old school lunches
Brent Finnegan -- August 20th, 2008
A reader informed me that unappetizing photos of Harrisonburg Public School lunches recently ended up linked from Digg to a lowbrow blog about “girls, gossip, and gear for men.”
The thing is, those photos were taken off the school’s website years ago. I’m told some of those items, like chicken fryz, are still on the menu, but many have been taken out of rotation. There also appears to be some confusion on Digg and Holy Taco between Harrisonburg, Virginia and Harrisburg, Pennsylvania.
I see someone archived the original site (from 2002) which as I understand it was put together for special ed classes at Waterman Elementary so they could do some kind of learning activity with it.
Current menus are available here http://www.harrisonburg.k12.va.us/foodsvc/
I can promise you that Chicken Fryz were never served to my children. I have the city school menu right in front of me and there are only a few days that have foods that are questionable. School lunch never tastes that great, but they have made huge strides in the nutritional content.
My kids usually pack, but that’s mostly because they inherited their fathers preference for eating the exact same lunch every day! Plus I can see how much they actually ate based on what’s left when they get home.
Your kids are packing? No wonder I don’t send my kids to city schools! :-) (Sorry, couldn’t resist.)
Hehe.
I miss school lunches. Some of that food was really good. You can ice-cream-scoop my mashed potatoes any day of the week.
Bleck! Some of those may taste ok, but they sure don’t look very good.
I agree with ‘justin’ (unless he was being sarcastic). I had the benefit of going to Waterman Elementary some years ago (wow, like 20+) and their lunches were usually very good. That was the days of homemade rolls at almost every lunch. We were allowed Chocolate Milk only on Thursdays. All through my schooling, city lunches were certainly as good as a fast food joint. I didn’t really care for the school pizzas (something about a pizza slice that is rectangular being cut from a big pizza the shape of a sheet pan always got me). It would be nice for them to return to more fresh local products and more homemade meals though.
Well my kids go to Waterman now, and the food is better than a fast food restaurant and certainly more healthy. I saw one meal in those pictures (the cheese breadsticks) that actually is served there, but it looks a lot better in person. Keister will be getting local foods every week (I think) this year. I’m not sure why this is only happening at Keister, but I hope it spreads throughout the schools.
I go through the menu at the beginning of every month and let my kids pick which days that want to bring lunch and which days they want to buy. My oldest, who will be in his third year of school food, wants to buy almost every day. So, it must not be too gross.
I don’t miss the taste of school food, but I do miss the bargain! I buy school lunches when I volunteer and am usually satisfied with what I get for the money.
Does anyone remember the chili from school in Harrisonburg? And the bread used to taste home baked. I always thought the lunches were good! But that was back in the day…
School rolls are the best things ever!
The hburg food pics are making the blog circuit. See http://www.seriouseats.com/2008/08/the-most-disgusting-school-lunches.html
Coming from a fella who’s been hungry his whole life, city school lunch was great :)
Love it, now we’re Harrison?
Or was he calling us Harrison City?