I always hated the breaded and baked rectangle of dry white fish topped with a rectangle of orange government cheese. It was served with a minute scoop of the blandest tartar sauce ever.

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At least items #5-#8 would help fight the uphill war against childhood obesity in this country. This opposed to what children mostly prefer in a bottle of Coke and some french fries.

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My grade school had excellent, excellent lunches. Except for the chili. Actually, it might have been good. I don't know. In the second grade, I found what I'm pretty sure was a booger in a big bowl of that chili and never ate it again.

Looking back, it was probably an onion.

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Porcupine Meatballs--tennis ball sized wads of hamburger with undercooked grains of rice mixed in, served in a watery, unseasoned tomato sauce. Gross.

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Fluffy sweet pink dessert is one large container of Cool Whip, one big can Eagle brand sweetened condensed milk, one large can cherry pie filling, one good sized can of drained crushed pineapple. Mix together and refrigerate. My kids liked it frozen and still will eat it at age 42 and 43 if someone prepares it.

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I didn't like it when my mom sent me to school with a pimento cheese sandwich. What made it bad was that she sent me to school with it for about the entire year I was in 2nd grade. Eventually she found out I was trading it off for anything at all I could get.

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Remember- Monday's leftover hamburgers become Tuesday's Salisbury Steak (just add canned gravy), and Tuesday's Salisbury Steak gets rinsed off under hot water and ground up into Wednesday's chili...waste not want not

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I think our school's worst was the "tuna suprise". A squarish baked tuna thing covered in fake cheese that smelled like cat food.

The best was that we always had the option of a turkey sandwich instead of what was being served in the main lunch line.

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Hahaha...porcupine meatballs. I think the worst thing I recall from the cafeteria was the "spanish rice" - fatty ground beef and cooked Minute Rice, held together with undiluted (and unseasoned) canned tomato soup.

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Please tell me that knit frozen dinner in the picture is available for purchase!

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I have you all beat. In Jr High they twice fed us spam, ground up with govt cheese, and served cold on a bun. No mayo, butter, whatever. It was every bit as delicious as it sounds. Being in an upper class white neighborhood, we had never before seen, let alone eaten spam, so the first time we ate it, but weren't happy.

The second time became legend. It started with a food fight between two tables, and spread over the entire cafeteria. Someone discoved that if thrown just right, with the top bun removed, the things would stick to the walls. Someone else discovered that they would stick to the ceiling. Within about five minutes, the place was decorated a lovely pink and orange.The lunch ladies were helpless, the teachers holed up in their lounge scrounging for anything but those sandwiches. We then moved on to throwing the red "fruited gelatin," and playing frisbee with the plates and trays. At that point, we deserted the room en masse and finished our lunch period on the playground.

Nothing was ever said, and spam and cheese sandwiches were never served again.

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If school & airline food is that bad, how come everyone eats it? It tastes good...not healthy, but good.

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I remeber the wonderful peanut butter cookies, they were so huge! Food in elementary school was fine. Middle school I ate ice cream with crushed saltines in them. High school i didnt eat! Now they have taken away the salt limited the ketchup, taken away any drinks but milk. Here they say 90% dont eat the caferteria food. I say bag lunch,. What they have always been feeding then and now is not healthy or appealing. But the ladies in the lunch room havent!

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I remember two items from my middle school's cafeteria. One was the meatballs. Kids would bounce them around. Yes, they bounced like small rubber balls. The other item was pizza. One of my classmates slammed her fist onto her pizza. When she removed her hand, the pizza slowly "recovered" from the impact until you couldn't tell it had been hit. Quite impressive, really, but not something you'd want to eat.

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My elementary school had great food... maybe that's because my Mom was the lunch lady, and made her own stuff. It was great, except that when other kids got sick, they got to go home...I got to go sit in the little room off the kitchen.

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am i apart of a new generation of school lunches?

does anyone remember the square pizza slices with the cube pepperonis? it wasn't quite pizza hut but it was certainly one of top tier school lunches.

the worst of all i must agree is the breaded fish square with the cheese that had crusty dark orange corners. i'd wait til 2:10 and spend 2bucks at the ice cream man just to eat something appetizing.

there's nothing like cheap mexican snacks in the late afternoon.

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Jason L.: I read your comment and started craking up!!! Not sure I'd eat that pizza either.

Matthew H.: I remember that pizza....yum!

In 5th & 6th grade I didn't even have a lunch room. Mom bought us the thermoses that you heat up with hot water.... To this day she cannot tolerate the smell of spagetti o's...lol... In high school I remember the turkey for the salad bar being the same color as the cat I was disecting in advance bio...right before lunch!!!!

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our worst lunch was beef tips, which were just the fatty part of some sort of steak product, smothered in gravy, with nasty green beans and really hard rolls.

i was happy when, in high school, we could leave campus and i could go to a friend's restaurant everyday.

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Worst school lunch item: the milk! That might sound crazy, but when I was in 4th or 5th grade, my cafeteria switched from cartons of milk to BAGS of milk. And when I say bag, I mean a 4 x 4 in square with no openings in it. That you had to try to stab with a straw without spilling everywhere. Everyone quickly stopped drinking milk at school because it didn't chill as well as the cartons did, was never mixed well and frequently past the expiration date.

I can only hope that the county eventually gave up on them, all they were good for was throwing at others during foodfights. The chocolate made the best splatter.

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Well, at some point my grade school switched from milk in little cartons to milk in juice boxes that didn't require refrigeration.
Nobody would touch the plain one, and the chocolate had chunks in it. I think it would be fair to say most of us were scarred for life

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