“The food IS horrible”
What are the ingredients? How is it prepared? No way it should be that bad, if it is properly cooked and seasoned.
I recall that when I was in school, long, long ago, our school’s dietician, Mrs Disney, would make vegetable soup, using leftovers from the previous day’s menu, as well as fresh ingredients. We kids labeled it “garbage soup”. It was not very pleasant to look at, for children who had been raised on Campbell’s, but it tasted okay.
Obviously it is not prepared well.
Growing children need quality food in ample amounts.
Carbs, protein and fats. Yes I said fats. Our bodies need fat to work well.
I really don’t care if this food isn’t as bad as the kids are saying. No one other then the kid himself and the parents should be in charge of what they are consuming.
I hate even debating the merits of fat moochele’ s govt program. I don’t care if it’s good or not. It is all sorts of wrong to control Americans like this.
“We kids labeled it “garbage soup”.”
I went to prep school, and lived in the dorm. I ate some indefinable foods back then. School bought a 55 gallon drum of cheap peanut butter. No one was eating it, so they started putting chunks of it in the morning oatmeal! Blech! And we ate untold pounds of mystery meat sausages. Lousy food, but a great education!
Back in the day, almost everything was made from scratch by our lunch ladies who were country moms who knew how to cook. OMG, no one could study the half hour before lunch period because of the hot yeast roll aroma drifting through the halls. We’d have lemon pepper chicken with real pieces of meat. There was free government butter for those rolls and the potatoes. That was when no one ever heard of peanut allergies and they’d come up with every imaginable way to give us peanut butter every day. Big pb cookies, bp and apples, pb&j sandwiches, pb and honey in a little dixie cup for those rolls, etc. The free government cheese was the best and they’d make mac & cheese, yummmm. How we managed to survive without Moo and the peanut police is beyond me.
I freeze leftovers of veggies,meats and broths. Once a month I make a batch of soup, either chicken or beef based, depending on what I have the most of. I use a fair amount of fresh ingredients each time and it really makes the best soup, ever. I add barley to the beef and rice to the chicken. I make about a gallon and freeze it in quart containers. Paired with a green salad and biscuits, it is a favorite.
We call it garbage soup, too! But it looks, smells and tastes great, with a rich broth, lots of meat, veggies, rice or barley.
Sometimes I have smaller amounts of both beef and chicken broth and the available leftover meat is pork. Then, I make hot & sour soup and pair it with homemade eggrolls or purchased BBQ pork steamed dumplings or pot stickers and rice. My husband will request this if I haven’t made it recently.
Most women have these sorts of recipes in their rotation. I am sure many of your classmates experienced some variation of this sort of soup at home. I always felt sorry for the classmates whose mothers only served condensed soups. It was so bland and uninteresting.
I’d say you all were lucky to have Mrs. Disney. Our lunch ladies were all country cooks and most of our lunches were more than ok. Their pies, OTOH, were fabulous.
Whatever the kids who are complaining are used to, it likely isn’t black bean, corn and quinoa salad, baked kale chips or garbanzo burgers in haute cuisine amounts.
The “food” — if you wish to call it that — is prepared at district headquarters — like sausage that no one is supposed to watch being made!!
I miss the old days too when all breakfasts and lunches were made at the school site itself and not trucked in.
I assume a lot of it is government left overs — I’m not kidding when I said that some of it is NOT identifiable. SO much of it goes in the trash, it’s a sin —but worse is the schools trying to pass whatever it is off as FOOD.
I remember looking forward to spaghetti day on Wednesday, fish sticks on Fridays, giant chocolate chip cookies hot out of the oven, made-from-scratch coffee cakes that we could smell cooking from the street in front of the school— and more. We kids couldn’t wait to get the weekly menu to check out which days we wanted to eat in the cafeteria. Those days are long gone...