1974 School Lunch Menu

Sounded better than mine. We would get something called the "manager's special" every week, and believe me, it was never special.

Pilgrims and Indians? What a hateful environment.

r2 = SJW mom

France's school lunch is where it's at.

OP's menu looks pretty nice if you just cut the milk and the sugar.

Spain's school lunch looks the best.

I remember a lot of sloppy joes, cheese burgers and tator tots. They were good too (during the 70s)!

Yes, lots of tater tots.

We never had burritos for school lunch, but otherwise, yes.

As always, the Italian food looks the best

Metal lidded paper cones of mint chocolate chip ice cream. I probably had it 3 times a week. The funny thing is I’ve never had it since.

What is Popeye salad?

With six kids to take care of, no way was my mom springing for the expense of school lunches. You get a sandwich, you get a sandwich, and YOU get a sandwich !

We'd have an odd mix of foods like quiche, Shepherd's or Cottage Pie, chicken curry and rice with various vegetables. We'd have fish and chips on Fridays. It was the done thing to complain about our school dinners but they were actually pretty healthy and varied.

The best thing was dessert though which would be something very traditional like Spotted Dick with custard which was amazing. Spotted Dick seems to come up whenever British cuisine is mentioned but I've genuinely never seen it anywhere outside of school dinners.

At 50 cents, wouldn't it almost be the same price, R13?

[quote]and tator tots. They were good too (during the 70s)!

[quote]Yes, lots of tater tots.

Ummmmmm. Tater Tots!!

Hmm, we had a bunch of things packed in cellophane that were heated up and served at lunchtime. The teacher would call out the options and count the fingers held up by the kids who wanted it. If you wanted one, you held up one finger. If you wanted two (Scott always wanted two hot dogs), you held up two fingers. Sometimes the lunch ladies would make extra.

There was grilled cheese, ham and cheese, hot dog, cheeseburger, a “Dagwood”, and a “torpedo”. Oh, and a square pizza.

My mom usually packed my lunch, but sometimes I had to get hot lunch and it was delicious in the way junk food is when you’re used to healthy homemade.

Fish on Fridays even if you weren't Catholic?

It does look familiar, but another one for there were always tater tots. Also, not as much dessert wise that I remember.

I feel old...

Turkey Swizzlers in the UK

The classmates who bought lunch every day were considered "cool" for some reason. My family was poor so I rarely got to buy a hot lunch at school--pb&j sandwiches, etc. Though I did get to buy a container of milk, so that was nice, I guess.

I went to a catholic school, but fish on Fridays is still pretty common in a lot of places in the UK anyway. It's still the busiest day for Fish & Chip shops.

W&W R2

I'm not sure when turkey twizzlers became a fixture in schools in the UK. We didn't have them in the 80s to mid-90s.

If it wasn't for that Jamie Oliver campaign I'd never have heard of them, I don't think.

[quote]What is Popeye salad?

Canned spinach dressed with Olive Oyl

No Cube Steak on a Bun? Where's the Calico Rice? And more Taterettes, please!

[quote]My family was poor so I rarely got to buy a hot lunch at school--pb&j sandwiches,

Interesting because we were poor also and the school fed us hot lunch daily for free. My mother had to go to the school with documentation, but then we received our “lunch cards.”

The few times I had it, the school's breakfast was better than the lunch.

Rectangle pizza and chocolate milk was the best...now kids have no chocolate milk and “healthy” slop like this:

Good, R28. The fatties could stand to lose a few pounds.

R8 is Napoleon Dynamite

Grilled cheese sandwiches!

oh yeah - cube steak with fried onions and ketchup. Yum!

Pfft. My school had filet mignon every friday.

We had white bread with whippd butter.

We had twigs.

We could get a leaf too if we were good.

R35 - You had vegan options? You entitled whore.

Chicken fried steak, frito pie, BBQ, in addition to the usual burgers and rectangular pizza

Our square "pizza" used to come wrapped and heated up in plastic.

Four years of high school & I never ate lunch in the cafeteria.

What’s so unusual about that, R36? We had tables and wood, too.

I remember it vaguely as 50% delicious menu items, and 50% revolting. There didn't seem to be a middle ground. There as not patter to who bought it or who brought their lunch. It was always considered cool to bring a lunch, never a signifier of the "poors". I don't think they had subsidized lunch or at least nobody knew if they did. It was a middle class school and thing were cheap back then. The Matinee cinema was 50 or 75c for kids. I seem to remember the things that were "expensive" were shoes, winter coats, and sports equipment.

We have pebbles. On Friday we get mud.

R42 - But you ate so clean. Whore.

Cue Darphur Orphan in 3..2...1

Sounds about right.

A Burrito, two cookies, and a small carton of Carnation milk

Yuck

I'd eat every item of that menu, every day.

It sounds healthier than I thought.

I remember fries so greasy we had contest by squeezing the whole paper packet of freis just to watch how much grease would drip out of the bottom. Trust me, it was a lot, like maybe a tablespoon!

Fried chicken with rice and gravy.

Meatloaf with creamed potatoes, hot rolls, and honey butter.

Hamburger, fries, and shake when I got to high school. We also had a salad/baked potato bar.

For those of you not in the U.S. Tater Tots have become a thing in bars and gastropubs. Basically, frozen junk food growing up have now been spun up into being hand made and delicately fried. They are actually good now as an adult.

Corndogs about 2X per month, and everyone broke the wooden stick in two before putting it into the trash because the rumor was they dug through the trash and reused them .

Our elementary school lunches were very good. Everything was made fresh I the kitchen. The rolls especially, they were the dense yeast rolls.

Now I think the food is all trucked in from God knows where.

Meat pies, sausage rolls, party pies, pasties, Vegemite sandwiches, salad plates, cheese or ham or egg and salad rolls, cheese toasties, grilled cheese buns/chunder buns, and in winter, chicken or tomato soup in styro cups, orange juice or a choccie milk.

Grilled mozzarella cheese sandwiches with a little cup of tomato sauce.

[quote]I remember a lot of sloppy joes, cheese burgers and tator tots. They were good too (during the 70s)! —Fort Washington, PA

YES! Don't forget the grilled cheese sandwiches with tomato soup. We never had burritos; I can't remember if we had tacos.

Hey Fort Washington, Delco here!

Stop, you guys are making me sick! I guess this is proof most parents don't really give a shit about their spawn once they have have been shit out of the front hole. I suspect they are secretly hoping the little bastards would die of food poisoning.

Now excuse me while I take a break to go vomit.

I don’t remember dessert being served with our school lunches.

What about Mock Chicken legs???

Mock Chicken Legs with gravy RULED!

I was in HS in suburban DC in 1974, and some of these items are very familiar - meat loaf, "whipped" potatoes - I never could figure out what those poor potatoes did to deserve a whipping - hamburgers, spaghetti, and the other generic stuff. On the other hand, you can see the Southern and Southwestern influences on the Houston menu with items like tacos and burritos - Mexican or Tex-Mex food was barely known in Maryland at the time - and cornbread and turnip greens.

One odd thing to me: It appears that the HISD served the same meals at all schools, regardless of level. Our high school cafeteria menus were much more elaborate than our elementary school menus had been. After all, they were serving 2000 students, not a few hundred. We actually had choices in HS, as I think they had a grill that made burgers and grilled cheese or hot dogs to order. I'm not 100% sure because I didn't eat in the cafeteria very often. If the weather was nice, I left campus, went to a nearby park and ate a sandwich from a deli with my friends. In the park, we could smoke cigarettes (or whatever we wanted to smoke),* Lots of people did that. Schools were not prisons in the '70s. Then again, we didn't have to worry about maniacs shooting up the place.

*By the way, my HS did have a designated smoking area for students ... yes, for students. The air in the teachers' lounge was blue with smoke whenever we got a peek inside.

In 1975 I was in fifth grade. There was this boy on whom I had this impossible, swooning crush. He was oblivious to me, favoring instead a circle of friends involved in sports, which I shunned. However, one day when the cafeteria was serving chile con carne, one of their better offerings, he approached me and begged me for my chile con carne; he was one of those who only brought a sack lunch from home, and didn't especially want what his mom had packed for him. The delicious odor of chile con carne in the lunchroom proved to be too much, and he asked me for mine. How could I refuse? My heart could deny him nothing. I told him, 'Sure,' but rather than simply eating it out of my tray, he chose the most impractical way imaginable: he started spooning it into a flimsy Glad Bag. The heat quickly caused the bag to break, sending the chile con carne into my lap. Apologizing profusely, he insisted on wiping it all up himself, sopping every bit of sauce and meat out of my crotch. I sat there and let him. ;)

Lunch at my elementary school was cooked by old ladies that lives in the community from mostly produce grow in our community. The meat, and the ever popular pizza, came from elsewhere I’m assuming but most was wholesome fare. We didn’t have desserts, if you had an extra quarter you could buy a peanut butter pattie, some combination of peanut butter, cocoa, and oatmeal.

High school was different. Most of the food was burgers and fries or pizza and chips. It seems they knew teenagers wouldn’t go for the ‘homecooked’ options. I always got the full lunch because it was simply more food.

I typed fat.

I remember that, just like the Houston schools, my school had fish in some form every Friday. We weren’t even in a particularly Catholic school district.

Fish fingers were popular, but I don’t remember Seafood Pattie. It sounds like the name of a San Pedro whore. “Seafood Pattie Services Sailors.”

And somehow everyone survived. What a Michelle Obama wrought in school cafeterias is unforgivable.

... By the Seashore.

Breakfast for lunch-French toast, scrambled eggs, and a hashbrown.

Our hot lunches were pretty tasty. Spaghetti, Fish sticks, Several kinds of hot dish, baked chicken, grilled cheese, mac & cheese, pizza (on toast), and many more. Every meal had some sort of vegetable, bread and butter and a dessert. You got a 1/2 pint of milk with an additional milk initially for 1 cent then it rose to 2 cents. This was the 60's

Even people educated at Princeton and Harvard, such as Michelle Obama, can't figure out how to make kids eat their vegetables.

I remember chicken croquettes at our school all the time (grade school late 70s/early 80s and HS late 80s/early 90s).

It was like a salt lick with 20 percent actual chicken product. LOL

R64, yes you ate all that food and look how great a person you turned out to be. How dare Mrs. Obama try to improve on the school lunches that produced such a remarkable specimen as yourself. /s

R70 + 1. I never got how Repugs could say they were against Michelle Obama trying to make schools serve heather food. That was such a bull shit argument. Talk about reaching for an excuse to hate someone. And how dare she wear something without sleeves. I guess a full on whore in the White House is what they were going for.

Here you go R12-

Holy shit, there are equal proportions of sugar, oil and vinegar in r72’s salad dressing recipe. Whoa.

Sugar does not belong in salad dressing.

R74 In France vinaigrette often has a pinch of sugar/drop of honey added, but in no way should sugar ever make up a third of the ingredients.

[quote]Meat pies, sausage rolls, party pies, pasties, Vegemite sandwiches, salad plates, cheese or ham or egg and salad rolls, cheese toasties, grilled cheese buns/chunder buns, and in winter, chicken or tomato soup in styro cups, orange juice or a choccie milk.

I remember those Aussie lunch breaks, and how casual they were. Everybody ate outdoors, kind of milling around or just sat under a tree, there being no designated lunch rooms and certainly no formal dining areas. So food you could walk around with, lots of salads, ice creams too! Could not have been more different to the English formal school meals of steamed kidney pies and heavy custards etc.

@nelashawty

NO POS WOW ! LAUSD “doesn’t” have enough money to pay its teachers but they just signed a contract with McDonalds

R77, that has to be a joke.

I'm not a fan of what is going on in R77, but you should understand, R77, that such an arrangement saves the school district money having to run its own food service. And McD's probably kicks some money back to the school district. An arrangement like this is really outside the scope of teacher pay issues.

And R78, no it's not a joke. It has been happening for a very long time in the US, over 20 years. In many schools, there is still a basic traditional school lunch program, with the added on fast food option. Jamie Oliver and Michelle Obama got involved in school lunches because they were too commercial and unhealthy.

The tweet is confusing. If read literally, the school district will only sell Big Macs. I guess it's possible.

R79, yikes. That won't help ease any childhood obesity.

I went to a catholic school for K-8 in the 80's. Their lunches were atrocious - just tin foil TV dinner fare, and a small carton of milk. My mom wouldn't let me eat them, and instead would pack me a lunch each day - usually a pb&j and a carton of orange Hi-C. The only good thing for lunch was on Fridays, because the school sold home made pizza's to the public and to the students.

We never had pizza or hamburgers in the public school I went to, or tater tots. Whipped potatoes (made from powder), meat loaf, sloppy joes, fish sticks, spaghetti, I think hot dogs once in a while...it was all pretty good. No Mexican food at all, no Tex mex — nothing like tacos or chili. I lived on the east coast & Mexican food was considered a southwestern US thing. Hot sauce/hot food was considered southern redneck. We were the meat and potato belt of the northeast in the 60s. Hell, we didn’t even have Burger King, McD, Hardee’s, Howard Johnson. I was almost 30 by the time my hometown got a mcDs. We had a “hamburger joint” but it was locally owned, not a franchise.

The most exotic thing we ever ate at home was shrimp chow mein on Friday night once a month. When Thomas’s English muffins put a “recipe” on the back of their package for “pizza” it was the first homemade “pizza” we ever had. It consisted of a split muffin, each side toasted, then put jarred tomato sauce and thin mozzarella on top of the muffin, a few flakes of oregano, and under the broiler it went until the cheese looked melted.

The Thomas’s pizzas were a snack, btw, not a meal. My sister and I would split one muffin between the two of us

In 1978 for $1 I could get a hot dog, french fries and a small container of milk. This was at my Junior High School. My parents rarely gave me money for lunch. 99% of the time I brought my own lunch with me.

I remember buying lunch when they had grilled cheese and spaghetti and meat sauce day. They were good. The other food was probably ok, but I didn't really care for sloppy joes, hamburgers or fish sticks. The pizza was like frozen Ellio's. I loved grilled cheese sandwiches, and my mom would send me off with a thermos full of tomato soup. The cafeteria workers in elementary school were all Italian nonnas and they knew how to turn out a decent meat sauce with the ingredients they had available. I also loved the "thick" spaghetti. We rarely had spaghetti at home, but when we did it wasn't #8.

Ground beef s’mores, aisha spring rolls, deluxe water pizza, acorn squash crepes, haunted milk

R86, what is haunted milk?

Milk that floats and wails until you drink it, R87.

What’s deluxe water pizza?

Yup, that was my school, basically

R84-You must be from the NYC area if you ate Ellio's Pizza. I loved Ellio's frozen pizza ca. 1975 before it was taken over by McCain.

Our pizza was a slice of white bread covered with a half-inch of meat-heavy sauce. The cheese on top was yellow.

Then there were pizzaburgers, which my sister and I recreated from some cookbook she had.

Properly made pizzaburgers will be on a split bun, although this filling is as authentic a recipe I can find. And I'd probably use yellow cheese or Velveeta.

Pizzaburgers! I remember them from elementary and junior high school. They were pretty good, or seemed so at the time. As you say, just meaty spaghetti sauce on a bun (toasted, IIRC) with a slice of American cheese melted on top. They actually do sound tasty even now as a quick dinner if you have leftover meat sauce. I'd probably use shredded mozzarella now, or maybe shredded Cheddar, but I wouldn't refuse Kraft singles if that's all that was available.

This thread brings back memories of our grade school cafeteria cashier who we all called “Babe” because she called us all “babe” when we went through the line. She had a blond beehive hairdo and cats eye glasses with rhinestones that were easily15 years out of date by the late 70s when I was in school. I wonder what became of her and if she ever updated her look.

R81 here. I forgot to add a pic, but this is the style of pizza we could get on Fridays at my grade school. They would sell half sheets to the students for like $3. It's known as "Brier Hill" style pizza, just sauce, roasted bell peppers and Parmesan cheese - no mozzarella. They also sold egg pizza, which was just the dough topped with some olive oil & garlic, beaten egg, bell peppers & Parmesan. They would also use the remaining pizza dough to make "pizza frittas", which were just the dough shaped like a doughnut, deep fried, and tossed in sugar. Those were 10 cents each.

We had pizza burgers as well, but it was just a traditional hamburger pasta, topped with jarred sauce (like Prego), and melted mozzarella cheese, on a traditional hamburger bun. Come to think of it, I'm surprised none of the main fast food chains have ever added these to their menus.

patty, not pasta, sorry for the typo

I was in junior high in 1974 (Lawrence, KS) and our lunches were prepared from scratch in the kitchen. Cinnamon roll days were the best. They were enormous and always generously packed with cinnamon and glaze. Our junior high was round with the library and cafeteria in the inner center rings, so you could smell the cinnamon rolls baking throughout the entire school. 45 years later and I can still remember the aroma!

In my Delaware high school in the early-mid 2000's the most popular lunch by far was chicken fries, or "fryz" as I believe it was spelled on the school menu. Not sure why, as it was probably one of the least filling. I can still taste the honey mustard dipping sauce that came with them though.

Why would they serve turkey a week before Thanksgiving??!

R1 I can't believe they pulled that "manager's choice/manager's special" crap elsewhere. When I was in school, the cafeteria food was always better at the beginning of the year and would go downhill from there. In the final weeks, "manager's choice" was on the menu every day. I guess that sounds better than "leftover shit we need to get rid of." If you didn't bring your lunch, you didn't know what you might have to choke down.

I went to public school in the 70s, and it was still fish every Friday.

Pizza burgers should have cheese inside the patty, not just melted on the top.

R103 is correct. A true pizza burger is made like this: Take raw ground meat or sausage, ground bologna or spam, tomato sauce, grated cheese, garlic (powder) and oregano. Mix it all together. In a cafeteria, nothing needed to be grated or ground - you would dump everything in the Hobart and it was strong enough to homogenize everything - entire blocks of gov't cheese, spam, whatever.

This mixture was then spread on buns, sprinkled with some more cheese (sometimes not always), and baked until the meat was cooked through. There is lots of grease runoff on these, and lots more gets absorbed by the buns.

It's an amusing thing to make for nostalgia purposes. They would be good made on slider buns and served with lots of booze to wash them down.

R104, are you sure the ground beef isn't cooked first? It would take a long time to cook thoroughly in the oven. Also, with all the fat in the ground beef liquifying and the water leaching out of the tomato sauce as the mixture bakes, I would think the bun would be saturated to the point of disintegration. I'd think you'd want to add the cheese topping in the last 10 minutes or so; otherwise, it would melt completely into the mixture and make even more of a mess.

Apparently, what we had were not true pizza burgers because they definitely were like a very meaty meat sauce (like you'd use for spag bol, only with a higher meat:sauce ratio), dumped on a bun, topped with a slice of American cheese and run under a broiler for a few minutes. Come to think of it, there was nothing burger-like about them.

We had $.55 lunch in suburban D.C. elementary schools with $.10 ice cream sandwiches sold off to the side. I liked the rectangle cheese pizza (not on a slice of bread) but often I just ate ice cream sandwiches. I do remember my mom, who worked full time) would make the same thing we had for school lunch for dinner. I’m pretty sure we had tacos but no burritos. Later in suburban Seattle junior high friends would walk across the street and eat at McDonalds and the vice principal made us clean the lunchroom as punishment when he “caught” us walking back so I had my mom wrote a note I had permission to leave...they called her to check the veracity of the note.

R105 the recipe I used was from a Minnesnowta lunch lady cookbook published in 1981. I'm sure there were different versions of the pizza burger, but ours contained a mixture of raw meat and spam, mushed up cheese and tomato sauce. There was no cheese topping on my version; it was mixed in. The whole thing bakes up into a greasy, sizzling, grayish pink topping on a bun. My sister's recipe said to broil them, which dried them out some. And yes it's very greasy which is part of their appeal.

I loved Western burger day (seasoned ground beef baked inside a roll, similar to Bierocks), but hated Salisbury steak with mushroom gravy day. I don't know why it set me off, but I couldn't even look at the Salisbury steak without nearly dry heaving. I'd bring my own lunch when I saw it would be on the menu. Now, I'd probably think it was not so bad.

Our cafeteria made great ham and cheese sandwiches where the ham and cheese were baked into the bread dough. They were made like cafeteria pizza is, in big rectangular pans, then cut up.

Though we joked that hamburger patties were not actual meat, they were still better than my mom's greasy burgers. Sorry, mom!

Peach cobbler was a regular dessert offering, as were "haystack" cookies, which consisted of 2-inch tall stacks of Chinese Noodles that had been covered in what was probably almond bark-style chocolate. They were very good.

There were three drink options: whole milk, lowfat milk, or chocolate milk. Everyone chose the chocolate except for Steven, the sickly kid who drank lowfat milk because his hypochondriac mom made him avoid everything good.

I lived a block from school and started going home for lunch in 5th grade (age 11). I liked having a 45 minute break but had no idea how to cook, so I'd come home and fry baloney (I don't know why) or make ramen noodles or a hot pocket and catch the last 15 minutes of old Perry Mason reruns on TBS. Looking back, it was probably a mistake nutritionally and socially, but I hated being at school and looked forward to that break every day.

R86 / R88 Haunted milk sounds hysterical.

R108 I loved the Western Burger day..." Of course your prototypical frau has got you covered with a recipe for it

This menu looks pretty much like what my So Cal school served for lunches in '74. School lunch cost a quarter, a dime and a nickel.

Yes, 40 cents.

We loved our lunch ladies. They were out classmates mothers. They knew our names, knew our brothers & sisters names. They called us honey and sweetie and dear. They loved us.

When I was in the 6th grade (1975) the junior high school was closed for days due to the sauce they smothered the burritos with gave everyone food poisoning. Luckily I asked for no sauce and had a nice little vacation.

I went to Catholic schools.

Not really a good school lunch tradition going on there.

I can still remember the sight of all the vegetable in the trash when you'd dump your tray. Kids didn't eat them. Do they now I wonder.

I just thought of that chocolate pudding with peanut butter mixed in that they served in my elementary/jr. high cafeterias. And I tried to look it up just now unsuccessfully. Anybody else remember that?