Under Review:

Under Review: Cafeteria Horror Stories

This week, America discovered its school lunches are more dangerous and unhealthy than a Burger King Whopper. Today, horrible cafeteria food is under review.

By Andrew Bluebond, Drew Seman, Arielle Fleisher, and a Virginia public schoolteacher
December 11, 2009

An average school lunch.

This week, USA Today broke the news that America’s National School Lunch Program uses meat that not even fast food restaurants consider consumable.

According to the paper, for three years now, the government has provided public schools with millions of pounds of beef and chicken that “wouldn’t meet the quality or safety standards of … Jack in the Box and KFC.”

Our only question is what took USA Today so long? Young people have known for decades that cafeteria food was terrible—now we just know how terrible. Today, three former schoolchildren and one current school teacher review their cafeteria experiences.

 

Want some tepid burger with your mayo and ketchup?

THE TEACHER

I’m a teacher at Chantilly High School in Virginia, so I’ve got plenty of experience with cafeteria food—not eating it, but hearing my kids complain about it.

One of my students called it “greasy, unhealthy, and nasty.” And another said, “Everything about it is bad.” A third student told me he totally questions the authenticity of the hamburgers, because, as he put it, “they’re shaped like flowers.”

Now, I guess you could chalk up those assessments to the fact that teenagers in high school are notoriously grumpy and dour, but I’ll remind you that we teachers rarely go near the cafeteria food. The meat has a dull gray patina—you can just tell it’s this subset of food: “cafeteria food.”

Some of my co-workers claim it’s not so bad, but that’s when they’re eating something relatively hard to screw up, like spaghetti and tomato sauce. You’ll never see someone over the age of 18 in the cafeteria on stroganoff day.

Also, we have a cooking class here taught by a professional chef. Occasionally, he’ll cook for the teachers, and I’ll eat that. But if he’s not cooking, I bring my lunch.

5 out of 10 hungry teachers

-Karen Black (a pseudonym)

 

Pizza and corn and fruit salad—oh my!

THE CATHOLIC SCHOOL SPECIAL

Lunch in my modest, Rust Belt Catholic school was an interesting experience. From the adjusted Lenten menu that eliminated meat on Fridays to the stoplight and microphone that regulated our noise level, the windowless, basement-level cafeteria was a strange place.

Vegetables were noticeably missing from my meals there; “salad” consisted of pre-packaged iceberg lettuce, shredded carrots, and tiny purple pieces of cabbage, all slathered in Italian dressing. Other vegetable choices included green beans from a can, which creepily held their shape, like the tapioca pudding.

And then there was what could only generously be called pizza. They were baked in single-slice-sized bags when they were prepared, effectively steaming the pizza into an anemic mush. The cheese (again, I’m being generous) seemed to glow radioactively, and the layer of grease on each slice would have provided enough lubricant to fix every squeaky door in the school. More troubling was the “pepperoni,” which came in reddish-brown quarter-inch cubes, ensuring that the animal from which it was obtained could never be ascertained.

For beverages, we had our choice of two percent “low-fat” milk (with, ironically, 16 percent of one’s recommended daily saturated fats) and one percent low-fat chocolate milk (with more than 25 grams of sugar). Skim milk and unsweetened one percent milk were nowhere to be found. Perhaps they were hidden with all the other healthy and appealing food, far, far away.

2 out of 10 points of butterfat

-Andrew Bluebond

 

A patriotic order of catsup and freedom fries.

My senior year at New Bern High School in New Bern, North Carolina, every school in the county was supplied with an excessive amount of tomato paste—apparently far too much for use on spaghetti day alone. In order to use the surplus paste, the county organized a "catsup" making contest. All the districts greatest culinary minds took part. In the end, the New Bern High School lunch ladies’ recipe was victorious.* Heinz Fancy Ketchup packets were replaced with a vat of "catsup" for students to ladle onto their trays. Apparently the difference between ketchup and "catsup" is that "catsup" is slightly thicker than tomato soup; it tastes like tomato sauce and salt, and there’s no vinegar needed. Catsup is served best with freedom fries.**

In protest, students made t-shirts saying, "No More Catsup, Bring Back the Ketchup," but "catsup" was there to stay.

4 out of 10 soggy freedom fries

-Drew Seman

Who ever said “delicious chalupa” is oxymoronic?

I always loved cafeteria food. Loved. In elementary school, I used to beg my mom to not pack my lunch so I could eat it. My favorite things on the menu were chalupas and turkey pot pie, and—despite what you may think—since becoming an adult, the love affair hasn’t ended.

For anyone in Washington, D.C., who likes their food on trays, the Brookings Institution has an excellent cafeteria, as does the National Education Association. But my favorite is definitely that of National Geographic.

My goal is to hit up all the establishments listed on Gridskipper’s list of top Washington cafeterias. Obviously, the prospect of undercooked, rotten, bad meat is not stopping this girl.

I also loved airplane food—you know, when they still had it. Sigh.

10 out of 10 spotless think tank cafeterias

-Arielle Fleisher

Arielle Fleisher is an events associate at Campus Progress. Drew Seman is an online communications associate at Campus Progress. Andrew Bluebond is a junior at Claremont McKenna College and a Campus Progress staff writer.

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Comments

1. Andrew, what about the mushie cookies??

   — Patrick Lowe - Dec 11, 05:44 PM - #