School Meals

Do you remember your first school lunch? Mine costs my Mom 50 cents per meal. This was in 1982. The first time I bought school lunch, I thought I was badass. The school I went to sold lunches by the week. So a week’s lunch costs $2.50. To my surprise, a lot of kids brought their own lunch. They had cool lunch boxes. Some plastic. Some metal. The metals ones were rough, as they rusted pretty quickly. The lunch at school was so scant. I think about it now. You got a peanut butter and jelly, a cookie and a milk. For a 2^nd grader, that was a snack, not a meal. I ditched buying lunch pretty early. I would say about 4^th grade. Started packing my own lunch. My Mom preferred just giving me money. I packed a thermos, a Twinkie, a turkey sandwich. It was a “Dukes Of Hazzard” thermos. Catherine Bach was on it. For some odd reason, by the time I got to lunch the thermos would leak onto my sandwich. It made it soggy, and gross. I tossed that, and ended up just eating the Twinkie. The most obvious of obvious slipped my brain. My parents owned a Chinese restaurant. Common sense would be that I would pack Chinese food. I did one day and ended up trading my shrimp in lobster sauce for a bologna sandwich. Looking back, that was seriously stupid. I had gourmet food. But I wanted to eat what everyone else was eating. And I did love tater tots. Still do to this day.

I guess later on, school lunch got a little better the older I got. They also started to cost more. We got square pizza and mac and cheese. The slop was burnt at the corners. Funny how when I see that now, it takes me back to Fridays at school.

In high school we started to go outside of school. In the morning we’d stop off at Perkins to a get a bottomless pot of coffee and burger and fries. High school breakfast was great.