What did you dislike about school dinners?

[Shandan35]

I think my only complaint was that the sweetcorn was tasteless

CUSTARD 🤢 my mum had to write a note to the school to get me off custard- seriously. To this day the smell of custard “gies me the dry boak” as we would say in Scotland. Nearly 50 years later!
I feel this post should have had a trigger warning ⚠️

Salads

Some iceberg lettuce and a sweaty piece of ham rolled up into a tube shape

I don't remember much apart from the chips, they were good. I can only assume I didn't eat much bit the chips 🤣.
Couldn't stand packed lunches. The smell still.makes me feel a bit sick when I have to empty the dcs boxes when they come home. Always smells like soggy bread and yoghurts, even if they haven't had a yoghurt. How is that possible 🤢

This was in the mid 70's
Mushy peas🤮
Spam fritters🤮
Fried to death onions🤮
Salad that had a ginormous pile of cress and cubes of cold swede🤮
Custard that had little round jelly like lumps in🤮
Rice pudding with a dollop of jam in the middle🤮
Piped mashed potatoes that tasted nothing like spuds🤮

A dinner lady called Mrs roof, who used to loom over you until you finished your plate. Thank god we were eventually allowed packed lunches.

One school- absolutely nothing, it was all awesome.

The next one- I distinctly remember grey, gristle pucks that were supposedly burgers. That and over cooked cabbage!

God, the smell of the canteen. I didn't have school dinners at secondary, but when the people who did came back to the classroom afterwards they just had this horrible stink...like very very stale cooking oil

I actually liked the spam fritters at primary !

Skin on custard that made me retch but dinner lady forced me to eat until one day I was sick and had packed lunches after that

Spam fritters!!!! 🤮
I can still smell them now and even thinking about them make me want to hurl!!!!

I had a weeks worth of school dinners when I was 5 in 1982. I hated it so much. My Mum is an excellent cook and we ate Mediterranean food at home so a lot of it was very unfamiliar and stodgy. The smell in the room still makes me heave when I think of it (it used to waft into the pack lunch area too and put me off my sandwiches).

I clearly remember one of the dinner ladies lifting my friend up by the arm off the chair and smacking her legs because she wouldn’t eat the grey boiled liver. When you were done you took your plates to scrape in an enormous open bin of slops. All the food mixed with bright yellow custard. And Oh god the smell.

H on the other hand has very fond memories from his school of things called gypsy tarts, which I have never heard of.

Some aspects of school dinners were foul...tinned burgers ffs!

However Australian crunch is food of the gods...better still, Australian crunch with bright green mint custard! Heaven!

The big vat of custard that used to develop a thick skin on the top then the dinner ladies would take that big ladel and mix the skin throughout the custard and serve it up. Big minging skin lumps through it. Ugh.

I forgot to mention the mashed potatoes with greyish lumps. It smelled terrible too.

Boiled cod swimming in water - grey, lumpymashed potato - custard with skin - snot pie - tinned burgers and tinned sausages - tinned tomatoes served as a vegetable and tinned spaghetti. Not even a drink of water allowed all day in case we spilled any.

Early 70s, rice pudding! Especially as i wasn't allowed to leave until i'd eaten it... memories of sitting there, once everyone had left with a congealed bowl of rice pudding in front of me.
I can't even look at a picture of the stuff! Urgh

As a child that didn't have many hot dinners at home; I loved every meal. I would go for seconds and I was skinny as a piece of cotton!

The smell (like hospital food smell). Yuk.

The chocolate concrete was wonderful though.

Semolina 🤢

Primary school dinners in the 70s were, by and large, passable but there were exceptions such as:

Minced chicken balls in batter;
Fish and bones in batter;
Spam fritters;
Instant mash potato with green lumps. Actually made me retch once it was that bad.
Baked beans, overcooked and kept warm by pouring boiling water into the trough;

The sausages, roast potatoes, Yorkshire puddings and roast meats were ok. The sponge puddings were usually pretty good but the bright pink custard was less appetising.

Hairy mashed potatoes full of hard grey lumps.

Liver in gravy and baked beans on the same plate so all the juice mixed together.

Solid slabs of "scrambled egg" swimming in yellow oil.

Blancmange with thick dark pink skin.

I did like the roast dinners though, followed by treacle pudding with chocolate custard.

It's the smell of mass catering...my DC always come home smelling like that after a day in school!

I loved them. At primary school at least. Especially the puddings. YY to the weird metallic water jugs though. At Secondary I mostly remember having cuppa soup and a roll so I could save the cash for the weekend.

The actual food was fine (1980s comprehensive, years before Jamie Oliver made everything healthy). It was the 45 minute queue to get it and the horrible dark dining area with grey walls and two tiny windows that I didn't like.

I was at school in the 90s when school dinners were at a real low in terms of quality. I think a lot of stuff came out of a can or freezer box and just got heated up.

Generally the more middle class kids had packed lunches (not that these were any healthier really, everyone had a kit Kat or penguin every single day, salad/veg did not feature).

The burgers and sausages always had an odd texture, a bit rubbery.

I loved the tinned ravioli though, my mum would never have bought that at home.

That Jamie Oliver got beanies banned

I loved school lunches apart from the peas and yoghurt, I could never understand why they couldn’t give you a pot of yoghurt rather than a dollop on your tray. Oh and I wasn’t keen on the puddings, nothing wrong with them just not to my taste.

I was on packed lunch at infants and junior school mostly I think because of the price.