Elementary school. Cafeteria. What do those words make you think of?
We’ve heard what you think about school lunch these days. Now, we want to hear what you remember about your school lunchroom! What’s your BEST school cafeteria memory? It can be gross, funny, a tale of an epic food fight…if it happened and you remember, we want you to tell us about it!
Leave your lunchroom tale in the comments, and on Monday, August 16, you might just be the winner of a $50 Earth Fare gift card!
We’ll be looking for the most memorable lunchroom tale, so don’t hold back! We want to hear YOUR story.
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Apparently I’ve always been ‘mindful’ of what I ate. I hated school lunch and most days my mom would pack a ham, turkey or bologna (- don’t eat meat now and I hated it between bread then) sandwich….that I would throw away, sell or give to someone.
Anyhow, there was ONE thing I enjoyed from the school cafeteria: DeConna ice cream sandwiches. I would eat one ANY day I had the 35 cents to pay for it. Well one day I sold my meat-filled lunch and lucky for me, I had been stashing my money for days. I had enough to buy 7 ice cream sandwiches…and I did (getting sick as I think about it now). I remember all of my friends thinking I was hot s*** for buying all that ice cream and I thought I was too!
I ate every single sandwich with glee. Lunch was over and so was my stomach. I lost the entire $2.45 worth of ice cream, not even an hour after I ate it, to a trash can waiting for me outside. Needless to say, I didn’t buy another ice cream sandwich after that.
However, I did continue to sell my sandwiches. Its no wonder I was so thin….
Aside from being incredibly talkative regardless of whether or not it was a legal talk time, I was generally one of those “good” kids, the well behaved kind, the kind you really could take out to a restaurant with adults. For most of my earliest school years, I brought a lunch from home. My lunches tended to be quite elaborate and might include little surprises, decorations, or little notes. Probably needless to say, I was in the minority. Both for my demeanor and for my lunches.
Fast forward ahead to the Fourth Grade…. Somewhere along the way I’d decided that I wanted to be more “normal”, more like the other kids anyways. A part of this meant buying lunch at school. The food was um interesting at best. I got a kick out of some of the weird textures so wrongly called “meat”. Most items that I had known outside the school environment were quite unrecognizable as being whatever the signs said they were. Meatloaf was a perfectly shaped little round patty that resembled a tiny hamburger more than anything. However, it tasted like bread and had a texture like tapioca. Ice cream was always at least partially melted and refrozen, melted and refrozen, melted and refrozen, enough times to give it what I called “refrigerator taste”. (I now know this as “freezer burn”.) Nothing was quite as it seemed in that cafeteria.
And then there was the Day of the Bologna Sandwiches. Now let me make this perfectly clear: At my school, no one really cared if a kid ate all their food or not. Thus the incident that follows here had nothing to do with trying to get rid of food to pretend it had been eaten! I still wonder a bit about this one. To this day I have NO IDEA why we did this! And it was indeed, MY idea!
I suppose this might have had something to do with wanting to be a bit less well behaved. I do know it felt like the most incredible rebellion! It was SUCH a heinous deed! I led my best girlfriend into corruption of the highest order! When I’d told her of MY Idea, oh how we giggled. Co-conspirators in a dastardly crime, we gathered up our courage and stealthily made our way to the far side of the cafeteria. There, to allow for a bit of a breeze, were open windows. Our plot involved using those very windows for our own personal crime scene! And then we did it. We summoned up everything bad we could find inside us, and together we tore open our sandwiches and THREW OUR BOLOGNA OUT THE WINDOW! *Shocking!* Well we thought so anyways!
What happens next is the stuff of legends. A teacher who had seen our horrific act of rebellion, came over to us and said to come with her. We followed her into the hallway, certain we would now be suspended or worse. And she asked us why on earth we did such a silly thing. “Silly”??? Did she say “silly”!?! We, shrugging our shoulders with a flavor of perfect contriteness, told her we had no idea. Expecting the worst, we then thought it must have been delayed as she told us to go back and finish up if we had more eating to do – and to please use the trash bins the next time we had something we didn’t want.
Our horrid deed went unpunished. Unless finding out it wasn’t so horrid after all counts as its own brand of punishment! After all, we had plotted this all day!
I remember always longing for my friends’ packed lunches. White bread sandwiches with bologna and cheese, pre-bagged cheetos, oreo cookies, along with a Sunkist canned drink wrapped lovingly in aluminum foil. My mother, who loved to garden, would send me some sort of soup (which never stayed warm in my Barbie thermos), an apple and sliced, green bell peppers for snack. Now, I go to eat lunch with my son at his elementary school. He opens his Laptop Lunchbox and shows off a Peanut Butter (SmartBalance Brand) and Honey on multi-grain bread made from freshly-milled wheat (which he doesn’t appreciate nearly as much as I do), carrots, an apple, Paul Newman’s oreo-style cookies and Horizon chocolate milk or just water (in a cool thermos) to drink. I try hard to fill his lunchbox with fun, healthy foods that fit in our budget. Still hard to compete with the guy across the table sporting pop-tarts, doritos, snickers and a Capri-Sun. But, we do the best we can! Thanks to Earthfare for all the help!!
All I can think of when I think of elementary food is: “mystery meat”.
I swear that meat and gravy stuff they served us was crumbled dog food, LOL.
Also, our pizza crust HAD to of been made of white rubber. We use to scrap the cheese and sauce of and *bounce* the crust on the tables.
Every time I think of a cafeteria, I remember when I went to a private school with only fifty kids.
When it was lunch time, all the kids would go to the cafeteria (which was not a big room, but not too small either).
Me and my brother would bring a lunch from home. I usually brought microwaveable hot pockets and my brother would almost always bring microwavable shrimp.
Well, when my brother would go to the microwave to cook his shrimp,the whole cafeteria would smell of the soggy fishy smelling shrimp, and all the kids,sickened by the smell would say,”oh no, he made that disgusting smelling shrimp again!”
Ha ha! that makes me laugh now every time I think of it! I’m so glad that’s over.
I went to a catholic school (don’t ask..lol) and we had some of the best cooks from our little town. Everyday they would make the best yeast rolls and on Fridays cinnamon rolls from scratch. The smell rolling through our little school around lunch time was so good that it was hard to study. I finally convinced my mom that going home for lunch wasn’t cutting it, so I could eat there. I still remember the taste of those rolls and that was over thirty years ago…YUM
All I can think of is when I would go meet my child to eat lunch with her at 10:15 in the morning the gross smell! I mean the food is not good and for sure smells nasty but especially at 10:15 in the morning! Luckily she take her lunch everyday. Maybe having a picky child isn’t so bad at times!