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I'm only 33 and this is a sore subject for me. During my first 3 years of elementary school I attended a smallish country school just 2 miles from my house. We had FABULOUS, homecooked food and could go back for seconds or thirds on most days. Then the school corporation decided to combine 3 of the elementary schools in our area into one school and the food quality went downhill. I wanted the scratch pizza, donuts and meatloaf surprise (meatloaf wrapped in mashed spuds and topped with cheese- divine!) from my country school and not the over processed crap at the new one. But I digress...

Now I have a 13 y/o son attending a different school system and the food situation has gotten worse. The menu is filled with fried foods and high starch meals- I've seen corn as the only 'vegetable' on some days. They were offering ice cream ala carte with the option to 'block' your child's account so they couldn't purchase it. WTH? Why offer it all?

If this country is so obsessed with the obesity problem why aren't we targeting school lunch programs? I understand that it is extremely difficult to feed a hoard of kids with different upbringings in a short period of time, but my feeling is they'll eat what they're offered or they'll go hungry. Serve fruits and green vegetables with each meal. They may not get the chance to eat them at home so how will they ever develop healthy eating habits if they aren't exposed to nutritious foods?

Ok, I'll jump down from my soap box now. I'm preggo with my second child and am seriously contemplating forcing this child to brown bag it once he/she starts school. Of course if it is as stubborn as its father that won't go over well. :)

Even back in the 80's my elementary schools lunches were all homeade with regional Mexican dishes, cottage pies and never a burger in sight. Veggies were mandatory, but they were always delicious and so no one ever turned them down. There was never the boil in the bag limp broccoli or cauliflower. Fridays were the "junk food" days. There was the option of Texas Toast grilled cheese sandwiches and if you liked you could buy ice cream (instead of the homeade cobblers) for an additional $0.35 but they only would offer the orange push up sherbert pops.

It was a shock when I got to middle school and all they sold was burgers, pizzas and fries. I began to bring my lunch then - the delicious combination of cream cheese and olive sandwiches. The only saving grace in high school was that we could go home to eat lunch.

I'm 42 and in the 70s when I was in K-8, we had a full service cafeteria with ladies who made hot lunches every day. The menu was published a week in advance so even though I usually brown bagged, my parents would let me buy lunch on days when the cafeteria served what I liked. The caferia ladies were mothers, aunts, grandmothers etc. of the students in the school so they were certainly invested in preparing good food. The cafeteria always smelled so good I'm sure many of the vegetables came from cans but it was far better than the high school fare I got, which was usually pizza, burgers, or fries.

Part of the problem is the school districts hiring 'food service' companies who are more concerned with the bottom line, and using as much subsidized (read processed) foods from the government, rather than fresh food.

How many of those school cafeterias are now run by companies like Sodexo?

Maybe we should take the idea Jamie Oliver had in his native England to shake up school lunches.

I grew up and live in Puerto Rico and went to a private school. My mom packed lunches for me everyday until I was in 8th grade. But I can empathize with the mother's who see the poor choices their kids are offered at school.

Get someone high profile to really care about the issue and give a name and a face to the cause.

They were offering ice cream ala carte with the option to 'block' your child's account so they couldn't purchase it. WTH? Why offer it all?

Same reason they offer Coke and other sugary stuff in vending machines in schools...Money, money, money, money, m-o-n-e-y!

I went to a Catholic school and between beatings they served us many hot meals. Unfortunately, most of these came out of a can. (This is where I learned to eat Chef Boy R Dee Ravioli - much to the chagrin of my Italian immigrant father.) We had a lot of tuna in school and hot dogs with beans. The food might have been hot but it was wretched.

During high school I rarely if ever ate at school. They mostly had hero sandwiches (their tuna salad was not half bad - if I ate at school that's what I had), and a few hot offerings that were so awful, I couldn't even identify the foodstuffs.

Tyler tried to do a school-lunch-makeover but the lunch ladies took him to school about how difficult it is to prepare great food, promptly, and stay on budget. The best thing is to send kids to school with your own good food - but there is no guarantee they will eat it. It will, however, likely make a great trade. (Kiddie e-bay?)

When I was in school in the 80's and 90's (a variety of piblic and private schools), the main thing I remember was that ALL sandwiches had mayo (which I loathe), the only beverage was milk (to which I am allergic), and the "unit roll." The "unit roll" was a possibly whole-grain dinner roll, sweetened with so much sugar, the benefit of the whole-grain was completely negated. Much of the food was fried.
The private schools, if they served lunch, sold a lot of processed, packaged, fatty foods. The majority of the private schools required you to bring your own. I never took sandwiches. The thermos was my friend.
My mom now works for the school cafeteria in my hometown. Now they serve fresh salads, no fried foods, no sodas. They still serve a lot of processed hot foods (french "frys" are baked, no pork products). Many of the snack items are still sugary. Some days the meals aren't very balanced (macaroni and cheese with french fries), but the kids now at least have options.

i always took my lunch as the prepared food was nasty. i agree the smell was like a tin can. i am 31 and back then there was no such thing as a salad bar but i hear schools have them now. I think that a pack lunch can be just as unhealthy as the fried prepared stuff. if you want the kids to eat healthy packed lunches you will have to involve them in making it or else there will be a lot of trading that was very popular at my school. if they feel they made they may take more pride in it and eat it(no promises) :)

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My lunch trays were always wet from the washing machine. Potatoes were whipped up from flakes in a huge mixer, corn and beans were soggy and soaked in liquid from the can, and the hamburger meat always had this pasty smooshy texture to it. There was always this gross steamy detergent smell coming from the kitchen. No wonder the kids always went for the 25-cent candy bars from the vending machine.

I guess I was lucky. Most of the cafeteria food was pretty decent at the schools I attended. My classmate's grandmother was the cafeteria administrator and the "lunch ladies" were consistently friendly. Eighth grade girls signed up in seventh grade to be servers and were rotated on a weekly basis. I think we were paid something like 65 cents per hour and those little ten dollar paychecks made us as happy as if they were gold bricks.

Now, just because the food was mostly pleasant doesn't mean that most of the vegetables weren't canned, they were. But there were salads, with the ubiquitous thousand island dressing, but just a little. We were served things like meatloaf, spaghetti (oddly topped with grated cheddar cheese) or baked chicken legs with mashed potatoes that probably came out of a box, but were decently seasoned. Fish sticks, pizza and tacos were probably the favorites. There was this dish called "Chuckwagon Stew," which was much maligned, even though it was just ordinary beef stew with barley. I rather liked it, actually.

The one thing I truly hated was the wretched tuna bun. It was a hot dog bun filled with tuna made with mayo and topped with a narrow slice of American cheese. Then they rolled it up in foil and baked it. It was, to me, disgusting and I always traded it off. But then, I still don't like tuna melts so maybe I'm not a good judge.

Our trays always had a protein, at least one vegetable, a starch, a fruit or a dessert and milk, always plain, whole milk. Altogether, not bad at all.

Then came high school. Suffice to say, it wasn't in the same league and I was always grateful for the open campus policy that allowed us to go elsewhere for a lunch unfettered by lukewarm soy enhanced burgers.

Growing up in San Jose in the mid to late eighties (I'm 24) I'm pretty sure looking back the school lunches were big industrial food. They always came in plastic topped black rectangular plastic trays, the food was always wet and soggy, never brown or crisp (I particularly recall their hideous baked chicken drumsticks)- it's pretty obvious it was just heat and serve stuff, I can't recall any kind of kitchen to speak of. Most days I had tuna salad on crackers with fruit or some other lunch from home.
High school was pathetically bad- aquiring lunch took half your lunch period, and the food was pretty much fast food (McD's, some pizza chain, and taco hell) brought in and superprocessed microwave staples- burritos, spongy breaded "chicken" sandwiches and burgers, top ramen, fries, really terrible stuff, all supplemented by contracted soda and candy vending machines. It's fortunate that I have a great fondness for sourdough bagels with swiss cheese and fruit- my mom would just stock the freezer and fridge with bagels and cheese and I would grab and go. I'd come home hungry, but my mom's the queen of planned overs so I'd always have something good before leaving for work.
My college cafeteria is also wretchedly horrible- it's super processed, expensive, and the quality is terrible- the vast majority of the meat used is that disgusting, shaggy, precooked mystery meat, and the food is consistantly completely bland and tasteless- I'm fairly convinced it's all just the cheapest versions of sysco staples. I'd literally rather go hungry than eat cafeteria food.
It irritates me now to think of the utter crap that was and is offered, but at least I can say that it made me realize the value of packing one's own lunch. I shudder to think how many perfectly delicious vegetables and healthy foods were made completely loathsome to thousands of children still forming taste preferences.

When I was growing up (same era in question), all the schools had full-fledged kitchens where actual cooking took place. It wasn't "good" food by any stretch of the imagination, but it was relatively "real" food. Yes, the vegetables were canned, as was the gravy (i'm pretty sure), and the mashed potatoes were instant. There was lots of cheese since school food programs were subsidized and received a lot of that "overage" product that you see in other government food distribution programs. The spaghetti was baked and topped with a mild cheddar and American cheese blend. The burgers were kinda rubbery and were stuck to the buns from sitting in a steamer. The pizza was square, and made with hamburger and some variety of cheese that did not begin to resemble mozzarella.

Nevertheless, the dinner rolls were baked on site -- the aroma permeated every inch of the campus starting about an hour before lunchtime -- and actually tasted strongly of yeast (I remember telling my dad that the school rolls were "weird" because they tasted like beer). The food was hot. It was served on a plate, not in a plastic wrapper.

We've currently got four kids attending public school. None of the schools in our large district has a real kitchen (actually, they don't even have indoor cafeterias). The food is all delivered to the schools at lunch time by big trucks from the central Food and "Nutrition" (ha) Services Department. It's all sold in plastic packages and looks a lot like what you get from the local convenience store. Pizza or calzone is on the menu every single day, without exception, along with an additional rotating option, usually consisting of bagel dogs, hamburgers or chicken fingers. Rarely, a turkey sub, tuna with crackers, or a salad appears. Although the nutritional analyses come up much better than the typical 7-Eleven junk food, it's junk food all the same.

Our kids refuse to buy lunches at school unless there is absolutely no choice. When that happens, their complaining is understandably epic.

School lunches at my HS in NYC (mid-late 90s) were most definitely not homemade, but were relatively wholesome and complete. Not as nutritious as fresh food, but not as bad as fast food. Unlike fast food, it was served in reasonable portions. Also, lunch for a dollar was an exceptional value - same goes for 35c breakfast.