did you eat school dinners, were they good?

[Fuchs66]

noooo spam fritters were ace fatty salty yum

from someone who comes from a country where deep fried Mars bars and Pizza are considered food

nope, we had it at Scottish state primary in the 80's

 

[sojourner]

There's a lot of fussy fuckers on this thread, have to say

 

[Guineveretoo]

There's a lot of fussy fuckers on this thread, have to say

We weren't allowed to be fussy.

I remember being forced to eat liver and onions, too, which I was never made to eat at home, because my mother didn't like it.

No wonder I went vegetarian!

 

[Fuchs66]

There's a lot of fussy fuckers on this thread, have to say

Yep I've been on Russian army (officers) food before for up to 6 weeks at a go and compared to that school dinners were 5 star plus

 

[ajdown]

noooo spam fritters were ace fatty salty yum

I saw them in Iceland recently.

 

[sojourner]

Yep I've been on Russian army (officers) food before for up to 6 weeks at a go and compared to that school dinners were 5 star plus

What does that consist of?

 

[Fuchs66]

I saw them in Iceland recently.

The country or the crappy shop?

 

[Fuchs66]

What does that consist of?

Boiled buckwheat, porridge made of various ground grain, fatty sausage, overcooked liver and lots of soup with a half inch layer of fat on top. No variety, no spices and no taste. Fuck knows what the conscripts are on (probably the same minus liver and sausage). You can survive on it but it isn't very nice.

 

[Kanda]

The shop or the crappy bankrupt country?

Fixed

 

[Fuchs66]

Fixed

I saw what you did there

 

[N_igma]

I don't really remember primary school dinners, except for the odd time we would get chocolate caramel squares for desert, they went down a treat.

 

[oryx]

Our school dinners were revolting beyond belief - and yes, being up north we had tapioca!

I didn't like tapioca but it was just about edible compared to some of the other culinary monstrosities:

- Liver with a greenish tinge and tubes in, in a sort of browny pink gravy with flakes in
- Fish floating in an inch of oversalted water. It smelt of piss and stank the school out (as did the liver)
- Cabbage also floating in an inch of oversalted water
- Beetroot juice running into lumpy mash
- Something masquerading as 'roast beef' which I think was actually elastic bands in gravy.

Even the relatively inoffensive stuff like carrots and roast potatoes and chocolate sponge tasted distinctly odd. Fuck me, even the water tasted odd when served with school dinners!

There was a thing called cheese pie which I could just about eat. It was a sort of pale and lukewarm curdled fluid on hard pastry, but edible compared to the other stuff.

 

[Saffy]

They used to do a massive egg and cheese pie that I loved, it's only later on in years that I guess it was kind of like a quiche. That with cheese mash and veg.

I remember sometimes they used to have cheese, apple and a cracker at pudding time and we all thought it was the best thing ever.

Oh and smoked cod, vile bright yellow stuff.

 

[scifisam]

Not sure about infants. I do remember everyone having to sit down to say grace before we ate, no matter whether you had packed lucnhes or dinners, even though that wasn't a religious school, and then getting told to leave the table for telling the other kids a naughty version of 'for what we are about to receive, may the Lord make us truly grateful. Amen.' I have no idea how I made that naughty. Probably 'for what we are about to puke up' or something typically six-year-old.

Junior school I went home and watched TV for lunch. Didn't really eat anything. I got my energy through osmosis from the adults around me.

My daughter's school dinners are really, really tasty. They wouldn't fit into the healthiest diet ever, but they're trying to get a hundred different kids from different backgrounds to eat this food, so they play safe with pasta including hidden veg, mild but tasty curries, and always a bit of salad on the side - which quite a few kids do eat - and they have a variety of veggie options. The puddings are still usually stodge and pink custard. I like that. Unhealthy, yeah, but that's the food of childhood.

 

[spanglechick]

we had tapioca in london in the eighties.

 

[electrogirl]

I never had them at primary school, my mum gave me a packed lunch but when I got to secondary school I pretty much ate Pizza/ Turker Burger and chips for lunch every day. I remember the bags the chips came in being soooo greazy that they nearly broke.

We fucking loved it.

Oh and an Ice Cream van visited the playground every lunch too where we stocked up on Wham bars and Screwball.

 

[moomoo]

I went to boarding school so didn't have a choice.

Breakfasts were good I seem to remember. Then we had lunch, low tea which was a glass of squash and a biscuit after lessons and then high tea which was dinner.

And there was a kitchen in the house that we could use with a kettle and a toaster so we didn't starve.

 

[Geri]

"Mint Green Custard".

That was lush, all thick and gloopy. Served with chocolate pudding.

 

[Hellsbells]

Mushy peas and mushy sweede ((shudder))

 

[pogofish]

Oh yes

I pleaded with my mum and dad not to do the free meals, when they were both on the dole, because the fucking hassle you got was unbearable. You were made to actually stand in a separate queue at my school if you got free dinners. Might as well have just stamped our foreheads 'unclean'

Exactly - As well as the separate queue, at one of my schools, you had to go to a different counter in the school office on a Monday morning break to claim them. So you had to walk the entire length of a corridor queued-out with kids waiting to pay, then have your eligibility double checked - often loudly in front of many of them. Especially as I was on the "discretionary" list because my mother's accomodation status made automatic free meals problematic.

Even when I later worked in schools and they had supposedly done away with the stigmatisation, I still found things like schools issuing different coloured tickets etc. Well through the 1980s

 

[pogofish]

not least the kentish phenomenon, spead into the london burbs, of Gypsy tart. Which is basically condensed milk boiled up with demerara sugar and poured into a pastry case.

We had that up here too - It was one of the better things, although they did tend to drown it in pink/pus-coloured custard which melted the filling & turned the case to mush.

 

[pogofish]

Is tapioca a private school thing???

Nope, they had it in the shittiest of state schools too - In fact, Tapioca just about sums-up all that was bad about the entire school dinner system.

 

[pogofish]

Oh and an Ice Cream van visited the playground every lunch too where we stocked up on Wham bars and Screwball.

Our ice cream van sold at least as much fags as sweeties.

Oh and within the last year or so, a head teacher here was prosecuted & lost her job for trying to beat a child into finishing its dinner, so I presume not a lot has changed that way either?

 

[berniedicters]

School dinners were, for me, the crucible of lots of my attitudes towards food and authority. At the beginning, I had them, but my early vegetarian leanings came up against disciplinarian dinner ladies pretty quickly, and I can still recall sitting at a deserted table with a lunchtime gauleiter cajoling me, increasingly frustratedly, to eat my mince, or - worse - spam fritter. In the end, I resorted to subterfuge, and would hurl the spam fritter out of the window, or "volunteer" to take other people's plates to scrape, in the hope of "losing" my uneaten mince, generally to no avail.

I learned lots of things; cameraderie, or who you could trust to cover for you, how to deal with authority, in the shape of the dinner lady who'd deliberately ruin the whole meal by pouring gravy over the lot when asked not to, or the inevitable and regular punishment for lobbing spam fritters out of windows of being made to spend the lunch break standing outside the HM's office (tip: take an interesting book) .

And a certain revolutionary tendency that arose once I'd persuaded my mum to let me take packed lunches instead: an edict went out that packed lunches could only be eaten in the canteen, followed by a further one that said that those eating packed lunches could not eat them until all the school dinners kids had eaten. At which point I declared UDI, somehow exploited some confusion between school and home, and took my siblings off to the local fields to eat our packed lunches in peace and freedom from the oppressive tyranny of the school dinner ladies.

No, school dinners were rank, and I hated them!

 

[kalidarkone]

i'm talking priamry school dinners

i loved them - apart from the days when you had cheesy mash or semolina

madge seems to be in awe of them (more to do with the fact that she gets a 'big proper pudding' )

i loved chocolate cake and custard, and remember the joy that spread along the dinner line when it got out that it was chips today! (but hated those few times when there were no chips left )

I mostly loved them apart from 3 things: Spam fritters -I mean wtf? Pease pudding and some strange meat in gravy which I could not identify and was disgusting.

 

[berniedicters]

Oh yes

I pleaded with my mum and dad not to do the free meals, when they were both on the dole, because the fucking hassle you got was unbearable. You were made to actually stand in a separate queue at my school if you got free dinners. Might as well have just stamped our foreheads 'unclean'

You know, up until recently, I'd have put that down as a bit of bureaucratic ineptitude - the sort of senseless discriminatory cruelty that would have retired school admins and the like facepalming with embarrassment at how they could have been so heartless.

Now I'm not so sure.

I suspect that, given half the chance, a lot of schools would happily collude with that special brand of nastiness that kids have and find a way of "accidentally" letting it be known who the free school meal types were.

In the same way that the dinner ladies would "accidentally" make sure the kid who hated carrots got loads - and was made to eat them all - or (as in my case) ensure that the entire plateful of food was smothered in mince or gravy.

When we wring our hands about the state of society, we seem to forget all those corrosive little attacks on people's sense of justice and fairness that we made them put up with as kids. Perhaps it doesn't make that much difference - but it's pretty clear from this thread that there are still plenty of people around for whom the shit dished out at lunchtime (and I'm not even talking about the food here) is still a matter of interest and relevance to them now!

ETA: and having seen pogofish's contributions, I see that other forms of institutionalised harassment were taking place more recently, so I wouldn't be at all surprised if it wasn't still happening now.

 

[Epona]

I loved school dinners, ours were always very much the meat and 2 veg variety. I developed a deep love of cabbage whilst at school. And even though I don't have a sweet tooth, the puddings were ace - a great slab of some variety of sponge pudding with a matching custard (yellow, pink, or chocolate depending upon what type of sponge it was!) And rice pudding or semolina with a dollop of jam in the middle.

There were 2 school meals that I recall hating - one was the concoction they called Spanish meatballs, which was really really greasy, and the other was eggs in cheese sauce. But mostly they were bloody lovely.

 

[Ceej]

We were not given chips at primary school, nor allowed to take packed lunches. Everyone ate the same rubbish, and we were forced to eat everything on our plates, even if it was over cooked and disgusting. We were even forced to eat the puddings, which were often gross, too. I have never seen tapioca pudding since, and would be happy for that to remain the case.

Mind you, I was at primary school before most of the people on here, so perhaps things improved in more recent years!

Me too Guin - you'd sit in front of your plate until it was gone. Chum and hot air pie and frogspawn was my least favourite. My mum could never understand why I always seemed to have mashed potatoes in my pockets!

I'm a school manager and one of the things I did in school was get rid of the contract caterers and bring the meals service in house - spag bol, curries, chicken and mushroom pie, macci cheese, fresh fruit salad, smoothies...all luvverly stuff and no processed food. Kids and parents both love them.

 

[_pH_]

I don't remember being made to eat all my school dinner, but my mum does - her and her brother had empty baccy tins in their pockets which they'd put the bits they didn't want in. they were called 'gristle tins'

 

[aqua]

at primary school I used to love school dinners then mum put me on a diet and stopped me having school dinners to have packed lunches instead

I used to love their mashed potato, and their stews and deep fried spam occassionally - their pudding were ace too!

at secondary school it was really rare I was allowed dinners, but when I did I loved chocolate concrete (with green custard )