@llewelly @futurebird

The grade school I went to had pizza, but it was pretty bad.

There were reasons I brought my lunch from home.

(And, no, I did not have celiac as a kid.)

@llewelly @futurebird It was always the highpoint of the school lunch menu and it was also awful pizza.

@becomethewaifu @futurebird @mina

Minnesota's state school lunch program is now more flexible than that; but it still has strange consequences from overly strict rules.

e.g. my daughter can get a standard school lunch for free, but has to pay for milk if she brings her lunch from home. And at the high school, students don't get extra food for free even if they need the calories.

I would just have all the kids get whatever food they want and save the cafeteria staff the unnecessary work.

@kirakira @jiub @futurebird https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MohjX61yUnE

@llewelly @futurebird

Ok so picture this, there is pizza day, but your parents only let you bring a sack lunch.

(I actually didn’t like pizza, but it was sad for kids who did like pizza and had to eat a sack lunch…I just realized this is probably why me and my misfit of sack lunch eating friends tended to eat anywhere other than the cafeteria)

@futurebird Aren't you from the East Coast? Wasn't your pizza better?

@MCDuncanLab @llewelly

This surfaced forgotten memories. I was fascinated by the concept of "bagged lunch" begged my mom to let me have a bagged lunch. (I thought it was very exotic like in an anime)

My mom was so confused and annoyed to her "bag lunch" was for "poor kids" and she didn't work in the math mines all day to have her daughter eating out of a paper bag.

Also since she was a math prof she had no time to make a lunch ... and tried to get Dad to do it who was baffled.

@MCDuncanLab @llewelly

It quickly came to: "if you really want to have a bagged lunch you need to make it yourself."

I was excited to try!
It was a disaster!

I think I gave up after a few months. But the strange little plastic containers and boxes I found hung around in the kitchen for years.

Later I was obsessed with a "factory lunch" and using the old lunch pail that belonged to my grandfather when he worked in the mills.

That went a bit better.

@Meowthias

"school pizza" has nothing at all to do with any other dish that might go by that name.

it's a different food basically.

@MCDuncanLab @llewelly

Thing thing about only "poor kids" bringing their lunch wasn't really true at our school. Most of the kids who brought a lunch just had very fussy mothers who thought the cafeteria food was terrible.

They were not totally wrong.

But my lunches... they were worse. I have memories of friends taking up a collection to feed me because I'd brought something that made no sense... like two cups of white rice with ketchup and nothing else.

@futurebird Ours in New Mexico must have come from a different supplier because there were no bubbles in the pizza.

@Meowthias

They made ours from scratch with government cheese I think.

@futurebird @MCDuncanLab @llewelly I never went to a school with a cafeteria that served food, so all kids brought their lunch to school or went home for lunch if they lived close by.

@futurebird @MCDuncanLab
I often made my own sack lunch when I was a child, and in those days my dream sack lunch went something like this: thick slice bread, preferably from the end of the loaf so it's tough, thick slice cheese, thick slice tomato, fried egg, 2nd thick slice cheese, 2nd thick slice bread, again preferably from the end of the loaf, thermos of tomato juice. But I think I only got to make that twice, and ended up leaving out ingredients and substituting practically every time.

@futurebird The reason I asked about the East Coast thing is that in NM we got local-inspired (️) food that was pretty good.

@futurebird I was the weirdo who thought the pizza was gross so I was in the other line and unaware of the whole bubble thing (and probably reading a book)

@llewelly @MCDuncanLab

That sounds much more responsible. I didn't really have a planning skills to pack a lunch so I'd just... find things in the house, and around the house and put them in the box to figure out later.

@futurebird it makes the dough chewier but it means less of anything else, so I am neutral to The Bubble!

@futurebird @MCDuncanLab @llewelly I went to high school in Victoria during the '90s, when we had a fairly extreme neoliberal/libertarian state premier named Jeff Kennett.

Jeff was a complete tool on every level. This is a guy who once boasted about collecting golliwog dolls and naming them after his favourite Aboriginal footballers. After politics, he ran a football club until a major racism scandal.

He privatised pretty much everything he could (electricity, the gas utility, public transport). He awarded an ad agency that happened to be owned by his wife a bunch of government contracts. He sacked all the democratically elected local councils, merged them together, and appointed CEOs to run them. He wrecked a major urban renewal project (Docklands) by letting developers run amok. And he corporatised any government agency he couldn't sell.

Privatising state schools was a bridge too far even for Jeff, but he did merge them together and corporatise them.

Before Jeff, school tuckshops were typically run by volunteers, usually grandparents or stay at home mums. I remember pies cost $2.60 and $1.60 for sausage rolls. Vanilla slices were $1.10.

You'd write your order on a brown paper bag and pay at recess, and then collect your order at lunchtime.

And excess stock was then sold off during lunch time.

Jeffrey Gibb Kennett couldn't privatise schools, but he could contract out things like cleaners, groundskeepers, and canteens.

So he did.

So we went from a volunteer-run tuckshop to a for-profit privatised school canteen where the deep-fried rubbish cost double.

@futurebird i unironically loved The Bubble(tm) even though it usually meant less proportional dough and therefore fewer calories compared to a normal slice of cafeteria pizza.