Readers share their school lunch memories
The missing mayo. The 40-cent meal. The apple too big to eat.
What our parents packed — or didn’t pack — in those drab paper bags sticks with us like peanut butter and jelly. Following our recent cover story on Bay Area chefs and their school lunch memories, we asked readers to share what they remember eating in school. Here’s just a sampling.
I was in second grade in the 1950s. I always took my lunch, because my parents didn’t have the money for the cafeteria meal. One day, I opened my brown paper bag and found it contained only sugar cookies. I had mistakenly taken a bag of cookies a neighbor had given my mom. I had no trouble trading cookies to other kids for sandwiches and an apple. And I had a cookie for dessert.
Funny how that’s the only school lunch I remember.
— Abe Wischnia, Santa Clara
My mother’s sandwiches were not what you would call gourmet. Two slices of bread that were spread with oleo or sometimes butter. Never mayo! In between the slices of bread would be a slice of lunch meat, sometimes canned corned beef or canned deviled ham. On Sundays, we would have roast beef for dinner, and she would grind the leftovers. It would be spread on our sandwiches for several days. Never lettuce or cheese, but a banana for our fruit. We were given three cents for milk which she would wrap in a hanky, so we would not lose our pennies.
One day, my sister got up the courage to ask my mother why her sandwiches couldn’t be thicker with more filler. My mother took her to heart. She made my sister such a big sandwich, when she opened her mouth to take a bite, she couldn’t close her mouth. The school nurse called my mother, and my mother went ballistic. She thought my sister had lockjaw. She took her to our family doctor, who said my sister had dislocated her jaw from opening it so wide to eat her sandwich. Her jaw was sore for several days, but I never heard my sister complain about her sandwiches again.
— Carol Hewitt,
Newark
Even though I am a Bay Area native, I spent my high school years in Houston, Texas. This was in the mid1970s. In our high school, the cafeteria was in the center of the school. It was well lit and very large. We had older ladies who would come in every day and actually cook hot lunches. The food was freshly cooked, varied and tasty. Amazingly, the cost of an entree, a roll, two veggies, fruit and a pint of milk was 40 cents! I remember that you could buy a week’s worth of lunch tickets for $2.25. I miss those perfect lunches — and the low cost.
— Dan Dalal, San Jose
In the 1940s and 1950s, I mostly ate lunch in the elementary school cafeteria served on metal trays with dividers for each item. The students who were hired to wash those trays made a deafening noise as they stacked them in the sterilizer, and it echoed throughout that big basement cafeteria. I especially remember the sauerkraut, which my friends and I pretended to love. On Fridays, the PTA sold ice cream bars, and I always bought a Dreamsicle. which was orange sherbet on the outside and vanilla ice cream inside.
If my mom did pack a lunch for me, my favorite part was a fresh tomato. She would put salt in a paper drinking straw and twist the ends so it wouldn’t leak, and I could salt my own tomato. I don’t think I ever ate the apples she put in my paper bag. They were always too big. When I entered high school, I lived across the street from the school so I went home for a hot lunch. The food was the best, but I decided later that I had missed out on the lunchtime social life.
— Bonnie Home, San Jose