What did you dislike about school dinners?

[Shandan35]

I think my only complaint was that the sweetcorn was tasteless

Tapioca 🤮

Mash

And yet we still survived

Pressed return to early
Yet we still survived amazingly and got on with it in general or learned tricks to hide it
I used to like fishfingers and mash and sponge & custard in primary.
Secondary I practically ate for 4 years , 1 chicken drummer , chips and salad cream, because was cheap and left me with money to get magazines etc

There was no such thing as school dinners when I was in school...still isn't really a common thing here now. They only introduced hot dinners to a handful of schools here this year.

Perfectly round mystery meat. There was pink meat, brown meat and beige meat. Fat and gristle marbled right through it.
Grey powdered mash served with an ice cream scoop. It had a faint smell of ammonia.
Plastic cups with raggedy edges from years of kids biting them, that made the water taste strange ( I still can't drink water from plastic cup)
Anaemic cabbage that disintegrated into mush if a fork got within three feet of it.

Lumpy custard with skin on it. Totally put me off custard for life. Basically any sloppy milky wet pudding.
Lumpy mash potatoes, although I do still eat that I just make sure it's lump free. Other than that I quite liked school meals especially fish day because the parsley sauce was lovely. Liked pretty much all the desserts too minus the custard of course. The worst part of school dinner for me was the food waste tub. I would gag every time I had to scrape left over food into it. Didn't enjoy it as much in secondary school though. Took too long to queue and then there was barely any time to eat it. Much preferred going to the newsagents and buying a pot noodle and a quids worth of penny sweets to munch on sat in the park

Didn’t have school dinners as they didn’t have a big enough kitchen. We all had to take packed lunches which in the 80/90s was quite monotonous. I used to swap mine with my friend who had lunch provided for her as I loved hot dogs and she didn’t so we were both happy until the dinner ladies busted us.

I don’t know any I put the 80s... I didn’t start school till 1990

Green custard, meagre portions. At high school I used to nick toast

The meals looked gross and only the children from families where money was a struggle had them for free, no one would pay for them!

Turkey twizzlers (

Mashed potatoes served with an ice cream scoop by the dinner lady who had really long fingernails also being made to finish everything. Mum soon sorted that out with a letter but I was terrified!

Mashed potatoes 🤮

Pink custard 🤮
We had green custard as well!
And pink blancmange with big cubes of different coloured jelly in it.

One of my favourites was duchesse potatoes, they were amazing!

I went to school in the 60's. No packed lunches allowed. You either went home at lunch time or you had to have school dinners. I hated things like rice pudding and custard, but was forced to sit and eat it as well as other milk puddings when they were on the menu.
It put me off any milk puddings for life, even now in my 60's I can't even stand the smell!

The drink was tiny. Those little white cups of squash, gone in one mouthful. I remember being so thirsty ALL THE TIME at school.

Hmm, the first bit I hated was the teacher standing up and asking everyone to be quiet and announcing really loudly “ could all the FREE SHOOL DINNER CHILDREN line up and go downstairs and get their FREE SCHOOL DINNERS of their pegs” then doing the walk of shame to get our carrier bags with a paper plate in it and a disgusting sandwich which always always had sliced tomato in it. So disgusting food with a side order of shame. Happy memories!!

Going against the grain here - my sister and I often reminisce about school dinners because ours were amazing! We were in Primary school in the early 90's.

Treacle Sponge
Butterscotch Tart
The BEST mashed potato
Amazing roast potatoes
This dish called Chicken Supreme which was just chicken in white sauce, it was lovely!

Secondary was all burgers and chips and some bruised fruit in a sad looking bowl!

Corned beef
Spam with boiled egg
Soup that tasted faintly of soap

The puddings made up for it all though.

Having said I loved the stodgy because I ate so well at home I have suddenly remembered something I couldn’t swallow - think it was cabbage which was partly over cooked and mushy and partly tough and stringy ?
I am currently hungry for a watery flan or a slab of butterscotch tart.
Bizarre !

I disliked almost everything! But here's a list of the worst things:
Mashed potato with hard, black lumps.
Mince that bounced off your teeth (99% gristle).
Lukewarm, stringy, overcooked cabbage stalks.
Dry pastry pies containing gristle and no gravy.
Black hardboiled eggs.
Boiled swede.
Gristle stew.
Gristle and kidney pie.

Packed lunches were unheard of in those days (1960s): one either had school dinners or went home to eat. My mother didn't want me coming home, so my parents paid 5/- a week for the school dinners, 90% of which I couldn't eat, so they wasted their money really.

Honestly, my school dinners were quite good at primary school - didn't get them in secondary.

But the one thing I absolutely couldn't stand was cheese flan. Oh my god. When I saw that on the menu I just wanted to cry. It was absolutely disgusting. I am not a picky eater by any means whatsoever but wow. I couldn't deal with the cheese flan!