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In This Story, I Revisit the School Lunch of my childhood. I’m Joanne Greene
The bell rings and there’s a mad dash for the classroom door.
“Slow down!” the teacher implores, whichever teacher of whatever grade I happened to be in. The boys are pushing and shoving, and we make faces at them as we run to the cafeteria to compete for the best spot in line.
The acrid smell of heated, canned green beans blends with pungent steam from the hotdogs. If it’s Friday, you can count on fish sticks with tartar sauce (had to rock the Boston accent there) and mashed p’daydas as the server called them. Unsmiling workers in white uniforms and hairnets slop goopy, wet blobs of food onto a pile of peach plastic plates. All I ever get is milk, essential, we’ve been told, for growing children at every meal, a small carton of which costs three subsidized cents.
A full lunch costs a quarter. Sounds like a deal, right? But my mother either didn’t think so or didn’t trust what they might serve. Sometimes it was Turkey Fricassee, in salty, creamy white sauce, with carrots and peas for color on white rice. It might be American chop suey, elbow macaroni with ground hamburger meat and chunks of canned tomatoes. There’s parmesan cheese that smells so bad I could puke. But, even so, I envy the kids whose parents let them buy lunch – the kids whose moms work or sleep in, who think twenty-five cents is a good price for a hot meal, who can’t be bothered chopping up tiny pieces of celery to add crunch and a vegetable to the tuna fish sandwich I will trade for bologna, if someone is willing. I love sandwich meats which Mom says aren’t meat. She also said McDonald’s can’t possibly be selling real hamburgers for fifteen cents each. It must be horsemeat. My lunches come in brown bags and do not include baggies filled with Fritos or little surprises. At Passover, it’s the worst. A smelly hard-boiled egg, celery with peanut butter, an apple, and dry matzah. Just because the Jews were slaves in Egypt, why do I have to be tortured? School lunches always come with dessert, which are often little pieces of cake, sometimes with chocolate frosting. Trading my lunch for bologna and mustard makes me feel just a tiny bit guilty, so I eat at least part of the Macintosh apple (Mom thinks fruit is a dessert and also an apple a day keeps the doctor away) and vow not to trade away my other sandwiches – the ones with Skippy peanut butter and Welches grape jelly on Wonder Bread, which builds healthy bodies twelve ways, but sticks in my teeth and makes me thirsty.
We shove some food in our mouths while discussing the latest Beatles album, who has a crush on the cute boy in class this week, and how Miss Mellus, the math teacher, has legs that look just like piano legs. For real. Then, somehow, before we get to the really juicy stuff, it’s time to bus our trays, toss our garbage, and head back to class.

excerpts from "It Happens Every Noon - School Lunch in the 1960s" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JxcGWOWYw6M