Um... I actually liked school lunch

Family Search's question for September 16th was: What are your memories of school lunch?

I know that it's popular to complain about school lunch, but I enjoyed the majority of mine. The food my school district served was pretty good. We got a monthly lunch calendar, and my mom and I would go over it and circle which days I would eat school lunch. She would pay for those days and I would bring a home lunch on the other days.

One funny memory I have is there was a lunch lady who wouldn't let students say no to vegetables, and there was a lunchroom monitor who wouldn't let students leave unless their trays were empty. So I would hide the food I didn't like in my empty milk carton before asking to be excused.

At my elementary school 4th-6th grade got to rotate being lunch workers. I loved being a lunch worker and being a server was the coveted position (being a dishwasher or a table wiper were not as much fun). There were food perks to being a lunch worker, like we got left over desserts. And it was fun to leave class early for lunch, and come back late.

In middle school and high school we had a lot more food choices, so I rarely took a home lunch and ate school lunch almost every day. In middle school there was a main lunch line, an alternative line (something like a corndog or chicken sandwich), a pizza line, and a snack cart. The snack cart we had to use cash on, the other lines we used our lunch accounts. In high school we had even more options. There was the main lunch line, the burger/chicken sandwich/corndog/nuggets line (in two different areas of the school), a subway sandwich cart, a pizza cart, and the "Dawg House" (which sold pizza, hot dogs, nachos, and other concessions snacks). The carts and Dawg House we had to pay with cash, the school lunch lines we used our lunch accounts. My high school was surrounded by restaurants, so sometimes I did that.

In elementary, middle, and high school, the main lunch line was the closest to being the healthiest. In middle school I didn't do so well with that, I got pizza most days. High school was about half and half. I'm going to try to teach my kids better food choices, and hopefully they'll follow my advice.