Sloppy Joe day was the best. Followed closely by hamburger day and pizza day. The square pizza was a crowd pleaser for sure. But sloppy joes won hands down.

Early 1960"s in jr. high school my favorite was the friday "fish sticks" with homemade in house TARTER SAUCE. ............. drill sgt.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: drill sgt,

quote:

Originally posted by sig226fan:
Sloppy Joe day was the best. Followed closely by hamburger day and pizza day. The square pizza was a crowd pleaser for sure. But sloppy joes won hands down.

I wonder if my school even had sloppy joes. I always just went for pizza day since I could only do one day.

Now that I am thinking about it, I don’t remember ever bringing lunch to middle school. I remember buying a chocolate milk and the chocolate peanut butter wafers in a package as a lunch or a honey bun. What kind of lunch is that? LOL. In high school I got out at noon so I ate at home.

quote:

Originally posted by parabellum:
The pizza. Sausage pizza with a thick crust, served to us in rectangular slices.

That was some shit, but why was it good? Ish?

Grade K-4 Catholic school. Lunch ladies were great cooks. But the Sloppy Joe sammichs, pizza, and goulash were tops. Tater tots, green beans, mac-n-cheese were the sides.

Private school grades 5-8 no cafeteria, sack Lunch, no refrigeration. PB&J and water. Warm water, and did I say how much I HATE PB&J? I hate them.

Public High School, most of the time rolls with butter ( they actually made them fresh every day) ( they were awesome), and lemon aid. But sometimes Sloppy Joe sammichs, cheese burger and they weren't bad. Pizza, pre-made frozen, but they were edible.


ARman

Were there any school lunches I remember? no, thank goodness.

Nothing memorable. It was like the chuck wagon on the movie City Slickers "The food's hot, brown, and plenty of it."

It was a red letter day when the pizza first rolled in. I think I was in 4th grade. I also think every kid I ever talked to from anywhere else had the same rectangular sausage pizza at their school as we did.

We knew it probably wasn't the greatest, but damn was it ever a hit!

In alimentary school, when Mom made the lunches, a variety of sandwiches. PBJ, egg salad, tuna fish, pimento cheese, deviled ham, those were the usuals. On the side, a fruit and desert. Dessert was usually the canned pop-top pudding or a mini candy bar. Trades were common but one best not let that be known at home.

After Mom got a job then we bought lunches from the school cafeteria. The school issued a monthly ration card that was punched each day. The weekly menu featured enchiladas on Wednesdays, fish sticks on Fridays, chicken fried steak on Tuesdays (?), Salisbury steaks, and GOKW whenever.

The vegetables were canned and heated on the steam table. Carrots, corn, green beans, lima beans, mixed vegetables, mashed potatoes. The brown gravy was pure salt. Not the best but not the worst.

Dessert was a cobbler, pie, cake, or pudding. The lunch was served on a paper tv-dinner style tray.

Thanksgiving lunch was highly anticipated.

Strangely, I sometimes feel maudlin for the enchiladas and fish sticks. Maybe an incipient dementia is manifesting.

I remember a kid, I think that his name was Danny. He'd point at his groin and say 'enchi my lada'...


That was at the Northwood Alimentary School in San Antonio.

I remember the rectangular pizza. Always on a Friday.

There was also this thing called turkey-on-a-stick.
It was some pressed turkey meat concoction shaped into a sort of drumstick shape with a wooden dowel in the center.

Then there were the soft pretzels. 10 cents each or 3 for a quarter.

1964-5 at MacArthur H.S., in San Antonio; cheese enchiladas every Tuesday or Wednesday (I forget which). That was the only day of the week I'd eat in the cafeteria.

In elementary school, it was the same sandwich for years- a thin slice of packaged ham on white bread with lots of mayo and black pepper, plus a box of raisins. To this day, I will not eat raisins, but I still love ham, albeit a much better quality ham. Like others, I had one day per week in the cafeteria which was unmemorable, but in middle school for two years, I received 75 cents lunch money three times a week, and I spent it all at the "Canteen", a small building in the playground that sold snack food. My regular meal for my 75 cents was a brownie w/frosting, fruit punch, and a Snickers bar, sometimes substituted with a Carnation frozen chocolate malt.

In my elementary school you could buy one-half of a Strawberry ice cream sandwich for a nickel.

Nothing today produces as much joy as that nickel in the early 1960's.

One thing I recall about our school's rectangular pizza is that the sausage appeared to be an extrusion. Little cylinders about 3/16 diameter and variable in length 1/4-1/2". It always reminded me of D-Con pellets.

1970s kid and like the OP we did not have a means to refrigerate or have ice packs to keep our lunch cold. We brown bagged lunch and got a quarter to buy a small carton of chocolate milk almost daily. On occasion we would get an extra 35 cents for an ice cream also sold by the school. My go to sandwich was an Oscar Meyer bologna and American cheese with mayo on white bread. Our sandwiches were always wrapped in tin foil. We would get one treat that consisted of a small box of raisins, a hostess Twinkie/Devil dog, or homemade cookies. Devil Dogs were my older sister’s favorite and to this day I can’t even look at a devil dog without my mouth go8ng dry. I had to save some milk to be able to wash it down my throat. We probably only did hot lunch half a dozen times a year and almost always on pizza day.

Brown-bagger here too. We didn't even have hot lunches at school until high school and during that stretch my folks were struggling pretty good financially and couldn't afford it. They did have a low-income option that was a different colored monthly punch card than the full price kids got. Mom and dad were too proud to have their kid be known as low-income, so I continued to brown bag it.

I do remember in grade school we'd occasionally have hot dog days. Always on a Friday and they'd do it maybe once a month, if that. Otherwise, it was a sandwich with Wonder Bread in a waxed paper bag, maybe a homemade cookie, and a piece of fruit. We were required to bring our brown bags home as well as we could usually get a week out of one bag. So, after lunch, it always got folded up and put in our back pockets.

High schools I was given $3 a day for lunch. If we made the long walk to Taco Bell, tacos were $0.59 each. I was eating like a king.
Many days it was the Smith’s Deli, taquitos or burritos.

Most days I picked up a bottle of Pepsi, and a pack of red zingers. If I ate that every day, I still had $7.50 at the end of the week for weekend money.

PB&J sandwiches made by the cafeteria lady and soup of the day. Sandwiches stuffed so full you needed a spoon to catch the droppings. Available every day made with Shedd's PB in the big gallon buckets. My daily lunch except Fridays...pizza day.

Growing up, chicken rings were the popular school lunch.

Yes, rings:

(Nuggets, just in ring shape. I assume to speed cooking.)

These were a weekly staple in my school district. Always served with mashed potatoes and gravy for dunking. And the lunch line was always twice as long as usual on chicken ring day.

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Originally posted by StorminNormin:
There is only one jail I go to in Texas that I eat their food when I am there and it is in South Texas. They don’t follow the standards and it is like a couple of old grandmas making wonderful Mexican food. The meals are very good. It is the only jail I will eat the food at.

The school where I was a School Resource Officer for several years had a cafeteria manager who was amazing. Tons of freshly made stuff. Her school lunches were so good that staff from the administration building and other nearby schools would come to my school to eat from the lunch line.

She ended up leaving the school district and opening up a very successful country-style cafe nearby.

Most of elementary I packed a lunch, I remember my yellow snoopy lunch box I had for a while and a Six Million Dollar Man one. Usually bologna or pb and j In middle and high school my mom was a lunch lady. Extra food for me

The pizzas were the bomb, I also enjoyed turkey, mashed potatoes and gravy day. They would put out bowls of cranberry sauce on the tables

Yes, in the 70s, the regular Friday sausage pizza rectangle with fries was good and most memorable (yes, good, not great), but we also had turkey and dressing on the last day before Thanksgiving that was quite good and always a treat.

The rubbery salisbury steak and chicken (or maybe turkey?) tetrazzini were edible but barely so. Starting around 7th grade, we got to choose our meal and lots of people went with the cold/salad plate on those days.