@MCDuncanLab
Heh. Without recognizing it as drama my mother happily relates how the "kids make their own lunches" protocol happened in our family. Apparently when my elder sister was 6 she was taken to task for bringing her sandwiches home uneaten for a week. She countered with the sandwiches not being made the way she liked them (maybe it was margarine not butter?) and from that day on lunch making became the kid's job. Including our eldest sister, who was not involved in the exchange at all. When the younger siblings started school we got our lunches made for us for a week. I recall a lot of margarine and marmite sandwiches. On brown bread.
@jgordon @futurebird @llewelly

@RedRobyn @jgordon @futurebird @llewelly

Dang, your mom and mine were cut from the same cloth.

@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.

@RedRobyn @MCDuncanLab @jgordon @llewelly

I remember doing "margarine and marmite" well... just marmite. But it was another attempt at "exotic food" no one in Ohio knows about marmite but my grandmother had some for some reason and let me take the jar.

I'd read about characters in some book eating "marmite on toast" so I brought that for lunch one day.

It was VERY sticky and got stuck in the little plastic sandwich bag. "This is what they eat in LONDON"

It's middle school in the 90s or 80s and it's PIZZA DAY. Yay!

One of the square slices behind the counter has a bubble. The dough has somehow acquired an air pocket. It's huge. The size of a tennis ball.

Everyone is talking about "The Bubble"

How do you feel about the bubble?

@futurebird @MCDuncanLab @Wyatt_H_Knott
that must be it, because the only other macintoshes are the boots and the computers, and presumably neither boots nor computers would be in school sack lunch, being too tough for youngsters to chew.

@futurebird yikes that’s bad. How did that happen?

@llewelly @futurebird @Wyatt_H_Knott

Funny I grew up in Washington state and literally the only apples we ever got were gross red delicious.

In high school, I had a fancy Fuji apple and thought I was in heaven.

@fivetonsflax

I found some descriptions of Japanese packed lunches that said you needed a bed of rice then to add "pickes" but the images showed red things (I now understand that things can be pickled other than cucumbers)

I reasoned that ketchup was a bit like relish so could work as a "red pickle"

... it did not work.

@MCDuncanLab @futurebird @llewelly

Nuts are no longer allowed in school.

@Meowthias @futurebird

I was on the east coast back then and in addition to pizza day we also had fiesta pizza day which was basically an Old El Paso taco on a piece of crust. Fiesta pizza day was only slightly behind regular pizza day for the best day of the week.

@futurebird That’s much better than what I was imagining. Kind of adorable actually.

@ned @futurebird @llewelly

I think they allow sunflower butter.

Plus im pretty sure making a 2nd grader make their own lunch is a no no these days.

Cookies are probably also banned.

@futurebird @llewelly

My older sister was a pain in the butt, at one point maybe when she was in 2nd grade she pitched a fit about what my mom made. Mom said fine 2nd graders make their own lunches. When I hit second grade that meant me too.

I ate peanut butter and butter sandwiches every day probably until 6th grade.

We also got a gross red delicious apple, and two chocolate cookies, which my sister was in charge of making, and I did get a milk card.

@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.

@aj @futurebird @MCDuncanLab wait wait wait, Victoria Canada, or Victoria Austrialia, or somewhere else?

edit: oh, I see, it must be australia. Thank you anyway.

@futurebird Shout out to my Gen X and boomer friends!

Who remembers listening to the radio in the mornings to hear them read out the school lunch menus and then decide if you should pack a lunch?

Our radio station covered several districts so we got to hear what kids in the region were eating.

@grumble209 I don’t remember the radio ever telling us school lunch menus. But since snow was rare in our beach city, I remember plenty of mornings where it snowed a tiny bit and I would sit impatiently waiting for them to list any school closures or delays.

I remember thinking I don’t care about “two-for Tuesday” or where “The Bod Squad” is giving out T-shirts this weekend! Tell me if school is closed!!

@futurebird

@paco @grumble209 @futurebird in my state they would have the towns with snow days scrolling across the bottom of the screen during the news. And there was a town way out in the middle of nowhere where they always got way more lake effect snow or whatever, so they always had snow days when we rarely did, but the name of that town and mine shared a long prefix so it was always agonizing to watch the scroll