School Lunches

SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
We also got free school milk.
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Yep. That was some time after WW2. We'd have the milk delivered in 1/4 pt bottles for morning break ( which I think was about 10.30am). First come, first served. Horrifically warm in the summer and frozen in the winter, but, hey, it was milk - with cream on top!
 
We could sign up for milk, but my parents never did as they knew I wouldn't drink it unless very cold.
So I just drank milk at home. To this day I will refuse to drink milk that's not properly cold
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
I actually have found memories of my infants school lunches but then we didn't have much at home and school lunch was our only cooked meal. I know now looking back that my mum was skipping meals too feed us.

My favourite was steak and kidney pudding because all the other kids hated kidney so I'd swap my steak (which was stringy) for their kidney. On a table of 6 or 8, it meant I got more kidney than they did steak. I don't remember the vegetables being up to much though. We also got free school milk.

I'm trying to think when I started there, I guess it must have been 76 or 77, but none was a village school, not a city school, so it may have been different.
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I went to a village school too, the start age at the time was 5 years old.
I don’t remember enjoying a single school lunch! Some of it was passable and some of it was just awful 🤮
 
The only good school lunch when I was growing up was pizza, and 1970’s rectangular pizza is rather iconic now, with lots of copycat recipes out there and plenty of blogs of people waxing nostalgic about it.

Thing is…it wasn’t that good, it’s just that everything else was so bad. However, on Pizza Friday (twice a month), everyone bought the school lunch, even the wealthy pretty girls who had drivers bring them school. Everyone wanted that pizza!
 
badjak said:
We could sign up for milk, but my parents never did as they knew I wouldn't drink it unless very cold.
So I just drank milk at home. To this day I will refuse to drink milk that's not properly cold
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Unfortunately, in the 2nd grade (8 yo) I was very thirsty at lunch and took a big gulp of my milk, only to find that it was curdled. Now I will cook with milk or add half n half to coffee and I like heavy cream, but I can't stand to drink milk, cold or not!
 
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wow.............that was a long time ago. I packed a lunch most days. Usually sandwiches and chips. Usually PBJ.
 
SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
I went to a village school too, the start age at the time was 5 years old.
I don’t remember enjoying a single school lunch! Some of it was passable and some of it was just awful 🤮
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It's probably more a reflection of how bad things were at home. We were in a council house (luckily very edge of the village) and my mum volunteered at a home for battered wives and their children (she was one.) So things were very tight.

Breakfast is something I don't really remember that well other than a slice of toast with bramble jelly, or porridge but no sugar or jam.

Evening meals, well the only 2 things I remember were Heinz tomato soup (no idea if it was Heinz though!) with a little grated cheese in it for protein or spaghetti on toast.

So a cooked meal for school lunch was the highlight unless we went to our grandparents house, but that meant they had to pick us up from quite a long way out, or we had a long bus journey to their home with 3 changes involved.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
It's probably more a reflection of how bad things were at home. We were in a council house (luckily very edge of the village) and my mum volunteered at a home for battered wives and their children (she was one.) So things were very tight.

Breakfast is something I don't really remember that well other than a slice of toast with bramble jelly, or porridge but no sugar or jam.

Evening meals, well the only 2 things I remember were Heinz tomato soup (no idea if it was Heinz though!) with a little grated cheese in it for protein or spaghetti on toast.

So a cooked meal for school lunch was the highlight unless we went to our grandparents house, but that meant they had to pick us up from quite a long way out, or we had a long bus journey to their home with 3 changes involved.
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Good on your mum though ay, helping out other women unfortunate enough to find themselves in the same position as she did.

Tinned spaghetti and beans seem to have been a staple in every Brits life from that era.

But you certainly have my sympathies if school lunch was the highlight. When did you discover food could be so much more?
 
SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
Tinned spaghetti and beans seem to have been a staple in every Brits life from that era.
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And a generation earlier. I also had those as a kid. But I really liked school dinners. I think I've said that before. I was vegetarian so they gave me cheese in place of meat and more vegetables. They certainly knew how to make a very good steamed pudding and apple crumble. And I seem to recall that nothing was over sweet or over salty. The custard wasn't anywhere near as sweet as custard is today. The women doing the cooking were home cooks.
 
SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
But you certainly have my sympathies if school lunch was the highlight. When did you discover food could be so much more?
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My Grannie used to cook for me every Wednesday. Grandad would pick us up after school and we'd have the evening there. Plus I lived with them a couple of times over the years. My Grannie actually became vegetarian so she could learn to cook for me and even after she started eating meat again, Wednesday's were always vegetarian with meat on the side for those who wanted it. She would always send me home with another serving for Thursday night because at home, we cooked for ourselves from 11 onwards. My parents just refused to acknowledge I was vegetarian and simply didn't cook for me which she was livid about.

Once I got to university, I asked her for her recipes and when she passed, I got her recipe book. And then took up cooking myself.
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
My Grannie used to cook for me every Wednesday. Grandad would pick us up after school and we'd have the evening there. Plus I lived with them a couple of times over the years. My Grannie actually became vegetarian so she could learn to cook for me and even after she started eating meat again, Wednesday's were always vegetarian with meat on the side for those who wanted it. She would always send me home with another serving for Thursday night because at home, we cooked for ourselves from 11 onwards. My parents just refused to acknowledge I was vegetarian and simply didn't cook for me which she was livid about.

Once I got to university, I asked her for her recipes and when she passed, I got her recipe book. And then took up cooking myself.
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What a lovely Grannie. No wonder she was livid though.

I had a similar experience of becoming a vegetarian when I was 14. My mum just refused to cook for me, not even the accompanying sides like the veg or carbs.
She would sometimes buy me the most revolting vegetarian frozen ready meals that contained a lot of cheese, unfortunately at the time I didn’t know I was a coeliac so they gave me terrible stomach ache.

I think she was half trying to punish me for becoming vegetarian and half trying to starve me back into eating meat.
I lasted three years but got so thin, so hungry and so unwell I did go back to eating meat.
I didn’t have a lot of choice, the small amount of money I earned at the weekend waitressing had to go on bus fares and educational supplies.
I was far too embarrassed to admit to anyone my wealthy mother was not helping me in anyway so at lunch time I’d make an excuse that I had a job to do or I’d just go home and miss my classes.

As I write this I realise it’s sounds just awful but at the time it was normal for parents to behave in very odd ways towards their children. Most of the children I knew growing up didn’t come from what you’d now call enlightened parents!
 
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SandwichShortOfAPicnic said:
I write this I realise it’s sounds just awful but at the time it was normal for parents to behave in very odd ways towards their children. Most of the children I knew growing up didn’t come from what you’d now call enlightened parents!
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I think I must have been very lucky. My parents took my vegetarianism seriously. They even visited the bread factory to enquire as to whether animal fat was used in the making of their bread. This was in the early 60's when vegetarianism was quite unusual. I've mentioned elsewhere that my Mum was totally blind but nevertheless she did all the cooking except sometimes at weekends when Dad helped. Basically I had lots of vegetables, eggs and cheese. It was fine. We were quite poor and I had free school dinners. But our council house was an end if terrace with a big garden and my Dad grew loads of vegetables and we had chickens, so plenty of eggs.

And I loved school dinners so I got well fed, I think.
 
Morning Glory said:
I think I must have been very lucky. My parents took my vegetarianism seriously. They even visited the bread factory to enquire as to whether animal fat was used in the making of their bread. This was in the early 60's when vegetarianism was quite unusual. I've mentioned elsewhere that my Mum was totally blind but nevertheless she did all the cooking except sometimes at weekends when Dad helped. Basically I had lots of vegetables, eggs and cheese. It was fine. We were quite poor and I had free school dinners. But our council house was an end if terrace with a big garden and my Dad grew loads of vegetables and we had chickens, so plenty of eggs.

And I loved school dinners so I got well fed, I think.
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I think you probably did get very lucky!
Mr SSOAP also enjoyed his school dinners but boarders definitely have a different relationship with food compared to day pupils and other normies 😂
 
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