A year of school lunches

My mom made me lunches to take to school in a bag. At the time, I thought they were awful. I mean, she would put milk in a canteen for me, then use the same canteen on other days for soup. I neither wanted milk-flavoured soup, nor soup-flavoured milk.

But at least I never had to eat cafeteria food (ok, sometimes I would buy a pizza pop from the cafeteria, and sometimes I would just buy chips and Coke from the convenience store across the street). The famed “mystery meat” and “sloppy joes” of lore just weren’t part of my experience. Partly, I suppose that’s because I went to relatively small schools in relatively small districts, where kids were encouraged to go home for lunch.

At any rate, it’s a pretty common experience for kids to have to eat famously bad cafeteria lunches. Now, a schoolteacher has vowed to eat those same school cafeteria lunches every day in 2010.  It costs her $3 a day — but most of her students get it for free, or subsidized at 40 cents. Now, what could you cook for a few hundred people, with that kind of budget?

She calls the picture above “not a bad lunch.” I applaud her.

Check out her blog, called “Fed Up.“