Over at the lovely PBN they are having a blog blast and want to know what is our favorite story from a school cafeteria. Since I’ve been out of high school for nearly 7 years now, I will attempt to remember a really good story for you guys.

Before I started going to a strict christian school, I went to a school for part of elementary school that didn’t have a cafeteria. What? No cafeteria you say. This is correct. It was a small school and instead of having lunch ladies to make us lunches each week we would be given a small menu from local fast food restaurants in our area. We would be given a choice of 3 different meal ideas from one particular restaurant on each day of the week [ such as cheese, pepperoni, or supreme personal pan pizza’s from Pizza Hut ]. This of course occurred before kids sat in front of television or video games all day and before the big uproar between childhood obesity in connection with fast food.

Now fast forward to the strict christian school that I graduated from equipped with their very own cafeteria. To be in a school with a real cafeteria was some what strange to me at first. To be served really horrible school lunches equipped with so much grease that you literally had to dry it off with a paper towel before you could even think of ingesting it made me beg my parents on a daily basis to send me back to my old school. My father forced me to buy school lunches but I can honestly say that I rarely ate them. They were that bad. As I grew older and got into high school, I became wiser and instead of purchasing school lunches I would just buy the side items that they were serving like mac, grease, and cheese or a bowl of french fries. You weren’t “cool” if you brought your lunch to school and you were even more “uncool” if you actually ate school lunches. What was a pimply teenager to do? I honestly don’t know how I survived. I think I came out ok for the lack of nutrition that I had as a child. But to this day I still prefer to eat just “side items” instead of real meals. Pass me the mac, grease, and cheese over some chicken any day of the week. I’ll take it!

Check out School Menu and its parental counterpart Family Everday, two sites that work together with School Food Services Directors to provide and promote healthy eating and physical fitness for kids and their parents.