Memories and Musings of Elementary School Lunch

This is my second entry in the Write of Passage writing challenge. This week's challenge was:

Take Fifteen Minutes to write about your elementary school lunch. Describe. 

Remember. Smell. Touch. Who is there? Where are you? What are you eating?

The thing I remember most about my elementary school lunchroom was the smell.
It was disgusting.
The smell of student lunches mixing, food cooking and the garbage disposal running would turn my stomach. To this day, when I walk into my children's school cafeteria, the smell is the first thing I notice. It still makes me nauseous. It's one of the only places I won't volunteer. I just can't do it. And even as an adult, the smell turns my stomach and makes me start dry heaving.
Do you feel closer to me now that you know that? :)
In elementary school our lunches were served on cardboard yellow trays that were thrown into the garbage disposal when we were done. I remember having to pick off certain items because they were not allowed in the disposal, but cannot specifically remember which items went where. I just remember wanting to throw my tray into the garbage disposal as quickly as possible so I wouldn't lose my lunch. I also stayed as far away from the chute because if you were too close, it would splatter. My worst fear was having the disposal spit someone's school lunch remains back at me. It still gives me the heebie-jeebies.
Our lunch menu was always interesting. Some foods like beef and macaroni and spaghetti made me want to hurl from the smell alone. The sight of the sauce would make me think of the cans of tomato paste my mom would open on Sunday mornings as she was preparing her pot of sauce. At school, the red sauce looked pasty, clumpy and there was no gravy, just macaroni slopped together with the sauce. On those pseudo "Italian macaroni" days, I would eat my dessert and call it lunch.
There were some meals, though that I really looked forward to-like pizza and macaroni and cheese.
I loved the school's macaroni and cheese. 
Mainly because my family was Italian and my mother did not make macaroni and cheese because it was not right. Well, at least not in her eyes. Macaroni had to be served with sauce, meat or yuckitty yuck yuck, lentils. When we got to high school, both my brother and I would go to the store and purchase boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and make it ourselves. It was so delicious and was something we both really enjoyed eating. My mom would cringe as my brother and I would eat an entire pot of what she called "the most fattening stuff ever." We didn't care. And to this day, I LOVE mac n' cheese.
So do my kids.
Just saying. 
My favorite days were pizza days. Maybe because I loved pizza but mmmmm...was it good. The pizza was cut into a rectangle and was always hot and cheesy. It was nothing like the Sicilian pizza we would eat on the weekends, but the next best thing in my eyes. Mexican pizza and taco days were also favorites of mine because living in an Italian family we did not get to have Mexican anything. Period.
The other thing I liked about my school lunches were the little desserts. I loved the brownies and the chocolate chip cookies. The cakes and pie-looking stuff, not so much. They always tasted so processed-even back then. Maybe because I loved baking and my mom would let me bake my own cakes and cookies on the weekends and holidays. My cakes always tasted so fresh, moist and yummy that I couldn't bring myself to eat the crap the school served. Some days, the school served little containers of fruit juice or fruit. I did not like their juices or their fruit because it always looked and smelled old and moldy. Plus, the juice had pulp in it and that totally grossed me out.
Still does, even to this day.  
Periodically, they would serve those juice bars and the orange ones, they were the bomb. If the popsicles were too funky-like grapefruit flavored, I would let it melt on my tray or give it away. As a kid, I believed it was wrong to serve grapefruit popsicles to us kids. We wanted the good flavors, like orange, cherry and grape.
Not. Grapefruit. Ugh!
Now the chocolate milk, that was my little pint of goodness. All that I looked forward to each day. I LOVED school lunches for the chocolate milk alone. My mom was not a fan of chocolate milk and school was generally the only place I ever had the opportunity to suck some down. It was always delicious, cold and well, chocolaty. And I remember savoring each sip until the carton was empty and then wishing I had more money to buy another carton.
Funny thing about my elementary school lunch days, is that I don't remember much about the people I sat with. I don't remember ever sitting with one special friend during lunch. I just would sit at the table with my class, eating and chatting. It was all very casual. And everyone was pretty much friends with everyone else.
Amazingly enough, when I started the prompt I thought I would have a hard time remembering my school lunch days, but as I started writing, the memories came flooding back to me. Funny, how that happens.
Take some time now and think about your elementary school lunch days. What do you remember most about your elementary school lunch? Was it the food, the smell, the people? Share your memories with me in the comments. I look forward to strolling down memory lane with you! :)