Did any of you watch that show "Food Revolution" with Jamie Oliver? Well I sure did and really liked it. I came across a blog yesterday that many of you may have heard of: Fed Up With Lunch- A school lunch project. The blogger is a teacher who spent a year eating and taking pictures of the school lunches served at her school. I admit that I spent a good 2 1/2 hours yesterday going back through her posts and looking at the lunches and it really made me think back to when I was in elementary school.
Now, I am 27 so it wasn't SOOOOO terribly long ago that I was being fed school lunches myself. I went to elementary school in the Appalachian mountions of North Carolina and Virginia. At first, I thought that maybe I had a bad memory but then I asked my mom and she agreed with me. The lunches that I saw on this blog, and a lot of the lunches I saw on Food Revolution, were NOTHING like what I remember having. I remember the lunch ladies at my tiny elementary school in rural Virginia making the best green beans. The lunch ladies would cook food like my Nannie.
Now, don't get me wrong, we had the square frozen pizzas (I lived for the ones with the square pepperoni) and I remember having tater tots and chicken nuggets. But I CLEARLY remember those lunch ladies making some good southern green beans (with fat back and all) and I remember seeing them making the spaghetti sauce in the morning on spaghetti days, when I would get breakfast. I remember this as clearly as I remember our milk that came in little bags. (Our options were white or chocolate and only once per week would I pick chocolate.) I remember our meatloaf looking like my mom's meatloaf, not some processed meatloaf-ish microwaved thing. I don't remember ever having plastic, microwaved containers of pre-made food at all.
After thinking about this I consulted my mother who agreed with me that back then, at least in MY elementary school, the lunch ladies actually cooked a lot of the food. Now, I don't know if that has changed, even in my little school, or if that was just the way it worked because my school was so small. I liked it though. It was nice. However, I do have to give credit for the schools serving more fresh fruit. In my elementary school we never had fresh fruit but instead were given fruit cups (loaded with sugary syrup.)
Reading that blog, and watching Food Revolution makes me worry. I don't have children yet but when I do I am fairly certain I'll be packing their little lunches. (Except maybe on the square pizza days I'll let them have the school lunch... cause you knowwww how good those little pizzas are!)
What do y'all think? Were your lunches like the ones on Food Revolution or did your schools lunch ladies actually cook?
Posted in: Food,Ramblings,Randomness
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