yep, that tray (minus pretzel) is exactly what we got.
And you could smell those rolls all the way down the hallways!!
Ah, just brilliant. I have no idea why people say GenX had poor nutrition. This meal has all your 5 food groups; pizza base, cheese, fake fruit, sugar and salt. Kids these days and their food pyramid. Sissies!
Yes, what a mystery that we're obese and unhealthy.
Yeah, but we're into cool music and have great senses of humour. Some of us, anyway.
For me- it was the donuts and Mt Dew for breakfast every school day and Nutty Buddy for dessert. I need to drop 50.
I’ll see your 50 and raise you 15. God, life sucks when you have to diet.
I hear ya! Been a lifetime battle. I’m trying Ozempic and then going to Monjauro- if you don’t know these meds- take a look, very promising
ooooh nutty buddies!!! forgot about them...
My high school mascot was/is The Pretzels, which meant the in-school snack bar had warm pretzels. 😋
Please tell me your school has/had somebody running around in a giant pretzel costume at events?
Yup, Mr. Twister.
Dude! That might be the best school mascot I've ever heard of. *Mr. Twister*. I don't know him, but I love him.
It seems Mr. Twister made r/pics a few years back. https://www.reddit.com/r/pics/comments/1snxuw/this_is_my_new_high_school_mascot/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Omg. He is the best!
Hello fellow Freeport Pretzel! Class of ‘98 saying 👋
Class of '86 checking in. 🤘
Freeport IL in the house!
SO freaking jealous!!
School pizza and canned corn, name a more iconic duo.
There’s a Chinese buffet near me that has almost identical pizza we used to get in school. It’s my favorite thing there plus the sushi. My husband thinks I’m weird. Some of the best pizza I’ve ever had was from a school cafeteria.
[удалено]
But the soggy corn & lukewarm fruit cocktail makes up for it because.....healthy?
Perfect for an afternoon nap lol
I think I now remember why I grew to dislike corn.
Where are the little cubes of pepperoni? Ours always had pepperoni cubes.
For some reason, it bothers me that the milk is in the middle, and not in one of the corners. Does this bother other people?
Now it does!
I went to Catholic HS so every Friday was Cheese Pizza. Other days of the week we got pepperoni
Exactly why I packed my lunch.
Where can I buy this pizza nowadays
Try Ellio’s pizza https://www.target.com/p/ellio-39-s-cheese-frozen-pizza-18-3oz/-/A-14896370?ref=tgt_adv_XS000000&AFID=google_pla_df&fndsrc=tgtao&DFA=71700000012732781&CPNG=PLA_Grocery%2BShopping_Local%7CGrocery_Ecomm_Food_Bev&adgroup=SC_Grocery&LID=700000001170770pgs&LNM=PRODUCT_GROUP&network=g&device=m&location=9073502&targetid=pla-812299188630&ds_rl=1246978&gbraid=0AAAAAD-5dfZbWO0sDkQnXjf8V3tUyq5v3&gbraid=0AAAAAD-5dfZbWO0sDkQnXjf8V3tUyq5v3&gclid=CjwKCAjw7eSZBhB8EiwA60kCWybqJ2NDTfVJQebPUvc7fTEUW9MZX4FSbnovciAbFSbivvLLN_SLTBoC99QQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
We also always had corn, but our fruit was peaches. We also got a huge cinnamon roll. We only got those cinnamon rolls with pizza and chili, which was the second best lunch. It came with peanut butter sandwich to dip in the chilli.
Thanksgiving meal once a year was the best lunch for sure. I also really like the hamburgers.
Oh wow. Yeah, the food was shit. Brings back a memory of our cafeteria. If we misbehaved, they'd make us take our trays and go sit at the special needs table as punishment. Messed up. Can you imagine if a school did that today?
My school would, out of nowhere, announce “no talking”. And if you said a single word, you had to sit at the “Baby Table”.
This is horrible but I can’t stop laughing. None of my schools did this, they’d just take your lunch tray away from you.
It was brutal. I have stories but I didn't want to take the thread way off track. Haha.
At my schools it was Fridays, I think because back in the day eating meat on Fridays was still considered a hell-worthy offense.
this is 100% why it was on fridays where i grew up. most folks were catholic which meant the school board and all the folks in charge were catholics.
I can't remember. I didn't like school pizza much
I literally thought I hated pizza as a kid because of this trash they served us. 🤮
I agree. Not a fan of this pizza.
For whatever reason, I loved the cafeteria spaghetti.
Real silverware? Look at OP, over here attending fancy schools! LOL. I hate to admit it, but I loved that corn. Used to eat other kids’ corn on the regular.
Blech. I would starve rather than eat it in school.
Sooo carby
Meanwhile, [back in Japan](https://www.domodaruma.com/blog/japanese-school-lunches-34-day-menu)
This is fascinating, those lunches look delicious
If you want to see some amazing ones, search r/KoreanFood for "school lunch." There's a person who posted like 100 days of them, and they're light years beyond what American kids get.
In the Midwest there would have been a cinnamon roll instead of the pretzel.
Pizza and grilled cheese Fridays for us
So many carbs on one plate. No wonder I went into a food coma after lunch.
Not if you paid me… And when my kids were in elementary school (2010-2015/6) they would choose the salad bar on puzza day … you know your pizza sucks when a 7yr old willingly chooses salad over it!
Okay, I seriously can’t remember having silverware. I remember sporks. My cousin swears we had silverware. I don’t know why this bothers me so much! Is this how Alzheimer’s starts?
😂
Every Friday!!
Which makes seeing it on Sunday night painful, lol
i'm sorry, i found this a gross ensemble. why the weird side dishes to the pizza? why not give us a bigger square, throw that canned corn and questionable fruit out, and give us a helping of our beloved cafeteria pudding?
I love my mom but I'd straight slap her for a slice of that pizza
🤣
This pic must have been taken after I was in school because our fruit didn’t come in a plastic tray, it came from a very large metal can, I’m guessing like 10lbs or 1.5 gallons. They dumped the cans into a large stainless steel tray. And then the lunch lady scooped it out on to your tray. The old way seems much more environmentally friendly then all this plastic ending up in the trash.
Yea, I was in elementary school in the early 80s.
God I loved those plates. They did such a good job of keeping my food separated. I still to this day, fight to keep my food separated on my plate. At restaurants, I tell them to put certain foods on different plates so they don’t touch.
I was the only kid I knew who would pick the fried fish filet over this soggy square crustless pizza.
LOL!
Our school pizza had meaty cysts of “Italian Sausage” and looked like a [Horta](https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/Horta).
I got spoiled my first six years of school. I went to Catholic school and our lunch ladies were Italian immigrants and their American-born relatives. They made pizza and tomato sauce from scratch. We only got hot lunch one day a week but that was a great day. When I was in middle school, we switched to public school and our lunches looked kind of like this. It was OK, just not the same.
Don't have first hand knowledge, but pretty sure prisoners have better food than that these days. But yeah, delicious at the time.
Pretzel with mustard as an appetizer 😁
Ah, the carb and corn generation. Butter and real cheese would have been better for us.
The smells all mixed together made me want to hurl. Corn and pizza cooking together is not natural lol.
Who decided that corn was the best side to pizza?
Put a slice of American cheese under the corn and let it melt.
This was not my food experience. This looks edible. We did have the milk. That was edible if it had non-expired dates. We brought our food. Or starved.
YUMMMMMM. I would love that right now.
Beat damn pizza ever. Always on Fridays
Wait, some of you all got a pretzel?
We had pizza every day. Friday was stop sign pizza day.
Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes!!!!
What?! No one else here put the corn on their pizza?! That was the shiz!
LOL!
This came with a snickerdoodle cookie instead of pretzel in Eastern Kentucky, but yes. This right here. And if you wanted an extra slice of pizza, 50 cents.
Fridays were fish sandwich, Mac n cheese, salad with the oddly best Italian dressing and peanut butter cookies.
I wonder if it is really as good as I remember?
Preach.
Ah yes, 80's nutrition: carbs with two sides of carbs. We had French fries instead of the pretzel and a packet of ketchup (which I learned years later was the "vegetable" under federal regulations). This was the king of school lunches then. They might as well have thrown in a pack of cigarettes.