@Dutchess_III: “In elementary school they had this hamburger gravy that was SO GOOD! I’d be trading food like crazy to get more.”

I call bullshit.

Rubbery scrambled eggs with spinach and potatoes.

Ew really @ragingloli? Germans are strange. Mom says the Dutch cook strange stuff like that too.

Ew?
I loved that back then!

You did? I would be sore afraid!

I had school lunch for grandparent’s day with a couple of my grandkids a few years back. We had bread sticks and spagetti. And leaves! I leaned over to another grandpa and said “Do you remember getting leaves for lunch in school?”
He whispered back “I ain’t never seen ANY of this shit before!”
I tried to trade my leaves for a bread stick. I thought my kids were going to expire in horror…you do NOT trade food!
Many of the kids actually ate the leaves.
Thanks Michelle Obama.

I loved the mini pizzas. In grade 10 the were $0.75 each. Later in grade 12 they were $3.00 each.

When I was in elementary school, we went home for lunch. In those days we didn’t have busing. Kids walked to school in their own neighborhood and went home for lunch.

@Dutchess_lll
And I still do. With better eggs, though.
And you are going to hate this, then.
It is cooked blood sausage, and it is called “Tote Oma”, which translates to “dead grandma”.
And it is delicious.

My ex husband had a Taunta Loos, or something like that, back in Holland. We’d get letters from her.
Generally speaking, I’m not that fond of sausage outside of breakfast sausage.

We attended a small town school that served the best home made whole wheat dinner rolls! If the weather was bad outdoors, and recess was held in the gym, the extra rolls would be set out so that you could have as many as you could eat with butter and jam.

Oh yum!

I taught in this one tiny district out in the country and once a week they had home made chili and cinnamon rolls! Oh my God the smell of those rolls were to die for….but I couldn’t afford to buy school lunch so I never got any. * throws self on the ground kicking and screaming *

My favorites were:

Salisbury Steak with Mashed Potatoes

Rectangular Pizza with Crumbled Sausage on Top

My mother was so torn about hot lunch at school. She was too lazy to make my lunch every day, but too cheap to pay for school lunch. Lucky for me, lazy won out. I liked the hot lunches.

I do not remember pizza…

Grilled cheese and tomato soup
Turkey a la king

In high school, we had a mini taco bell and pizza hut that each sold maybe 3 items. So beef, bean and cheese burritos and pepperoni personal pizza.

Literally nothing “homemade” and no fresh veggies/fruit.

Michelle Obama changed school lunches fo sho!

When I was very young and brought my lunch I often brought fried chicken. I guess I was a little ahead if my time. That was before kids were eating chicken tenders all over America.

As far as cafeteria lunches K-12, I remember hamburgers, hot dogs, pizza, tacos, tator tots, green beans, corn, and grilled cheese sandwiches. I can’t think of anything else right now. I think maybe we had some sort of fruit, but I don’t remember exactly.

Oh, and chocolate milk.

We had a few local restaurants provide food for the prepaid hot food thing in middle school. There was a Mexican restaurant that provided burritos a few times a month; I loved those. The only time lunch at school was actually amazing (no offense to the simple lunches my parents packed for me).

Mummy used to get chef to deliver my luncheon rather than expose me to the dreadful cheap slop dished out to the other peasants kids.

I remember Mom packed fried chicken in a shoe box, wrapped in foil, for my dad and me forba father-daughter banquet.

1. When I was in first and second grade, if we showed up for 7 a.m. Mass with the nuns,we got to eat breakfast in the nun’s dining room, which always included cinnamon twist donuts and bacon and eggs.

2. In third grade a Friday lunch was tuna casserole, and the dessert was stewed prunes, which I had never eaten before. I ate it all, but as I stood up from the table I threw up all over the tray and the table. Got the afternoon in the nurses office until my mom picked me up. Never had to eat stewed prunes again.

Oh…now I remember. They always had fish on Friday.

From elementary school, I don’t remember much about what they served. I remember more from middle school and high school.

Middle school I went to a private school and I remember things like Chicken a la King. We didn’t pay, it was included in the cost of tuition.

High school I remember things like pizza. We paid cash (this was early 1980’s) or kids had a card for free lunch.

Although my schools all had cafeterias, I never bought lunch at school. I was a very picky eater until I got to be about 16. I know that may sound hard to believe to some of you.

I always brought my lunch. In grade school I carried a lunch box, with the notorious thermoses that Dutchess mentioned, that had a glass liner. You had to be really careful not to drop them.

A typical lunch would consist of a sandwich on white bread, either PB&J, tuna fish, or cheese. Then I might have some chips, I was partial to bbq flavored potato chips, and Fritos, and maybe a fruit roll up, and some carrot sticks.

When I was really young, I would usually have either milk, or High-C in my thermos, and when I was a little older, I would buy a carton of milk and a bag of planters peanuts. It was so good!

Occasionally I would have one of those sectioned packs that had 4 crackers, and a small section filled with processed cheese. The pack came with a little red, plastic spreader. I also used to love getting those packages of cheese filled cheese crackers, 4 to a pack. Occasionally I would have Welch’s grape juice that came in tiny cans.

Four days a week, I had a packed lunch. On Friday, the cafeteria served pizza. It was terrible, but was a change.

When I moved from New York to California to start fifth grade, the cafeteria was pretty standard stuff, until the second week when one day we had TACOS!

I had never had a taco before despite being half Mexican because my mom considered it street food. What a surprise!

I eat tacos all the time now, and have made them at home for my kids since they were little. My mother never ever made them.

Oh that is funny / interesting @zenvelo. Did she make other Mexican foods? My girlfriend married a Mexican back in the late 70s and I was introduced to burritos. Talk about a staple in my household after that! And in my kids’ current households.

@Dutchess_lll My mother made the best enchiladas ever. And we had cheese quesadillas as part of lunch on the weekends. My standard weekend lunch was a cheese quesadilla and Campbell’s Cream of Asparagus soup.

I never saw a flour tortilla until I was 20; but we always had corn tortillas in the refrigerator growing up.

My girlfriend’s mother in law taught her how to make flour tortillas, and she showed me….it was easier to just buy them!

@zenvelo I don’t know anyone who is Mexican who eats flour tortillas with any regularity if ever. My MIL almost never has flour tortillas in the house, but always has corn tortillas.

One of my son’s best friends lived with us for a summer. He’s Mexican. Pretty sure his Mom is here “illegally.” He cooked for us some times and it often involved tortillias. He said they were Mexican spoons. He used them to shovel food in his mouth.

@JLeslie To me, “corn tortilla” is redundant, as that’s what tortillas are made from.

Unless they’re flour tortillias.

@zenvelo I understand that POV. For Mexicans the flour tortillas are used for very specific things, while Americans choose which tortilla they prefer. For instance in a restaurant in America they may offer corn or flour for your beef taco. That wouldn’t happen in a Mexican household.

Also, you don’t put cheese on a taco, and the taco shell isn’t fried in Mexico either.

I’m in Southern California. Almost all Mexican restaurants serve both corn and flour tortillas. Burritos, at least around here, are always made with flour tortillas. I have cousins who are half Mexican and they all eat flour tortillas. One of my favorite Mexican restaurants, had an attached tortilleria, and they make flour tortillas. Pretty much all of the Mexican restaurants out here, are owned and run by Mexican families, and most people who work there are either Mexican-born, or of Mexican heritage. They use both flour and corn tortillas.

When I was in elementary school, one of my friends, whose mom was from Mexico, used to make homemade flour tortillas at their house. They were so good, but she always used corn tortillas to make her tacos.

I learnt to use bacon grease for my flour tortillias.

Kardamom Burritos are always flour as far as I know, in all parts of the US. As far as my husband knows there is no such thing as a burrito in Mexico unless they had them in a city outside of Mexico City that he is unaware of. We aren’t counting that maybe in the last 30 years they might have them now for the American tourists. A burrita in Mexico is flour tortilla with ham and cheese and maybe something else in it I don’t remember. California and Texas are different than Mexico. Here it has been Americanized or has transformed over the years.

This Mexican restaurant we used to go to in Tennessee was owned by a guy from Mexico City who had signs up in the restaurant saying “all you border state people no I won’t put cheese on your taco” lol. Something like that. I need to search TripAdvisor to see if they have photos.

My husband also doesn’t remember ever seeing ground beef in a taco in Mexico.

Burritos are eaten in some regions of northern Mexico near the border, such as Juarez. For the most part, they are a border food and you won’t find them in Mexico’s interior or southern regions. (Mexican burritos also usually only have a couple ingredients and are small). The familiar large, multi-ingredient bean-and-rice burrito that you associate with places like Chipotle originated in San Francisco.

I suspected as much. I’d probably hate authentic Mexican cooking!