School Lunches
I hated school lunches, not like I'm on an island with that proclamation. We all hated school lunches. The issue as to why we hated them is diverse though.
A. Atmosphere: The lunch bell rings and you head on down with a group of other kids. You funnel into the cafeteria and then form lines...one for the hot lunch...one for the cold lunch. It always reminded me of inmates at a prison. We line up single-file and slowly...one step...at...a...time...make our way up to the stainless steel serving area. There the obnoxious and mostly disgusting looking lunch ladies are there with the plastic gloves on their hands. When I went to school they hadn't invented plastic gloves and they all wore plastic bags on their hands. We shuffled along the stainless steel shelves and got the crappy food dumped onto our sectioned plastic trays. They couldn't even give us plates for God sake.
B. The Food: Top 8 Worst School Dishes.
Beef and Gravy: Lumps of stringy beef in a watery black gravy. It looked like a bowel movement on a plate.
Pork Sausages and Buttered Rice: These were breakfast sausages which I like...but they weren't broiled or fried. They looked boiled. The rice was scooped onto our plates with the congealed butter mixed into it with one of those ice-cream scoops with the thumb button.
Pizza Burgers: Not what you think...no...no. Not tomato sauce with cheese on a hamburger bun. Not a hamburger with sauce and cheese. It was a mush that I can only compare to cat puke on a half of a hamburger bun.
Fish Pizza: They actually put up signs "Coming Soon! Fish Pizza." I guess they were trying to create a "buzz" about it. It was a square fish fillet, breaded, with a thin layer of tomato sauce and cheese underneath the coating.
Grilled Cheese: How can you fuck up Grilled Cheese? Have a school lunch staff make 'em that's how. This was two pieces of white bread, sprayed with some sort of buttery grease, and between it that pungent and orange Government Cheese. This stuff didn't melt, it just sort of got warm and translucent. This Cheese was so bad...in the 1980's they couldn't give the stuff away. They unloaded the Government Warehouses and trucked the stuff away to poor neighborhoods. Horrible.
Chicken Soup: Knuckles, weird chunks of dark meat, an occasional bone, a weak urine-like broth, and Veg-All (this is the vegetable medley in cans with the potatos, peas, carrots cut with ridges, and lima beans).
Ketchup: They had this stuff in a large steel bucket as you left the serving line in the cafeteria. It wasn't even real ketchup...it was tomato paste that was doctored up by the school "chef." During the 80s, President Reagon actually thought Ketchup was considered a vegetable.
Beet Juice Popcycles: Yep...they wouldn't give us real Popcycles that wouldn't be healthy. So instead they gave us Beet Juice Pops. Now in some countries, beets are used to make sugar just like sugar cane. However, it takes a shitload of processing to make it into sugar. These pops had very little processing. They tasted like beets. They sucked.
A couple of good things though:
1. Chocolate Milk Day: Our School wouldn't allow us to have Chocolate Milk every school day for fear that we would all get "hyper." This is the God's honest truth. We could only have it on Friday. I guess they figured we would have the whole weekend to unwind.
2. Chocolate Cake with Powdered Sugar on Top: This was a great dessert. It tasted good and you could blow the powdered sugar into your unsuspecting friend's eyes.
3. Peanut Butter Corn Flake Squares: These are awesome. Now they can't serve them due to all the kids with "nut allergies." How come none of us had "nut allergies?"
4. Rice Crispy Marshmallow Squares: Just as awesome as number 3. We used to barter things for extra squares. I once traded a Playboy for one when I was in tenth grade.
