whose school food was horriblest?

being v.small and unscientific (8-12), we decided this was what happened when you fast-fried them straight from frozen ie it was FRIED ICE!!

But it tasted so horribly bad that I didn't eat pizza again for nine years. I was sure that there was no way anything could be that bad and still be called pizza without a) all pizza actually being that bad, i.e. overnight the nature of pizza had somehow changed, or b) my tastes having changed just as quickly. So I wasn't going to risk it.

Until high school, whenever my family got pizza, I just got a meatball sub.

I have never ever had a school dinner, I missed out.

I don't even remember anything about it, except that it was the first square pizza I'd seen. They did French bread pizza in high school, and frankly it was pretty damn good. My friends liked the school pizza, "you know, for school food, but the tacos are better," so possibly I was agog by the whole "this is my first day of school" thing and accidentally ate the janitor's socks instead or something.

it wz ok, everyone used to get seconds => it wz quiche really, but that hadn't been invented yet either

I still can't eat MUSHY PEAS. I cannot recall if primary skool was the first place to serve THE DREADED QUICHE or not but it wd not surprise me.

Then I went to high skool where it was obligatory by CHILD LAW to have chips or chips and gravy if you were eating in the canteen. If you had anything well quite frankly you were some kind of mentalist.

I had a my little pony lunchbox in primary school and of course no-one had lunchboxes in high skool but boring lame old tupperware. High skool = RUB. *pouts*

I think going back to my FIRST primary school, that on my last day I had a bacon sandwich! I was too little to use the canteen before, I remember it being very scary and full of big kids shouting.

Particularly foul were the lumpen, grey Homity pie (WTF?) and Friday's 'bake' which would include elements of all the four previous day's dinners. And we too had square rock hard pizza which was not very appetising - get with the WHITE FLOUR program guys!

Funny thing is, I would probably quite enjoy the Steiner school food these days (at least if they discovered what salt was). Youth is wasted on the young etc.

On Archel's point, in elementary school packing your own was de rigeur, but around middle school I remember it started changing.... and in high school if you brought your own lunch you were a dork? Is this a common template?

I didn't ride the bus though. Bus riders are SO GAY!!!1

also our dinner ladies were evil and would never let you have salad cream UNLESS YOU HAD SALAD - or at least some soggy wilted greens and a wrinkly tomato wedge that tried to pass themselves off as such - when everybody knows that salad cream is really for chips

However, here at this school, everything is fatty and foul. Many kids don't eat at all b/c they claim it makes their stomach ache. Mine too.

Burgers (aforementioned foul soy burgers) and fries are served every day. Other than this most food is just junk-type food. Frito pie, nachos, pizza. The "vegetable" servings required by law is usually just a little container with some lettuce a tomato slice and two pickle slices.

Recently, for two straight weeks, the steam tables in the serving line were broken so the kids got served a hoagie roll with one piece of bologna, no cheese, and a pack of goldfish. Every day. A few days they even ran out of this before the second lunch period was through.

Nearly all of our students' families are on food stamps/welfare so no one brings lunch. For some kids breakfast and lunch here at school are the only decent (?) meals they get all day.

By the 3rd year of being at high school we were allowed out to wander the streets at lunchtime, there used to be a mass exodus to the local chip shop, it was quite weird in hindsight.

I always wondered at the point of school dinners if they always seem so horribly unhealthy and/or close to poisonous. Its like the forced milk thing. People must have got sick so often! Ugh ugh ugh.

"tater tot hot dish" = "creamed tuna fish with tater tots and nastiness stuck in it which is subsequently baked into submission and foisted upon helpless children"

Using an actual foist!

http://maindish.allrecipes.com/az/TtrTtHtDish.asp

I have now moved onto thinking about the food at my sixth form college. Those burgers. They were heavenly. And so cheap. I used to love their egg and cress barms. Until I got one that was RANCID. I took one bite, threw up, and threw the rest away. It is now about three years later and I can only just face egg sandwiches again...

Ed, I live 5000 miles from hotdish sources FOR A REASON. Bless her, my mother NEVER makes hotdish because she thinks it's gross/common and I hate tuna. She did, however, 'Help' our hamburger on a regular basis. But I love a well-turned tater tot, and I love the Betty Crocker au-gratin potatoes-type side dishes.

I was on free lunches in school from 7th to 12th grade, but still our school had a McDonalds across the street and a bakery basically next door that meant it was futile to close the campus because it would have created a whole new class of miscreant and way too much admin for the Assistant Principal's office. How handy that this guy was also the mayor, as local businesses would rag on him if he gouged their high takings. We drove to get Vietnamese take-out and ordered pizzas sent in to the newspaper office if there were three people to split it with. And the bakery was the best...

No lutefisk served in OUR cafeteria, which wasn't bad (I still like turkey gravy over mashed potatoes, but hamburger gravy on same was most chundersome). We had a breakfast concession which did great cinnamon rolls or three buttered mini bagels for 30¢, and at lunch we could have any style of hamburger and what was pretty much a Wendy's Frosty (they were undercutting McDonalds) and still get change from a buck if we wanted to go a la carte. But oh dear, dyeless skin-coloured hot dogs happened a lot and someone thought these went down a treat with Boston Baked Beans. Horreur. Got busted by a lunchroom monitor for mixing ketchup and mustard once in second or third grade, which perplexed me to say the very least.