When I was a kid I always wanted to eat school lunch. You just weren’t cool if you ate anything out of a paper bag. Plus one can only eat so many sandwiches before even a glimpse of a brown bag makes you vomit uncontrollably. Tuna fish, ham and cheese, turkey and cheese, PB&J, peanut butter and honey, egg salad, toasted cheese, jelly bean and Nutella… enough sandwiches to last a guy a lifetime and a few for the road after. Well my sweet old mum managed to get me school lunch more as I got older which propelled me to previously unknown social ranks.
There were a couple highlights in school lunch. The first and foremost was pizza. We had pizza once a week in elementary and on this day, when the lunch bell would ring kids would stampede to the cafeteria foaming at the mouths to get a mouthful of greasy bliss. Once you got into junior high and high school they served pizza every day. Kids shit their pants at this revelation until a few weeks worth of eating it made them do so literally.
At my school, once you were in 4th grade kids could get a turn to serve lunch. I don’t remember why everyone was so ecstatic to participate in child labor. I do know part of it was probably the totally awesome hats you got to wear. They were these disposable sailor cap looking things. I guess since they were made entirely out of toilet paper the idea was you could cover your head with them first and your ass later after too much pizza. Well, for some reason no one got more excited about serving, than when you got to hand out pizza slices. Getting to serve that was like winning the Powerball. I know because I always felt stiffed that I never got to do so.
Another lunch menu highlight was chocolate milk. They could only serve it on short Wednesdays because it made kids too ADD to do so any other day. I don’t know why they were worried about that more than the Tampico. Tampico was this less than 1% (!) juice, high fructose drink. If you got chocolate milk that was a few days old you had to throw it out. On the other hand if you got a Tampico that was a few months old you hit the jackpot. I went out of my way to scrounge up expired Tampico. Instead of going bad, the juice tonic would just ferment and everyone who had any would go back to class arm in arm singing slurred renditions of Bohemian Rhapsody.
In junior high and high school, lunch was the best part of the day. In elementary however it was torture. First of all there was the military style seating. They had these 1,000-foot long tables you had to sit in classroom order on. There was generally a faculty member prowling the aisles with a whiffle bat to ensure you ate your food in misery and silence. The few times they weren’t there lunch would break down into pure pandemonium. There was one time it got into a full-fledged food fight utilizing the catapult like abilities of sporks. Somebody shot an orange slice directly at my face that I ducked. Right at that precise moment the principle walked in taking a squishy orange load right on his forehead.
There was also a stumpy, disgruntled looking lunch lady standing by the garbage cans blocking the portal to recess freedom to all those who hadn’t eaten all their food. There was generally something on the menu we didn’t like, be it butter bathed brussel sprouts or rubbery roast beef. I’m not really sure why anybody gave a damn if I ate my brussel sprouts. To get around this, we’d take turns being the sacrificial lamb. Everyone would give whoever’s turn it was all the vomitous stuff they didn’t want and that person would continue on in misery and silence until saved by the bell.
Junior high and high school lunch had a lot more options. Every day you had the choice of pizza, salad and potato, hot lunch, or just living off the vending machines with an intravenous supply of quarters. This is what most of the emos did and why it was an endless source of entertainment to glue quarters to the tiles around the machines and watch all the greasy, black haired skeletons try to claw them off. Hot lunch was really good my early years but eventually the district started cracking down and only serving food that was precooked at secret government facilities. I guess there were a few too many instances of playing magician with a hair in your esophagus or discovering a horsefly hive in your cake for anyone to feel safe eating a fresh, cooked from scratch lunch. After that the lunch foods started really going down hill.
Often times at the high school they would have day old pizza. This meant without paying any extra you could either have your single slice of fresh pizza or two slices of day old pizza. It would be insanity not to take the two-for-one until you realized it was Monday and contemplated what day old pizza truly meant. I think this is where the trend of dipping pizza in ranch came from in schools because then people couldn’t really tell how revolting their pizza was. Sort of like how sailors would eat hard-tack in the dark. Ignorance is bliss.
After awhile though I came to the conclusion that lunch pizza was where schools make all their money. I’m sure if you looked at the books you’d find some massive embezzlement scheme where some of the higher up lunch ladies and administration have secret Italian villas and enormous offshore bank accounts. It’s simple math. You have a $5 Little Ceaser’s Pizza. This pizza generally has around 10 slices in it, often more. A school pizza lunch costs you $1.25. Now if all you get is an alcoholic month old Tampico, a few lettuce leaves, maybe a cookie, and one piece of pizza? Multiply this by hundreds of kids a day. Pure genius.
I suppose if there’s a life lesson to be learned about school lunch it’s that "Ignorance is bliss".
