Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
Our school lunches where I work are a lot better then this but were also a petty good district in the state with decent funding.
That's a snack.
Like this is sort of the amount that you would get in the afternoon here if you have a long day. A sandwich or something with maybe a yogurt and some juice or something.
It was all so disgusting, too. Everything was sitting under warming lamps that I swear were just regular light bulbs. The fries were like, cold, wet and dry all at the same time. And the tortilla in the burrito was super dried out and it probably had that yoga mat fake meat filler in it but we liked those best. But yeah, that's why we would often just go across the street and get rice instead of all that, it was at least hot and fresh from the rice cooker. It was kinda crazy, there would be a line of 15-20 kids outside of that restaurant waiting to get a fucking cup of white rice with nothing else on it because it was tastier than our school food. Recounting this is really making me understand just how insane it was to be fed this way.
Were those sausages in gravy in your photo? And were those normal Dill pickles or something else? I would've devoured that as a kid if I had a choice between yours and mine
God dammit that is dark! And they do look like the saddest fries anyone has ever seen.
Answering your question they are small sausages in gravy yeah, very popular with taters here, kids especially love this dish. These days there is also a vegan version of this. And that is dill pickles. Could also be pickled beets or such in a dish like this one. But this is definitely a local school lunch favourite.
We also do the fish fingers and chicken nuggets sometimes, but the salad buffet and a side of mashed potato or rice and a gravy of some sort will also be there with it. Fish finger gravy is typically a spinach gravy and its so good.
You also get that dry cracker bread every day in school, except on soup and porridge days there is usually soft bread and some veggies, cheese or ham to put on it, because the soup or porridge alone isn't considered filling enough. And milk every day, these days also a plant milk option. The milk historically was the dairy industry lobbying in schools, everyone had to drink all this milk for healthy bones and teeth. We had hilarious dairy propaganda posters in our school cafeteria.
Feels so bizarre to me that these kinds of scratch-prepared meals would be served in schools. Everything in ours comes from a plastic bag. No wonder a lot of Americans have such an unhealthy diet, we are literally conditioned from birth to eat that crap. I am very lucky that once I discovered vegetables as a young adult I started to eat EVERYTHING and now I generally have a decent diet (when I have the energy to cook anyway).
The dairy lobbying was definitely a huge thing here, too, but the actually advertising has died down a bit. Commercials pre-2000's were so fucking weird lol
One of the weirdest cultural differences for me when I had a partner in the US was the way he talked about his mom "cooking homemade food" and it turned out to be precooked stuff like chips and nuggets on paper plates. On the other hand it was endlessly odd to him the way we would peel our own boiled potatoes for every meal and how I made food from base ingredients. Like he would get a pancake mix and I would get milk, flour and eggs and mix it.
We genuinely don't have those types of premade things even today and ready meals are very different to the stuff in the US. It too is mostly basic everyday food here, just made on a large scale. Basically the same fish soup is made at home, eaten at school and sold as a ready meal.
The grocery store in the US was also a truly wild experience for me. The produce section was so small compared to the shelves and shelves of somehow premade stuff. It's very different and I suppose it is reflected on the school lunch too.