Deep fried pizza pockets.
Corn dogs.
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Did you have this in the grade school cafeteria?
I found the discussion on goulash mentioned in this recipe interesting.
What I knew as ‘goulash’ growing up was inedible. 
I didn’t eat any. As a foster kid at that time, the “free” lunch went through a separate line and I didn’t want to be identified as “one of those”, so I just skipped lunches entirely and played D&D during lunch instead.
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At least every week or two.
1st grade thru 12th.
My kids’ elementary gives everyone free lunch now. I think it was a pandemic change that has stuck. At first I was like, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch.” Then I remembered the “free lunch” thing as a kid. I’m all for universal free lunch even if it only gets rid of singling out the less fortunate. What insult heaped upon injury. I’m sorry you went hungry every day in grade school.
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Even as a kid, it bothered me that they segregated the kids who got free or reduced price lunches. They may as well have announced, “ALL YOU POOR KIDS, GET OVER IN THIS LINE! LET’S GO, PARIAHS!”
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Wow, I didn’t know that occured in schools.
If we did not eat a lunch we brought from home, we had one lunch line to get a ‘hot lunch’. I went through it a few times a month when they were serving something I liked. This was early 60’s. I only remember once or twice when the meal was not what was advertised, according to the published monthly calendar. ‘Ick’ was served, but I think they compensated for that by serving one of those little swirly ice cream cups you ate with the wooden spoon (and later sharpened on the concrete stairs outta sight of the playground ‘police’).
I was not aware of a free lunch program we had in our school system when I was there. I know the Black Panthers brought about breakfast food service for those who needed it later in some schools and maybe that possibly preceeded the national school lunch programs. Before school started in the morning, the cafeteria was used by the choir and ‘band’, no eating activity.
I am glad that kids these days can get something ‘nutritious’ every school day. Our community now has backpack meals and snacks for any one 18 and younger, (even home, private and alternate school kids can get these) available for weekends and school holidays and vacations.
I am sorry for how it played out for you bitd.
This is why I think universal free lunch would be a good idea - a couple of states actually have that. It certainly would save money on the accounting and administrative infrastructure necessary to run a multi-tiered system, and take away the needless embarrassment for the kids who didn’t even put themselves in their position.
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Schools near me have had free lunch available to all kids for a couple of years. Since our spawn have been out of school for a number of years, I haven’t really kept tabs on it, but I think it started post-pandemic using COVID relief monies. Prior to that, parents had accounts and kids swiped debit-style cards every day when they got their lunches. Once an account hit a certain threshold in arrears, however, the kid would only get a cold lunch (Uncrustables and a milk, I think?) instead of a hot lunch until somebody brought the account current. Every year on my birthday, I would go to the local school and pay off all the lunch debts over about $10 - I didn’t want any kid to get singled out through no fault of their own. That was my birthday present to myself, and I enjoyed it tremendously.
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By the time my oldest started school about 20 years ago, in this area they’d gotten to a system where they swiped student ID and no one knew whether they were debiting from their prepaid account or were on the free meal program.
I go back and forth on free-for-all. In this area, we’d essentially be subsidizing a whole pack of wealthy parents - the median family income for a lot of school zones are over $200K. My son used to complain that he and I shared a Honda, while a lot of his classmates were driving BMW/Audi/Mercedes - and I do mean a lot of these kids. (He’s since grown up a little bit.)
But I don’t know how you could run a public school program where poor urban and poor rural schools in the state give free breakfast and lunch, but affluent areas of the state do not.
I remember some kids had these bright yellow tickets to pay for their lunch, whereas I used cash that my mother had given me (when I didn’t brown bag it). I never paid any attention to who paid cash and who had the yellow ticket.
I found out later, the yellow tickets were for the underprivileged kids whose parent applied to the program for free lunches. These yellow tickets were mailed out and the child brought a yellow ticket (each day) to the cafeteria to obtain lunch.
Again, I just never paid attention to who was using what to pay for their lunch.
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Some common sense from a legislature that hasn’t recently sported such a reputation:
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Bravo to you! I have seen many individuals and groups pays this forward, too.
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Thank you for doing that 
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I can just see lunch tickets of your being hijacked by some bully.
No food tickets, but we had a similar program with bus tickets in junior and high school because the schools we attended in our district were a few miles away. We could use bus tickets year 'round while attending those grades. The bullies swiped bus tickets all the time. SOL when you had to miss the bus 'cause you didn’t have a ticket and couldn’t bum one. (Hitch hiking was out of the question unless you were a tough male…too dangerous even then—lost a few😥 RIP).
just let everybody eat/ride.
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I don’t remember hearing of any instances of that happening, but I guess it is possible.
There were teachers/staff that roamed the cafeteria during lunch time to keep an eye on things. I imagine if they saw a student not eating anything, they would get to the bottom of it.
This act makes my eyes well up. Proud of you.
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It’s in large part the taxes of the affluent going towards these programs for kids’ nutrition, health, and education. Might be an ok thing to let those taxes cover their children as well as the rest. In an advanced society, kids could hopefully have food security, health security, educational opportunity, and ideally good role models at home. We all benefit from investing in the cultivation of young minds.
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