General Discussion

Well, since I'm currently sitting in my school lunch room, eating what I believe is supposed to be chicken, I wanted to see what everyone thought of their school lunches, good or bad.

Sone school lunches I find are decent, but for the most part, I don't qualify it as food. (Yikes)

I'm in college, and in my opinion the dining halls on campus aren't much better.
"What is supposed to be chicken" is pretty accurate for most schools, I think.
We had a running joke that not even the animal science majors could identify the meat...

I haven't had school lunch in years, but my high school's was decent. I usually had salad bar so it was good. The dining halls at college are generally better, though one of them served food like a high school would. On our "farm campus" we had a program that used local ingredients (including products from our own animals like eggs) and the food was always great.

@xxfacethemusicxx welcome to FR, by the way

@clarinetosaurus that sounds amazing, the local stuff, that is

Nasty, but there's fish Friday's with fresh fish food (dang I love alliterations)

I stick with home lunch

My school actually has really high quality lunches?? We fairly regularly have lamb, steak, lots of curries, some Greek dishes, salmon, etc. There are chicken and turkey dishes occasionally too, but they're all seasoned pretty nicely and taste good. Along with the main dish, there's also some sort of vegetarian dish and some sort of starchy dish daily, and two types of soup. There's also a salad and cold cut sandwich bar, and the salad bar has a lot of new ingredients (often locally grown) and interesting dishes daily (we recently had really good poached pears and figs with blue cheese there) and costs of school lunch are included in tuition. There's also the fact that I've been eating these lunches for about six years and in that time, they have almost never repeated the same exact lunch twice. Some meals aren't great, but almost all are above and beyond what I'd expect from a school lunch. I'll be going to college this fall and feel very ready to be disappointed by college food.

My Uni/College does actually really, really good food. Most of it is done by the Culinary department, so ocassionally we'll get something that's supposed to be ratatouille but looks suspiciously like black sludge with flakes of eggplant and squash skins in it, and well.... no thanks.

But we have Taco Tuesdays! :D
And not like, cheep taco-bell style tacos. Like, the beef/chicken/fish/turkey is in chunks, and not ground, and the veggies are fresh and local.
And then on some of the holidays we have Bomin' Ramen night, and ohmygod.
Fresh, home-made, Ramen in about every flavor you could imagine. Fresh meat, fresh veggies, A++.
New-Years Eve/Day, they have Culture night, where you can go into the Cafeteria with family and friends regardless of your enrollment, and you can eat all sorts of foods from different cultures that are supposed to bring good luck in the new year.

In elementary/highschool, I made an effort to pack my lunch except for pizza days. It cost more money on grocieries and I could have applied for free lunch tickets, but like, I got food poisoning three times from school food, and got rotting food sometimes. The veggies were always bad, the fruit cups were sometimes broken into, nothing was safe. It was really disgusting.

When I was in public school, I'm pretty sure the food wasn't even real meat. I know the eggs were fake. The meat was either fully soy or half soy and it was awful. What was meat was probably mixed with byproducts.

But can I just bring to light the fact that my old school's portion sizes were only big enough to feed a small child? We had to pay extra just to have a meal big enough to properly feed a teenager.

@xxfacethemusicxx My high school food was pretty rad, but it was also unfunded, meaning we had to buy it ourselves. The prices were awesome, though, and you could volunteer in the canteen to get a free lunch.

When I got to college, it was pretty jarring, because the food was pretty bad. Very little flavour, not much was fresh, but the sandwich bar was okay. But then, I also live in a region with really low standards for food, generally.

I hear a lot of horror stories about the university I attended, but I lived off campus, so it was never an issue for me.