What did you dislike about school dinners?

[Shandan35]

I think my only complaint was that the sweetcorn was tasteless

STEW! Primary school dinnerz every Friday was stew until p6 then you got to choose between stew or curry

Semolina and ravioli at school were truly disgusting. The thought of either still make me feel nauseous.

Baked beans
Pickled beetroot
Spam fritters (why? The war was over years ago)
Cheese pie
Rice pudding
Semolina pudding

And even things I normally liked
Very salty carrots
Very thin custard

I grew up with absolutely wonderful food - world wide stuff mum and dad both great cooks etc.
So I absolutely LOVED school dinners. Only time I had custard chips plain pastry things and old fashioned puddings. Stodgy plain ‘English’ food. I used to queue for seconds. only things I didn’t like were pickled beetroot and kidneys/liver which featured quite a bit.
I can still taste the butterscotch tart the cheese and onion flan (flan!) the link custard etc.

My mother overcooked all vegetables. My primary oversalted all vegetables so I hated everything.
I now love most vegetables, who knew

Loved the huge sponges! Great slabs of choc or vanilla sponge with matching custard, I like the skin on the custard too. I remember the metallic coloured jugs too, the cups used to set set my teeth on edge though, can make me shudder now if I think about it.

Liver.

(shudder)

I was at school in the 2000s and liked school dinners - they were a rare treat. Even turkey twizzlers!
At university however I was served a number of interesting things, not always completely edible. Falafel and gingerbread were always bulletproof - I remember trying to pick up the falafel with my fork and them pinging off the plate, and having to make holes in the gingerbread for the custard to soak into for it to become soft/moist enough to eat! Macaroni fritters were a bit weird as well.

I loved them - and it was the 70s.

My favourites were roast dinners (of course) and chocolate pudding and chocolate sauce, or raspberry shortbread and pink custard.

The only one I didn't like was liver and bacon.

everything

Except chocolate hedgehog/chocolate concrete with mint custard.

For those saying the (non) mash served with an ice cream scoop, was yours always yellow and dripping with grease? 🤮

I was at school in the 50s and as food rationing didn't end until '54 you can guess what sort of food they dished up. Actually you probably can't.

The only thing edible was chocolate sponge with chocolate sauce. Everything else ended up in the slop bucket (which I believe was used to feed pigs).

Mushy veg, fatty meat, lack of choice

The food at my boarding school the fatty meat even today I won’t eat gristle or fat unless burnt to a crisp.

School dinners at primary school were amazing, tiny school with the best cook in the world. Secondary school the worst part was the expensive new dining hall built a couple of years in, too small to accommodate as many as it needed to, everyone was supposed to eat in there but only seemed to have used numbers of people who used the previous two small catering options in calculating size. It was also painted an awful colour that made lots of people nauseated and gave some of us headaches, bright neon.

Fat on meat which the horrible dinner ladies made you eat and stood over you while you did. To this day fat on meat makes me want to vomit. I always trim off the slightest bit of fat and give it to the cat who likes it.

I have a strange cat.

I liked school dinners. Especially shepherds pie with yesterday's leftover baked beans in.

I was at Primary in the 70s. Dinners were foul:
Liver and bacon served with mushy cabbage.
Smash mashed potato which was never mixed properly so was all powdery inside.
Blancmange with such an inpenetrable skin, you had to turn it over and eat from the bottom up.
A strange curry type thing which was basically an olive green slop with pineapple chunks in it.
So many foul memories!

Some of the food at primary school was processed and poor quality. Processed peas (I like frozen peas) mock duck roll, cheap disgusting sausages. (I like better quality sausages.) I liked the 70s school puddings and some of the first courses like beef and cheese crumble.

Secondary school it was things like frozen pizza/pies and chips so not healthy. I liked the puddings though like choc chip sponge and custard 😋

Primary school in the 80s
Tapioca - the absolute worst
Semolina
Blamanche
Prunes and lumpy custard
Tinned jam
Pink custard
Grisly mince
Green spaghetti
Warm bottles of milk at break

90s here
That vile powdery mash that was served with an ice cream scoop

Nothing, bloody loved pink custard, salty cabbage, reformed potato! Not that any of it was nutritious ...

I remember at my primary school one of the teachers would call for silence part way through the 'meal' so we could say grace. Kind of ironic given of the inedible crap that we sometimes had, e.g. the aforementioned minced chicken things. Eww.

There was nothing to like. The only tolerable elements were plain boiled rice, half a hard-boiled egg, half an apple. We weren't allowed to take packed lunches, so I ate almost nothing from 8am - 4.40pm.