10 Old School Cafeteria Lunches That Give Us Major Nostalgia

If you're anything like me, your favorite part of the school day growing up was lunch. Although the period itself was brief, it was still a nice break from being in the classroom all the time and getting the opportunity to do two of my favorite things: eat and socialize. The school cafeteria menu was a major point of conversation in our school, and although the foods rotated from week to week, some steadfast additions stood the test of time. There's something quite comforting about knowing that generations before me ate some of the same foods I had in the public school system in the early 2000s — and there are some selections that will probably still be on cafeteria menus going forward. 

I embarked on a trip down memory lane in an effort to highlight some of the most beloved old-school menu items from my youth, as well as from generations of cafeteria dwellers before me. These selections have evolved to fit not only the taste of young eaters, but also school lunch and nutrition standards. As with all dishes, culture, region, and time all play a huge role, though some old-school favorites will live on in our memories forever. 

Sloppy Joes are one food that you're more likely to get smeared all over your clothes, face, and plate than you are into your mouth. After all, they call it "sloppy" for a reason. The origin story of the sandwich is murky at best, and when it officially entered the school system is anyone's guess. However, a 1988 U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) handbook, entitled "Quantity Recipes for School Food Service," featured it in its sandwich section, which suggests it was popular by then.

This is one food that I remember having in the school cafeteria often. Surely, it was a way to use up the leftover hamburger buns and copious amounts of frozen mystery meat in the school cafeteria freezer. The key to old-school Sloppy Joes is using the right blend of meat; an 80/20 blend is just right in terms of texture and fattiness. However, the aforementioned school lunch recipe recommends using "no more than 24% fat." The recipe even used a homemade blend of ingredients, like "catsup," tomato paste, and vinegar. Nowadays, consumers have the luxury of canned Sloppy Joe sauces. 

Regardless of how you make it, once you combine the meat with the sauce, you get a pretty tasty sandwich, which brings together sweet, savory, and just enough spice to still be tolerable by a 10-year-old. In my childhood cafeteria, these Sloppy Joes were often accompanied by some odd-shaped fry or starchy side — and usually had a fruit cup in tow.

Close your eyes and think of it: school cafeteria pizza. If you were lucky enough for it not to be in the shape of a square, consider yourself honored. Why schools were insistent upon using square-shaped pizza, I don't know. It's likely because the frozen pies could be heated up relatively easily in a convection oven before being served to the masses. Like many of the other dishes on this list, it's hard to know when it started popping up on menus (likely in the '80s and '90s), but like the recipe for Sloppy Joes, it was included in the 1988 USDA school lunch handbook. This publication includes a recipe for pourable pizza crust, although it eventually evolved into frozen pizza as home-cooking techniques were phased out in favor of mass production in the late 20th century. 

I remember that our school cafeteria would even try to make "breakfast pizza" with the leftover slices — adding a paltry sprinkle of breakfast sausage to the top before crisping it up until it was about as rigid as a math textbook. It's safe to say that I wasn't a school breakfast pizza kind of girl. When my cafeteria wasn't serving rectangular slices of edible cardboard, it was churning out frozen French bread pizzas, which I doubt should be called "pizza" at all. These bites were 90% dough and were always accompanied by a tomato sauce, likely too sweet for Michelle Obama to deem it a vegetable. 

Some people may call old-school cafeteria pizza's spongy crust delicious, but I disagree. The only thing it prepared me for was how sad the store-bought frozen pizzas of my adulthood would be.

Macaroni and cheese is one of those dishes that could do really well — or really not well — depending on who's preparing it. Luckily, I have pretty fond memories of eating mac and cheese in grade school cafeterias. It was often prepared with the plumpest and most overcooked elbow noodles that the school lunch supplier could find, and soft (read: borderline overcooked) pasta was absolutely swimming in the most artificially orange cheese sauce ever created. The softness of the pasta set it apart from the Kraft mac and cheese of my youth, but the flavor was probably about the same (or so I can remember). There was even a time when my middle school cafeteria started serving mac and cheese in individually packaged plastic containers, rather than cinematically plopping a spoonful of it onto my lunch tray as I passed through the line. 

Don't get me wrong, cafeteria mac and cheese was never a gourmet dish, and there are a whole host of recipes for it that actually infuse a gourmet touch and flavor in. They likely don't use canned nacho cheese sauce as a replacement for shredded cheese (which I can testify firsthand is the case in some schools and camps), but maybe it's like hot dogs — it becomes less appetizing the more you know about it. 

What the heck is the deal with mini corn dogs, and why do I only remember eating them in school cafeterias and not, you know, in the wild? Thinking back on it, I can't remember if I ever saw anyone in my school eating a hot dog for lunch, but I do recall, on more than one occasion, that full or mini corn dogs were offered in the hot foods line at lunch. Compared to the endless fry shapes, these corn dogs were always cooked to perfection. The outside was always perfectly crunchy and sweet, and I distinctly remember biting in, smelling that distinct corn dog-smell wafting through the air, and getting hit by the plume of steam emanating from the center. The only appropriate dipping sauce for these cornbread-covered bites was, of course, ketchup — though I have fond memories of foregoing a sweet sauce for an already sweet, kid-friendly food. 

They do still sell frozen corn dogs and corn dog bites in the grocery store, and I'll admit that reminiscing on them makes me want to buy a pack and try to relive those memories. I suppose you could also make them at home (substituting pancake batter for the cornmeal coating), but as with many of the foods on this list, it just wouldn't be the same. 

Is it a mozzarella stick, an abnormally shaped chicken tender, or a fish stick? You'd play kiddie Russian roulette every time you got an order of these golden-colored sticks on your cafeteria tray. Like corn dogs, I can't ever remember eating fish sticks outside of school — nor do I have any reason to buy them from the frozen section as an adult. I will say that schools are pretty savvy about sneaking protein into school meals, such as by adding white fish inside a "fried" coating and trying to pass it off as a mozzarella stick to an unsuspecting student. When they're warm, they're not half-bad. The fish lacks flavor, and it could probably be served with some tartar sauce (which some people report getting with them, though I don't remember them coming with more than the difficult-to-tear packets of mayo and ketchup). 

My school served fish sticks, and I assume that they were more popular around Lent. Many generations of school-aged children before me had indulged in these sticks as well; fish sticks were popular post-World War II as a way to use up surplus stocks of frozen fish. The golden coating masked the taste of the fish and appealed to chicken-tender-loving children. However, they weren't as memorable as other school food favorites — to me, at least. 

There were few days I looked forward to more in the school cafeteria than breakfast-for-lunch day. I am a fan of breakfast food, and it's the one meal a day that can be eaten super early in the morning or late at night, although it arguably tastes better later in the day. My school served a paltry serving of four French toast sticks with a side of sausage patties, milk, and obligatory fruit cup — with pancake syrup that was just as good guzzled down by the container as it was dipped into with the sticks. Outside of school, I never got my hands on frozen French toast sticks (my family always made its own), so it was a "treat" to get these sticks, which looked nothing like the battered bread I was used to.

The sausage patties were definitely nothing to write home about, and to be honest, the French toast sticks never really tasted that good. They were always overcooked and dry, though on one occasion I do remember getting an undercooked batch and reaching pure kid foodie nirvana. Nowadays, I would never think of buying frozen French toast sticks, and I don't think I would pay a visit to Burger King just for its fast-food version of this cafeteria staple. But something about sitting on an ungodly uncomfortable plastic chair in the cafeteria surrounded by sterile, fluorescent lights just brings back good memories. 

Peanut butter jelly sandwiches are remarkably easy to make: Just slather peanut butter and sweet, sticky jelly on the cheapest white bread that you can find, and you have a satisfying lunch perfect for eaters of any age. I can't tell you exactly why my school cafeteria eventually made the switch from homemade (or however homemade you can get them) to Uncrustables, but I think it has something to do with the undercompensation of cafeteria staff in a public, inner-city school district. These sandwiches, which can be found in the frozen aisle of the grocery store, are already pre-made; all the cafeteria staff had to do was thaw them, pack them into a metal tray, and leave them out in the cafeteria line for students to grab.

Uncrustables were a short-lived venture for my school cafeteria, seeing as the school transitioned to being peanut-free after a few years. Although nothing can truly erase the feeling of biting into a still-frozen Uncrustable and not having to work around a dry crust. I still buy them. They're a clutch addition to my horse and livestock show snack bag. 

Not only did my school try to make even the most unappetizing of pizza available to students, but it also tried to introduce several pizza-like stand-ins, including Bosco sticks. I remember seeing that Bosco sticks were on the menu one day and proceeded to ask, "What are those?" (Read in Vine voice for maximum effect). Bosco sticks are what you would get if a mozzarella stick and a pizza roll had a baby. They're long, and rather than having a breadcrumb coating like a mozzarella stick, they have a pizza-crust-like casing. Maybe it's just a weird-looking calzone, who knows? 

The only thing you need to know about Bosco sticks is that they don't taste good, nor do they taste anything like inverted pizza. Like a bad frozen mozzarella stick, the cheese never pulls quite like it does in the photos. The crust is doughy (which is admittedly better than the spongy cafeteria pizza) yet lacks flavor. Bosco sticks were often served with marinara sauce that was, as you can guess, too sweet to be palatable. Some things are just better relegated to the confines of history, I guess.

I can't think back to a time when my school cafeteria ever served tacos. Maybe there's something just too time-consuming about mixing seasoned ground mystery meat into little tortillas and trying to find toppings that are kid-friendly enough to justify adding to the tray. However, my school did serve walking tacos, which came with a bag of perhaps the saltiest, cheapest, and most flavorless tortilla chip rounds, seasoned ground beef, and nacho cheese. The meal was served disassembled on the tray — likely to encourage people to make nachos — but I remember stuffing all of those fillings into the chip, giving it a shake, and trying to peel the plastic open so that I could scoop up the contents with my spork.

This meal was, as I remember, very salt-laden. The ground "beef" was usually way too salty, and the chips and salty cheese didn't help at all. Sometimes it would be served with lettuce and diced tomatoes (poor man's pico de gallo), but I suspect that most kids turned their noses up at the sight of vegetables. Despite the gross overseasoning, this was one of the most satisfying cafeteria lunches I remember eating. The only thing better than them was the day-old taco salads that the cafeteria staff would make with the leftovers — adorned with cold, day-old taco meat (which was more appetizing than it sounds). 

I have never walked through the frozen aisle at the grocery store, laid eyes on smiley fries, and said, "Oh yeah, you're coming home with me." I could say the same about frozen popcorn chicken. But there was something very magical that happened when the school cafeteria added both of these items to the menu on the same day. Smiley fries, unlike some of its fried potato companions, have a high ratio of fleshy interior to exterior. While tater tots and curly fries crisp up, smiley fries remain plush and soft, which is what, in my mind, makes them appealing. 

It seems odd that they would be paired with popcorn chicken, which has the opposite problem. I don't think I've ever had cafeteria popcorn chicken that was cooked correctly. The chicken was never plump and juicy, and the crust was nothing but salty and dry. If you got the last lunch that day, you probably got your hands on popcorn chicken that was so dry, it could crack your tooth. Despite the differences between these two old-school cafeteria favorites, they could both easily be improved with ketchup.