Basically, what dishes/food made you go blegh when they were on the menu at school, what dishes were extremely unpopular? What dishes were surprisingly ok?
In France I must say, everybody hated the mushy spinach, the céleri rémoulade (shredded celery salad w/ mayo), macédoine (or french salad for our slavic friends), chicory casserole with ham (even the proper homemade version is vile, désolé amis nordistes), hachis parmentier (our variant of sheperd’s pie) or cauliflower casserole. If I forgot some, feel free to add to this list.
Some of them, cooked properly are decent to pretty damn good!
What about you ?
32 comments
There is no school cafeteria. Everybody brings their own lunch. These days secondary schools generally sell some foods but they don’t sell anything gross because then nobody would buy it. In my days they’d sell savoury pastries and some sandwiches, idk if that’s still the same now.
There were no school cafeterias when I went to school and this didn’t change much. You ate what you brought with you.
Doesn’t work that way in Belgium.
Generally kids bring their own food. At best a school offers people to pay for daily soup in primary school.
In secondary school you are also expected to bring your own food, or buy something in the cafeteria. If you hate the food, you don’t buy. Usually this is soup, baguette sandwiches, snacks and drinks.
At the last 2 years of secondary education we were (at my school) allowed to go outside of school during the noon break. Kids would thus either bring their own food or to the döner snack joint next door.
The cafeteria (canteen in Ireland) doesn’t offer much food, most people bring their own lunch.
The food in the canteen is pretty generic, sausage rolls, chicken rolls, curry chips, pastries. Most of these are extremely greasy and unhealthy, also way overpriced so they’re unpopular.
There aren’t any free cafeterias (that’s what you’re asking about, right?) in Norwegian schools that I know of. People will generally bring food from home. Older kids might have access to a cafeteria selling some pretty standard lunches, generally for quite a bit of money. (my favourite was [hhospv](https://www.dagbladet.no/mat/i-stavanger-elsker-de-hallthornostogskinkapiffivarmt/60339567)). Older kids might also go to a nearby grocery store during break and buy food
It’s quite rare here to have a school cafeteria.
Most students finish school at 1 or 2, and then go home for lunch.
Some schools do have them, particularly private schools and schools for very young children, kindergarten age.
I remember at kindergarten the horror of most of the students was the pasta with tomato sauce, which was made with large pieces of onion!
In Italy of course pasta with tomato sauce is a staple, they served that often…
When I was in kindergarten I absolutely hated eggs in mustard sauce with boiled potatoes. Or anything that involved beetroot
As school often ends in the early afternoon, lunch at school is not so essential in Germany. My schools always had cafeterias. They published to dishes for the week ahead and you could choose indivudual days when you wanted to eat there. So I only ate at school when they had something I really liked. Otherwise I ate something when I came home around 2 pm.
We didn’t have it in high school. It was available to have lunch in elementary school for some fee per month, but most had lunch at home and opted only for a snack at school.
From the snacks we were most happy with bread and linolada (our version of nutella), but I don’t know if that’s offered anymore for obvious reasons lol. We hated when we had pudding because of the hardened part on its surface.
lol, I know what you mean with “french salad”, but here it is peas, carrots, pickles, some cooked potato and maybe some apple slice and hard boiled eggs, all mixed in mayo.. it still makes me go bleugh ,but everyone else seems to like it, even tho it really looks and smells like vomit
But apart from me being picky, we had good lunches, my favorite was meatballs with a side of mashed potato and spinach, cleaned the plate in record time
Everybody was fighting over spinach pancakes and fish sticks. Porridge with fruit soup was also popular. I can’t remember what was the most hated, our school served cold chicken pasta salad once, and nobody finished it.
No school served food in our schools, you bring your own
Junior high school: we had a small pizzeria who brought warm pizza into the school during the daily break at 10:45. This was good but expensive. You went there in the morning or once a week, paid for your pizza, gave your name and class, and they delivered a bag of pizza for each class, with your name written on the wrap.
Once a week we had afternoon curricular lessons, and a lunch break at 13. My school had a built in kitchen, but they hired a catering company who cooked pasta 40 minutes away, so when it was delivered it was overcooked and cold. My classmates played the upside down game: they took the plastic dish full of pasta, turn it upside down, the one whose pasta remained stuck on the dish for the longest time won. Ah, and the last ones being served often found a different sauce on the pasta, because the containers weren’t cleaned well enough. Luckily, we had the option to bring our own lunch, so we often ordered more pizza during the morning break and save it for lunch. The company was fired when a sort of larvae were found in the pasta. So, to answer OP’s question, everything was crappy and scary.
High school: when we had afternoon extracurricular lessons, we had snacks at a local bar. The food wasn’t too bad, but it wasn’t lunch, and after 5 hours at school we really needed some real food. The local supermarkets closed at 13 and we were out at 13.10, so we sent them a letter asking to stay open 1 hour longer to allow us to buy a sandwich with freshly baked bread and freshly cut ham rather than the fake bar sandwiches, but got no answer. Now the same supermarket is open at lunchtime.
I would say probably fish on Tuesdays. They were never as crispy as they should and the sauce was not very good.
I think few people liked the pea soup as well, but usually you got some pancakes on the side so it was alright.
Our food at infants and primary school was pretty unhealthy basic stuff- pie and chips, chicken nuggets and chips, pizza and chips. It was chips with everything! But that meant as kids we loved it all.
The only thing I disliked was the mashed potato. I think they used instant mash, but it may have just been bad normal mash – I’m very particular about my mash and only like it when it’s more dairy than spud. Oh and they also diluted the orange juice, which made it vile.
Your dishes sound a lot more wholesome and nutritious than ours, but also more challenging for kids’ palates. Veg-wise we mostly seemed to have mainly just had peas and carrots as far as I can recall, so I don’t remember there ever being a particularly dreaded veg dish.
🇪🇸 I was one of the fortunate kids who went home for lunch. But I went to the school dining hall some times and the overall quality was low. I remember having to drink a glass of milk (which I hated) and that the meat steak had nerves and was though as leather. In general fish dishes and vegetables were abhorred, but it’s hard to tell if that was because they were badly cooked or simply because they just existed.
In high school (ages 14 to 18, now 12 to 18) there’s no lunch served, but at mine we had a small cafeteria with coffee, hot chocolate, soda, donuts, chips, palmeras de chocolate…
My kid eats at school now, (in big cities schools have roughly 9-17 schedules with 2h30 for lunch in the middle), and apparently he likes all, except lettuce, onions, cauliflower and zucchini. Which I kind of get. And tomatoes, which I don’t. But those are things he’s not eating either at home, so…
There aren’t school cafeterias at most schools. People bring lunch from home.
One of my least favourites was “*mandeltorsk*”. Basically a block of fish (name suggests cod, but I doubt it) baked in an oven with some crumbs, and *maybe* almonds, on top. Then again, I didn’t like fish. I went to school for one year in another municipality, and just about everything served there, from rice porridge so thin you could strain it, to potatoes so full of inclusions, eating them was more work than eating freshwater fish.
Cafeteria, what cafeteria? Yeah, that wasn’t a thing. Closest we had to that was a shop in some schools that sold snacks and sandwiches. Usually you bring lunch from home, or in later grades go buy your own lunch in some bakery around the school.
School lunches have been pretty much the same since I was in elementary school ~20 years go. I guess it depends on a school how good the cooks are. But essentially meals are the same. My kids kindergarten is right next to a school. They have the same meal planner, so they eat things but meals are cooked by different cooks. From what I hear kindergarten has good food, school has less good food. In my school everything was very tasty. Most popular were always [čufti](https://novice.si/page/wp-content/uploads/2021/09/celjanov-recept-1080-cufti.jpg) and [creamed spinach](https://www.kulinarika.net/slike/fotoalbumi/Lo47tK93z5wGq93FBuKuBuHFtwyAJ1zC/). Also spaghetti, any kind of meat in sauce with mashed potatoes or rice, schnitzels, milk rice casserole, fruit dumplings, cheese pasta casserole… Vegetable soups probaly weren’t very popular.
I remember we had these hamburgers/cheeseburgers wrapped in red or yellow grease-proof paper, they were the soggiest things in the world.
Chips in paper bags, sweated and steamed, they were so dry.
Individual pizza slices that were dripping in grease.
Obviously when you’re 12 years old these things are amazing.
I hate fiskbullar, it is fish meatballs, grey slimy and in a grey sauce with potatoes. Horrid, that was 40 years ago, my kid now doesnt get them. Kid most hated food is vegan wok, it bamboo shots, mushrooms, tofu and served with quinoa , it is slimy and zero taste.
In Sweden every kids gets food, it is 2 options, vegetarian and meat and a sallad buffet and then there is allergy food too.
Spinach soup is probably the most hated one. After that Liver Casserole and anything with saithe instead of Salmon.
Edit: most vegan food is also quite hated.
When I was at school we had very basic food but it was all cooked on site. I remember pork burgers with mash and onion gravy, lamb steaks with mash, fish fingers with mash, to be fair I think the school only did chips once a week, the rest of it was relatively healthy and it wasn’t too bad either.
That was, however, thirty years ago.
Nowadays it’s chips with everything, and cheap mass produced shit full of additives. It’s really a shame, but it’s all done to cut staffing costs.
Anything with blood or liver in it was generally not liked.
Finland
I feel like [Pasta King](https://pastaking.co.uk) is universally derided in UK schools. The stuff looks watery as fuck at the place I work at!
For me it was:
* Blood sausage
* Brown beans
* Hamburger (when it was served with mashed potato)
* Lasagna (it was too dry and cheesy)
However… For me this only happened in elementary school
In high-school I studied at another school than my friends and former classmates, and this particular school had a Hotel & Restaurant program…
So I used to tease my friends when they complained about their cafeteria food. We almost always had much better food, as our cafeteria had about 15 (unpaid) extra chefs to cook
And when the stars were aligned correctly; they asked me on a day when my class were served a 3 course (with 3 options each) à la carte menu
>In France I must say, everybody hated […]
I honestly doubt everybody hated all the food you listed. Maybe you and your friends did, but why would cooks prepare food that everybody hates?
Funnily, all the dishes you mentioned are things I like.
As for your question, I can’t answer, I’ve never eaten in a school cafeteria in my life. I would always eat at home or at a relative’s or friend’s home.
I would say boiled fish with boiled potatoes wasn’t always the most exciting dish, but there are ways to make it taste a little better.
For me personally, it was porridge. I have nothing against porridge, I eat it often, but it’s not something I want for lunch. Porridge is breakfast or supper food to me. Spinach “pancakes” was another shitty meal. They taste nothing.
“Dill meat” (basically rubbery pieces of meat in a dill sauce) and cabbage rolls were some other foods that were generally unpopular.
The worst in kindy were semolina porridge and milk noodle soup. Semolina porridge was bad because it had a layer of film on it from cooling down, and the soup… just read the name of it again.
I honestly don’t remember something as revolting at school.
Reading through some of these makes me happy to see most people just brought their own shit like I did. Versus the God awful stuff from my hometown schools (Yes I’m American from VA, our lunches sucked).
My secondary school had amazing food at first! It sold slushies, chips, garlic bread, the best cheesy jacket potatoes and some jam donuts. But that all changed when Jamie Oliver attacked and our dinners got changed to these ‘healthiest’ options that was just honestly sad. We could only have crappy juice or water, no more chips and no more jacket potatoes. Only sloppy salads, some weird half mushed half not peas, this sad excuse for a pizza that tasted like cardboard and some crappy bit of pastry covered in some snotty custard.
The most tragic day of my teenage life was watching them take away the slushy machine. Some crimes can never be forgiven, Jamie Oliver!