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Mashed potatoes with gravy. It was the only time you saw the kids who brought their lunch on a daily basis pony up to buy it.

Friday fish fry by far.

We had similar "pizzas," served on hamburger buns. I never did figure out how they got the meat to the consistency of paste, but for some reason I loved it. As for the grilled cheese sandwiches mentioned in the article, I distinctly remember (from 50 years ago!!) seeing the sandwiches literally lying saturated in an inch or so of margerine in big institutional size stainless steel pans. I wonder if that's where I acquired my life-long obsessive love of grease.

LIL SMOKIES & TATER TOTS!!! -- Those mini sausages. Yum!

I really liked the spaghetti with meat sauce for some reason. I mean, I even knew it wasn't good! The spaghetti was soft, and the sauce was sweet-ish, but I loved it! And the burritos I knew probably came frozen...the breaded chicken strips...but the best thing were the chocolate chip cookies. Soft, delicious, chocolatey cookies for 30 cents. I sometimes dream about them :(

I really, really hated the pizza squares. The cheese was FOUL.

In the LA schools they had a 10 minutes break that was called Nutrition. The caf served these absolutely fabulous and totally non-nutritious cinnamon rolls. I found the recipe online once, apparently lots of LA school kids still fantasize about those rolls.

Also the caf cake. They served a yellow cake with the best chocolate frosting.

Aside from those 2 items, I don't remember anything else about caf food.

well i personally really enjoyed these m&m cookies in high school, raw in the center. wonderful, they were 3 for a dollar and that was my meal haha.

in elementary school however i relied on the chicken nuggets.. and dominos on fridays. thank god for outsourced shitty pizza :)

tater tots

chicken fajitas

spaghetti with meat sauce blanketed in American cheese product

meatloaf sandwiches (the meatloaf itself, no; second day in a sandwich, YES)

chicken fingers were scary, but juicy and rubbery at the same time.

even though the food was 'bad,' i enjoyed a lot of it. although i had and have the metabolism of a camel's hump. :(

I really loved everything about high school lunch. I remember this dressing esp. It wasn't french or catalina, it was kinda orange and we put it on damned near everything. It was great as was the rock hard pizza you could drive a nail with, the turkey chunks in instant mashed taters, overcooked spaghetti and grease sauce, tacos with greasy orange mystery meat. Damn it was all good. I guess I wasn't a picky eater cause I would frequently eat my classmates food.

By any standard it was probably not very good, but I guess to some degree I was all about quantity and not so much about quality.

Mashed potatoes/chili con carne and then my aunt's pistachio jello salad. (She was a lunch lady.)

we never got anything that looked like the picture of the enchilada.

Never once in my school life have I ever eaten anything out of the cafeteria other then Ding Dongs. I was lucky, I guess, because of the quality of food I've seen. (Pizza, hot dogs, burgers, etc...)

The only thing I remember about school lunches was the shape of the pizza slices. If it was sliced in the traditional triangular shape, it was the "good" pizza. If it was rectangular, you were guaranteed a disgusting slice of pizza.
Looking back, all I ate was pizza at lunch. It's amazing I didn't have a heart attack by the age of 12.

I couldn't wait for chicken a la king day in elementary school! It was my absolute favorite...I really should look up a recipe for it.

In jr high, it was all about the microwaveable chimichangas. Seriously, it even came in the plastic wrap.

My faves in high school were tator tots and pretzels with cheese. Yum.

Things improved substantially at the UCLA dining halls, where sushi was offered several time a week and we even had chicken and waffles. Hello Freshman 15 :)

I always thought our lunches were pretty good in school! :)

As a high school kid in the late 1960's, healthy foods were not even close to the horizon. Freshly fried donuts was my favorite food. They cost 15 cents.

My son loved Miguel's Jr. bean and cheese burritos. These were originally only available at a small local chain of restaurants, but were added to the school lunch menu in the 1990's. He had one every day for 4 years.

Pizza pockets. I hate to admit it, but damn I loved 'em. Also, Nutty Bars. I know they're not cafeteria food, per se, but that's the only time I had them was at school with lunches. $0.35. They were worth every penny back then. Now, I think they taste like nothing but salt and fat. Funny how the palate changes when you learn better...

1980s - Taco boats, which consisted of a hard taco shell pressed into a tin tray and topped with cheese and meat bits. White bread and butter, soft spaghetti with dark meat sauce, turkey gravy with mashed potatoes. Oh, and cheeseburgers that I now believe were early versions of Boca burgers... definitely some fillers used in those.

Early 1990s - Later in high school it was huge slabs of spice cake with cream cheese icing and the chocolate cake with fudge icing. Also that buttery cheese bread.

Our school lunches were famously bad. Breaded chicken patty, plain hamburger with plenty of filler, spaghetti with greasy meat sauce, and those god-awful pizza squares that were always dripping with oil and severely underbaked. Never saw a salad in my four years there.

smokies and perogies. i remember running down the lunchline for thirds. i was amazingly only moderately pudgy.

they also had stew. i loved the stew. because stew meant bannock. my elementary was located near an area with a high population of Metis. the lunchladies were Metis. they made the best stew ever. at the same time i have never tasted bad bannock. however their BBQ chicken was nightmareish stuff.

...my mouth waters just thinking about those smokies. and i don't even eat/care for meat anymore.

Cheeseburgers, tater tots (or fries) and my personal favorite, chicken patties!

Very, very long time ago. Elementary school lunches were a nightmare, and I was a very picky eater. We had hot dogs with two lines - one for mustard, which terrified me, and one without. I got into the wrong line once in second grade, and "they" wouldn't let me have a dog without mustard. My teacher, um, showed me her tongue with cracks in it and said it was from eating mustard. horrors. (I love mustard now). We had salmon and tuna wiggle (canned fish mixed with a white sauce and peas and ladled onto 4square saltines.

I don't remember much about high school except I'm sure we had mac and beef (goulash here) and now and then apple crisp with hard sauce, which was pretty good. Lots of jello, which was okay with me. Lots of mystery meat, which was not okay with me.

This was all before the northeast had even heard of tacos, empanadas, fried rice, tater tots, burritos, or vending machines. No soda. Milk. Never chocolate milk.

underbaked chocolate chip cookies...four for a dollar. nom nom nom nom

No cafeteria in elementary school sooo...

McDonald's chicken nuggets and hot mustard sauce or bbq (delivered to school)
hot dogs with mustard (delivered)
pizza (ditto)
and ice cream sandwiches

Hs:
cheese or chocolate muffins warmed under heat lamps
Hostess snack cakes

College (too many to mention, we had a points not a cafeteria system) but I discovered hummus, veggie pitas, falafel, turtle pie, and kept up with candy pic-a-mix and Suzy Qs, to name a few.

Add me to the list of square pizza and cinnamon roll lovers. My elementary/high school also served these amazing, tall, soft dinner rolls. Soooooo good.
n college, I loved soft serve ice cream with granola and sprinkles from dining hall (because the granola totally made it healthy).

Bellieve it or not, the tuna fish sandwiches were really great. They served it on really fresh, fluffy rolls and had the balance of mayo, salt and pepper just right. My mother remembers back in her days that they used to whip butter into peanutbutter making their peanutbutter sandwiches extra creamy.

French Bread Pizza - hands down.

Tomato soup

We used to make little sandwiches out of the breaded chicken/steak fingers, mashed potatoes and gravy, and homemade rolls -- those were the best days. I also really liked the translucent lemon pudding, and the chocolate pudding from industrial-sized Sysco cans.

I brought lunch everyday during JHS but there were two lunches that I ate even if I had to beg or borrow the. $0.75!!! Chicken chow mein with white buttered rice(thinking back it was more Americanized than you can imagine but I loved it anyway) and twice a year once before Thanksgiving and once before Winter break- Turkey with gravy and mashed potatoes.

I used to like the square pizza slices, insanely bready but pretty good if you got one from the edge of the pan.

We also used to have really crappy hot dogs, that I always claimed tasted slightly floral, almost like rose flavored pork. But they tasted fine as long as you got them coated with grilled onions.

Spent my last two years of high school in Littleton, Colorado, and was stunned to discover something on the lunch menu I'd never heard of before: runza! Basically, ground beef and cabbage baked inside a big, doughy bun. Weird yet compelling, epitomizing an era known for its casseroles, crockpot meals, and shag carpeting. After we graduated from high school and were attending college nearby, a friend and I used to check the local paper for the school lunch menus, and just show up at our alma mater's cafeteria on Runza Day pretending to be students. And of course we thought it was a laff riot!

My best friend Hayley and I would have daily competitions who could find the biggest soft pretzel in the cafeteria. They were soft and salty and absolutely delicious. I miss those more than most of the curriculum!

At my high school in an L.A. suburb, once in a while (once a month?) some administrator would fire up a kettle grill outside the cafeteria and honest-to-goodness grilled cheeseburgers would be on offer. Those were good days.

The rest of the time, meh.

I loved the tuna puff. Basically a tuna salad mounded on half of a homemade yeasty bun, topped with cheese and baked. The lunchline lady always let me have the sandwich that had been made with the top half of the bun. Also, sandy sugar cookies. Five cents for a cookie bigger than my whole hand. I detested the white milk which was always too warm. It was in a completely square carton with a bit of tinfoil at one corner that you peeled back to open. In junior high my favorite was meatloaf with brown gravy mashed potatoes and English Peas. In high school Taco Doritos had been invented and I used to have a bag with a Dr. Pepper or a bag of Ozark BBQ potato chips. They were so thickly coated with spice your fingers were stained for the rest of the day.

I have the sloppy joe recipe from the high school I attended from 1954 thru 1958, the best. The ladies who cooked were mothers of students and when they got busy serving lunch the janitor would help serving. Great hot beef sandwiches too.

I loved the beef stew and the sugar cookies. This was when there were lunch ladies who cooked the food and served it lovingly to you. I was a picky eater (I would be skinnier if I still was) and I remember eating many things that I would not have eaten at home. In high school I ate a lot of salads and saltine crackers with butter.

The Turkey A La King served on top of a scoop of boxed mashed potatoes!
Before taking off for Thanksgiving they would serve this with a roll and a piece of "pumpkin pie", which was nothing but pumpking pie filling with a thin layer of Cool Whip frosting.

The only other thing that was remotely edible was the grilled cheese sandwich. I have yet to find one that comes close to that neon, buttery monstruosity.

I loved reading all of these--it really took me back.

Elementary school:
"taco pie" It was a mix of ground beef, beans, probably american cheese, lettuce and fritos! All scooped onto your plate with an ice cream scoop.
Macaroni and Cheese with two little smokies. I guess they added the little smokies to meet the protein requirement.

Junior High:
I don't remember a lot, but I ate salad bar and that rectangular pizza

High School:
I would eat lettuce and tomato sandwiches on white bread with yellow mustard (yuck!) but would also eat nacho bar.

College:
Breaded Chicken Sandwiches, Taco Pizza, Pasta Bar, Baked Potato Bar, the breakfast was always the best, "premium night" always the absolute worst.

I'm a vegetarian now, but I used to love Hot Ham and Cheese days. Was that a universal lunch item? Ham and cheese melted on a soft roll.

A few of my favorites: Tator tots, soft buttered roll (almost like White Castle bun) with mashed potatoes, tacos, chicken and noodles, rectangle pizza, and T-Bolt sandwich...Texas toast, mozzeralla cheese, marinara and pepperoni...yum.

I wasn't too big on cafeteria food but I always loved when they would have the special "holiday" hot turkey meals right before vacations. An ice cream scoop of mashed potatoes, a slice of turkey with that brown canned gravy and the always random slice of white bread to soak it up. Old fashioned yum.

This one is pretty simple. Number one is the rectangle pizza served on top of fries. I would take the cheese off the pizza, put it on the fries, eat the pizza dough, then mix the cheese and fries together and eat them. Very healthy.

Second was pita bread pizza. I would always get cold and wet in the middle, so it was much preferred to have a fresh one.

Growing up in Singapore it was Szechuan Chicken, Beef Kway Teow, with fat rice noodles, beef and greens, and Mee Goreng, Malay style curry noodles. All made fresh while we sat there patiently waiting, watching the woks sizzle and Mr. Ho flip in bits of this and that. Mmmm.

In elementary school i loved the cold triple decker PB&J's... Also i loved the taste of the sloppy joes with melted kraft cheese but i didnt like the chunkiness of it so i would scrape it all out and eat what became a sloppy joe flavored cheese sandwich mmmmm.....i've tried to recreate it but to no avail.

In H.S. we had open campus so i always left for lunch. lucky me

in my high school we had 4 stations and a decent amount of options, yet i would only get 5 things - ever! friday was pizza day and i would always dip my pizza in the mini salad and dressing it came with.
wed was chicken ranchero day - chicken patty topped with bacon, american cheese and the obligatory lettuce and tomato slice and you top it yourself with ranch dressing on a kaiser roll and it usually came with baked mac and cheese - the line on wed was always rediculously long!
the other days i had a bagel with cream cheese, fries and an arizona iced tea. or cheese nachos loaded with toppings (i don't eat beef) or a cheese sandwich on a kaiser as i have always been adverse to lunch meat.
i am very surprised i have normal cholesterol these days - i can't imagine what it was back then...although growing up in a vegetarian household my other meals must have cancelled out the cholesterol loaded fest during the school week.