What has happened to kids school lunches?

[barkley]

milk or juice for those who cannot consume dairy.

i would have killed for that rule when i was a kid-i had to have a note on file to keep from getting in trouble for returning my tray with an unopened container of milk (which they tossed out b/c it was against the rules to refuse the container when served/share any part of your lunch with another student-such a waste). my youngest can't do milk either but his school let him just say 'no thank you when offered it with his hot lunch'. i was surprised though-despite the lunch being a flat rate price, when i went to check the balance on his account for the first time (i would prepay for a quarter at a time) he had a credit balance b/c they would charge the flat rate but then post a credit for each of those declined cartons of milk.

 

[Mysterian]

We had trays with 5 spots, a large one, a round one and three squares at the top. One spot was for your milk and there was a long slot on the side for silverware. The desert was almost always canned fruit. The pudding would have only been for special days, like on Halloween they always did some "spooks-ghetti" and there would be some chocolate pudding with a plastic spider ring or some such on it. Otherwise it was always fruit cocktail, etc. Those are pretty sweet and syrupy though, so not too dissimilar from a desert.

Five was the norm, as far as I recall.

Here some photos from that blog I previously mentioned.
We never had pretzels! Or fruit in it's own container.
Corn doesn't really go well with pizza, but ok...

Classic crinkle-cut fries and what looks like the usual fake/soyish burgers we had.
We never had strawberry milk though.

 

[Mysterian]

This is the perfect thread for:

 

[BrianL]

i would have killed for that rule when i was a kid-i had to have a note on file to keep from getting in trouble for returning my tray with an unopened container of milk (which they tossed out b/c it was against the rules to refuse the container when served/share any part of your lunch with another student-such a waste). my youngest can't do milk either but his school let him just say 'no thank you when offered it with his hot lunch'. i was surprised though-despite the lunch being a flat rate price, when i went to check the balance on his account for the first time (i would prepay for a quarter at a time) he had a credit balance b/c they would charge the flat rate but then post a credit for each of those declined cartons of milk.

Our milk was purchased seperately - it was a quarter and you could choose white or chocolate. There was also a juice option I think. I remember there was controversey of adding a soda machine. It was only supposed to be used after school, but kids would sneak over and get stuff from it. There were no restrictions on what a kid could bring for lunch - my mom often sent me with a soda, so they couldn't necessarily prove where it came from.

 

[BrianL]

Five was the norm, as far as I recall.

Here some photos from that blog I previously mentioned.
We never had pretzels! Or fruit in it's own container.
Corn doesn't really go well with pizza, but ok...

Classic crinkle-cut fries and what looks like the usual fake/soyish burgers we had.
We never had strawberry milk though.

Ours were similar to this but the slot where the corn is was round and the silverware was on the other side. They were all beige or yellow. That looks pretty typical of our lunches, except we would never have had a pretzel, and the fruit cocktail would have just been dished out from one of those giant cans. The square pizza is on-point though!

Ours were in fact exactly like this, though they appear upside-down in this picture.

 

[leahgoogle]

Five was the norm, as far as I recall.

Here some photos from that blog I previously mentioned.
We never had pretzels! Or fruit in it's own container.
Corn doesn't really go well with pizza, but ok...

Classic crinkle-cut fries and what looks like the usual fake/soyish burgers we had.
We never had strawberry milk though.

Those are the lunches we need to get away from. We need a protein, fruit/veggie, starch and a small dessert if we must. It really is easy, but most children's palates are trained for junk food at a young age. I know there is a funding issue. The problem is that what the government approves for school lunch and what is actually healthy school lunch are two different things. This is when it becomes up to the parents to make sure their kids are eating healthy meals to the best of their ability.

 

[Boopuff]

Back in the dark ages… I went to a “mega” high school (4000 kids) our cafeteria had 3 lines, hot lunch (full meal meat, veg etc) a sandwich line and a quick service (I lived off the burrito and chewy-soft cookies) lots of choices. not Sure what it looks like now, but I‘d bet it hasn’t changed much , but “healthier options “

 

[barkley]

We had kids from many different cultures, and some food was just not in their wheelhouse. The food plan really needs to consider this!

SO AGREE! i worked social services in an incredibly diverse region and the local school district could'nt figure out why their hot lunch consumption rates were so low even among those that very obviously qualified for free-it was b/c what they served was entirely unrelatable to the populations they served esp. when it came to the processed foods. it was a combo of parents and kids who had never eaten the types of foods offered along with parents who did'nt want their kids eating the processed stuff which they (rightly so) perceived as something they did'nt want their kids exposed to/developing a taste for b/c they could'nt afford to provide it at home.

 

[barkley]

I remember there was controversey of adding a soda machine.

we had them in high school until midway through my jr. year when the district claimed they were unhealthy and had them removed. that left the only choices-milk/choc milk/lemonaide and hawaiian punch (both grossly oversugared). my friends and i ran a bootleg soda sale for a while-it was'nt against the rules to bring your own so we would bring a six pack each day and sell them to our friends at above our cost but below what the machines had been selling them for.

no soda machines at my kid's former high school yet they had junk food galore and sugar laden/caffeine infused drinks in vending machines which made no sense to me.

 

[BrianL]

Those are the lunches we need to get away from. We need a protein, fruit/veggie, starch and a small dessert if we must. It really is easy, but most children's palates are trained for junk food at a young age. I know there is a funding issue. The problem is that what the government approves for school lunch and what is actually healthy school lunch are two different things. This is when it becomes up to the parents to make sure their kids are eating healthy meals to the best of their ability.

The lower one is certianly odd with juice and milk and no vegetable (ketchup? ). We would have hamburgers - no cheese, generally with just those little minced onions on them. The sides would still have been green beans or corn, etc. I feel like sometimes there were fries, but it wasn't that common. The burger bun already counted as a bread so there wouldn't have been more. I don't think there is anything wrong with a burger per se, but it has to be balanced out.

 

[barkley]

school lunch hamburgers were sliders before sliders were a thing

 

[BrianL]

we had them in high school until midway through my jr. year when the district claimed they were unhealthy and had them removed. that left the only choices-milk/choc milk/lemonaide and hawaiian punch (both grossly oversugared). my friends and i ran a bootleg soda sale for a while-it was'nt against the rules to bring your own so we would bring a six pack each day and sell them to our friends at above our cost but below what the machines had been selling them for.

no soda machines at my kid's former high school yet they had junk food galore and sugar laden/caffeine infused drinks in vending machines which made no sense to me.

Ha! Yeah, I did that with my lunches too. I would often sell the soda for a king's ransom of 50 cents, but sometimes there would be a bidding war. I had this friend who just LOVED Chee-Toes, and when I had them, man-oh-man, I could get like 2 bucks for a ziploc full of them! One kid once tried to keep upping the price just to do it, and my buddy said, "If you bid one more time I'm gonna kick your....!" Fun times.

 

[design_mom]

My kids' school lunches are better than mine were. My mom used to make us buy (because she felt "hot lunch" was important.) Our school had one option: hot lunch, or you could buy milk only to go with your packed lunch. Our school (grades 1-8) sometimes did the "sheet pan pizza" (and that was decent), but other days they did "poor man's pizza." Poor man's pizza was -- I kid you not -- half a hamburger bun with plain tomato sauce and a slice of american cheese. It was awful. My mother didn't believe us ("It's pizza. How bad can it be?") until she showed up at school one Friday to pick us up for an appointment. After that, she let us pack our lunches on Poor Man Pizza day.

At my high school had a "whole lunch" offering (rotating menu), and then a variety of ala carte items but the ala carte items were expensive compared to the whole lunch, so I was not allowed to buy ala carte. Also, the lunch line was slow and we only got 30 minutes for lunch, so I usually packed my lunch myself.

My kids elementary school had a hot lunch entree and several available-every-day entrees (salad, sandwich, etc) plus several side dish options (choose 2). In middle school there were multiple hot and available-daily options. In high school, there were multiple options a rotating entree, some kind of pizza always available, a salad bar, a made-to-order deli sandwich station. Seemed pretty good to me! They always liked to buy.

 

[BrianL]

I should add, my school also had sandwich options for those not wanting the hot lunch entree. We ordered at the beginning of every day with a show of hands. Only two or three kids a day might ask for the sandwich. I believe there was PBJ or ham available, and you still got the other veggies and such. This was a small, Catholic emelentary school, K-8 with about 30 kids per class.

 

[mistysue]

i would have killed for that rule when i was a kid-i had to have a note on file to keep from getting in trouble for returning my tray with an unopened container of milk (which they tossed out b/c it was against the rules to refuse the container when served/share any part of your lunch with another student-such a waste). my youngest can't do milk either but his school let him just say 'no thank you when offered it with his hot lunch'. i was surprised though-despite the lunch being a flat rate price, when i went to check the balance on his account for the first time (i would prepay for a quarter at a time) he had a credit balance b/c they would charge the flat rate but then post a credit for each of those declined cartons of milk.

You are lucky they are letting him simply turn it down- they can get in trouble for that. We went in circles with our school at one point because they can ONLY replace cow milk with soy milk. I had a son with anaphylaxis to both of those. In the end we refused to let them serve him anything ever because they had too many "but it HAS to be this" issues with the current federal guidelines.

 

[barkley]

You are lucky they are letting him simply turn it down- they can get in trouble for that. We went in circles with our school at one point because they can ONLY replace cow milk with soy milk. I had a son with anaphylaxis to both of those. In the end we refused to let them serve him anything ever because they had too many "but it HAS to be this" issues with the current federal guidelines.

that is just crazy! just b/c the feds say that a certain food category must be available or provided does'nt translate to a mandate that a student consumes it (even when i was a kid we were not required to 'clean the plate'-anything unconsumed was thrown away when we took our trays up). i always felt awful throwing away that unopened container of milk every day when i was required to take it with my hot lunch-i had classmates that would have benefited from consuming it. i assumed when my son was allowed to decline it we would still pay the flat hot lunch fee so it was a surprise to see that daily credit on his hot lunch account (and he was offered no alternative-so he would take juice boxes or a soda which his high school allowed to brought just not bought on campus).

 

[PollyannaMom]

I think it's sad when parents ( based on some comments on Michelle Obama) are critical when kids are introduced to healthier eating habits.. Maybe we should force our kids to eat more salads/veggies iso crap at lunch. Mac and Cheese Homemade or box is CRAP from nutrional view. and we wonder why childhood obesity is an epidemic..

But the stuff they were serving (at least where my DS went to school) wasn't healthy! - It was overprocessed junk masquerading as healthy food because the breading was changed to whole grain. Mrs. Obama had a good heart, but I think she was picturing rich schools with their own vegetable gardens (in lovely greenhouses, of course, because here you can't grow much during the school year) making fresh salads a few minutes before lunchtime - not the soggy canned veggies and mushy, bruised fruits children were actually presented with.

I bet there were a few schools out there that managed to pull it off, but I also bet that most of them couldn't, and instead of developing a taste for healthy foods, kids were turned off from foods that they would have liked if they'd been been prepared well.

I wish back then somebody would have forced me to eat salad iso a Nutty Bar

The thing is that you can't force a kid to eat. You can only force them to take the items onto their tray. So much gets thrown out!

 

[lanejudy]

In elementary school we bought lunch by the week not individual days -- either full hot lunch or just milk, for all 5 days of the week. The classroom/homeroom teacher collected the money and handed out the tickets once a week. We rarely bought the full lunch unless it was a "holiday" meal that week like Thanksgiving dinner or something. Otherwise we had our metal lunchboxes with thermoses, which then became a brown bag somewhere around jr high. Mom did an assembly line every evening to pack up 5 lunches for the next day. I think in high school we could buy a la cart, but I still didn't buy often. The high school had a soda machine -- the really old kind that gave a cup filled with syrup/seltzer! But it was turned off during school hours. I think there was a snack vending machine too which was also turned off during the day.

School lunch today is so different. DD has had free breakfast and lunch and a snack since about 4th grade. First because the elementary school qualified for Universal Lunch due to a high level of families qualified for free/reduced lunch, then due to covid free meals for all kids in the district (previously it was just the 1 elementary school). The state just passed free lunches for all school kids, and I'm conflicted on the issue. DD still didn't do school lunch every day largely because of a dietary restriction that the school wasn't able to adequately accommodate, though she often at a second breakfast and the snack each day. And while it was nice we didn't have to pay, we had the means to pay for her meals. I realize there are kids whose families can't afford food, and maybe some who are too proud to do the paperwork to qualify for free/reduced. I just don't feel the retired next door neighbor needs to have a considerable increase in property tax to provide free meals for my kid when I can afford it; it just doesn't sit right with me.

 

[Kathryn Merteuil]

For some reason this sounds oddly familiar. Did you go to school in the 80s? I wonder if it’s because they had the kids who got the hot lunches they had to get them all lined up and organized and maybe it was easier just to put the sack lunches in a group and someone else would watch them?

Yes, I was in elementary school late 70's early 80's. My class just had the one teacher. I remember the lining people up to go through the lunch line, and having to be quiet before entering the cafeteria. I guess it could have been a supervision thing as far as kids not having to go through the line, but it looks like they could have let us sit with everybody else.

 

[NotUrsula]

There are enough OER (Open Educational Resources [read: free]) that no one should be buying books, especially in K-12. I use OER in my community college classes.

And you're free to do so, because it's college, where instructors get to choose their books. As an academic librarian I advocate for OER, but I know enough about K-12 governance to know that it's a much harder row to hoe there, because public school textbooks are normally mandated statewide by the Dept. of Ed., and there is heavy lobbying from textbook publishers to use their products.

IME, licensed online resources are exponentially more expensive than hard-copy, because the license must be paid every year, whereas many hardcopy textbooks may be kept and reused for several years at no additional cost other than storage. The STEM monographs I buy tend to cost about $180/each in hardcopy, but they start at about $315 per year for a multiuser digital license. Classroom licenses are a bit cheaper, but not by that much.

My HS DD attends a private school where we must buy her books. The e-book licenses generally cost us about $75-200/year for each title. About half of her classes use digital.