Kids Lunches today vs. 1970

My kids get vegetarian food, no processed food, they never eat processed animals.

I think that's great.....keep it up!

I have fond memories of school lunches in their early 60s, having grown up in a small town of about 3500. Hamburgs and fries, shepherds pie, hot dogs and macaroni cheese, ham sandwiches with soup beef stew and always fish on Fridays. Accompanied by fresh fruit, apples, oranges, grapefruit, pears and, vegetables like carrots, peas.,green beans, and of course plenty of potatoes. About the only thing I disliked were powdered eggs. My parents owned a restaurant. I was in good standing with the lunch ladies eating seconds and sometimes even thirds. I was not overweight then or now a high level of activity has always been my life. Mowing lawns, paper route, fishing hunting, biking, skateboarding. Always wet from swimming. In Winter shoveling snowstorms was a group effort. Ice skating with bonfires on the ponds.Lots of skiing ski the slope was almost in my backyard. And just fooling around a lot. Soda and candy mixed with comics and matchboxes were paid for by daily chores / 25 cents a day. By high school, I mostly ate the hamburgers but I usually bought from the a la carte line A pack of six oreo cookies and a milk I called this my 31 cent special.

I remember "Cheese Burger turnovers" they were actually pretty good.

Nothing is free

I remember the last day of school a soft ice cream truck came and gave all us kids free cones!

I pity them. You have ignored millennia of successful human dietary practices because you you are too weak to think for yourself.
Plenty for you to virtue signal about on social media though, yeah?

most kids I knew pushed it around on the tray so it made it look like some got eaten. The amount of food tossed into the trash was obscene.

You'd love county jail!

Thanks :) just doing my part, but I enjoy it

went to school in the 60's and 70[s. lived in a small town in south carolina. knew the head cook at the elementary school 1=8th grades. and high school, and at all church covered dish suppers their food was gone so fast if you blinked, you missed it.

the spaghetti was great. the veg and beef soup was incredible, with a big hunk of hot cornbread, and a pbj sandwich.

some of the food i didn't care for. a couple of times we had hominy, gross. and cubed beets.

in high school they started having hamburgers with stripes painted on them, and rectangle pizza, both were good just odd.

the cake, cobblers, puddings could cause fights over somebodies left=overs.

they cut the potatoes into fries using the whole potato with the skin still on and they were delicious.

we had to scrape our food into one trashcan and all paper into another. I know they gave the scraps to different pig farmers around the area.

I still miss that beef and vegetable soup

At my daughter's high school they have salad and wrap options everyday in addition to the standard mystery food. They also have a burrito bar with lots of choices. It isn't bad.

I took tuna salad in a container most days, except rectangle frozen pizza day.

I remember in elementary school they would only have turkey twice a year (once being right before thanksgiving) and I loved that.

I mostly brought PB&J, but I always bought coffee milk

Oh man.....I remember bosco sticks from high school......i would crave them... that was the only thing I ever got if I bought cafeteria food, otherwise I brought my own.

"What disgusts me is the amount of food thrown away DAILY!"

i know an older guy who worked in a NYC school cafeteria...almost all the canned vegetables get dumped, since so few kids eat them, but they have to keep ordering anyway. i assume it's like that across the city, so that's a trainload of food each year going to the landfill.

as a kid i liked things like peas, lima beans and brussel sprouts but would pretend i didn't to not be a weirdo.

was anyone else here that way?

Old mofos

The school system should contract with a pig farm to buy the leftovers. It's a win/win for the school and the farmer.

That said, I grew up in the DEEP south. Teh lunchroom ladies made yeast rolls and cornbread you WISH your Mamma made it that good. There was canned greens but they used really lean fatback and real salt and pepper to season with.
Fried chicken was probably better than most fast food restaurants today. They did make some unusual fare like pigs in a blanket. This was sometimes mashed potatoes *real* potatoes, packed on top of a split hot dog with govment cheese slices melted on top. Or it was a hotdog wrapped in the yeast roll dough and baked.

The desserts were even better. A lot of fruit cobblers. I rarely recall just a slice or two of apple. It would be sliced all right and baked with brown sugar and cinnamon sometimes with a crust, sometimes without.

The use of yeast roll in other dishes must have been contingent upon how much was leftover.
Even so, I often brought my own lunch because my mom wanted to save money by making us ham or turkey sandwiches and home bagged potato chips and a couple cookies.

Pizzas were a rarity. Hamburgers were like every other Friday.

LOL fuck lil jimmy if i had children id make sure they had some kind of peanut product on them at all times LOL!

It was pretty good, especially the homemade French bread smothered in butter. They didn't make the bread everyday, but when they made it they limited you to one piece because everyone loved it. We mostly had homemade everything as far as the main meal.

I forgot to add little league baseball "hard ball" weekend football and basketball games where all ages played, dam did it feel good to take down someone larger and 3 or 4 years older. And the good old occasional brawl all us boys would show up. I would cheer for the underdog for they were being pick on a taunted and usually in the right. Most fights were over girls.

Luck indeed I was if I had a sprinkling of sugar on a buttered piece of bread. A farmers son would have "cake" atween buttered bread. He of course was a fat bastard...

creamy potatoes and turkey with gravy was the bombest shit i have ever eaten
always tried to make it never could

I just wrote about my experience and it was similar to yours and I forgot to mention the spaghetti whose only fault was the mop string sized spaghetti noodles I prefer thin to angel hair. And I appreciate what you said about pig farms because that's what I also just suggested on my post. But, I gather these schools are city schools up North and don't have nearby farms as an option. Shame they just trash it.

But, cool post!!

70’s kid here. We had fresh cooked food made with vegetables and actual meat. You could smell the rolls cooking all over school. Smelled soooo good. It has to be cheaper to cook “home cooked” meals that buying that frozen shit.

Anon coward - where's this college prep highschool? I wish most public schools would offer a program where you could get an associate's degree - our school system HAS to be changed up.

mid 70's to late 70's - small town Iowa.
Real food for lunch - yeast rolls, chili, real pizza, beef stew, fish sticks (not soggy), great deserts.

Nice lunch ladies cooking real food. It really was great.

And when something went a muck. FOOD FIGHT!

our school was gourmet meals cooked to each students preference. we submitted our ticket via the vacuum chamber boxes in each class room and the 333 chefs prepared them individually for each student per request.

I remember Cowboy Hats in grade school in the 70s which consisted of a scoop of smashed potatoes on top of a piece of fried bologna.

Well, if you force your kids to animals it is YOUR OWN FAULT.

Simply stop feeding animals to your kids OP and everything will be fine. Try some organic vegetables and STOP eating an animal.

When I was a kid, I had to walk 20 miles to school and gather berries along the way.