School Lunches

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I just read an article about researchers trying to find out if using emojis for grade school children to rate their school lunches would help schools make better lunches. The idea is to cut down on food waste. If the children like the meals then there would be less food thrown away. When I was in school I learn fairly fast which lunches were good and which were barf-bag meals. In a way I was lucky because if I didn’t like the meal I could ask for a sack lunch. The school had a monthly list of what would be served on each school day of the month. The only drawback was they always had one or two days a month listed as “cook’s choice.” This meant the cooks chose what they would fix for lunch. In other words, your guess is as good as my guess on what we were going to be served. My very favorite meals were fried rice with gravy and pigs in a blanket. When they first served pizza that was a good tasting meal, too. But as time went on their pizza lost its taste. I think they started using a different type cheese. I liked other lunches but those are the ones that stick out in my mind. If I forgot to ask for a sack lunch and the school lunch was something I just couldn’t stomach then I just didn’t eat anything for lunch. In those days we could buy a thirty-day lunch ticket or buy lunches daily. The difference was with a thirty-day lunch ticket we paid twenty-five cents per meal. We paid thirty cents per meal if we paid daily. It was a bigger hassle for the school if we paid daily than buying a thirty-day ticket. The thirty-day tickets also gave the cooks a better idea of how much food to prepare. They would punch our ticket for each day we ate. So if we skipped a day for whatever reason then it didn’t matter. We still got thirty days of school lunches. We could also go back as many times as we liked as long as we cleaned up what was on our plates. If we got caught scrapping anything into the garbage before going back for seconds, then they would not give us seconds. The first time through we had to take everything being severed. There was no picking and choosing the first time through. After that we could choose what we wanted on our next time through. Good old school lunches. There were good ones as well as bad ones. I guess letting children rate the meals with emojis may help, but I think just by seeing how many kids eat certain meals and how much is thrown away after certain meals should tell the cooks what is liked and what isn’t.