School Lunches Gone Wild: The Curse Of The Mystery Meat

People have always joked about school lunches. Now they just freak out because everybody thinks the food in school is not healthy.

Well, big surprise.

It never was.
At least it tastes good today.
I mean, Pizza, Pasta, Taco Salad.
.
. who cares how many calories it has, it tastes yummy! That wasn't always the case and it certainly was not when I was in school.

I cannot tell you how many times I paid good money for a school lunch in elementary and middle school only to find that I just couldn't eat it. It was always either undercooked or overcooked and sometimes there would actually be stuff hanging off or stuck to the side of the plate from a previous day's serving. I mean, it was beyond nasty! Things got a little better in high school.

They had a snack bar that featured hamburgers, various cold and hot sandwiches, tacos, pizza and a few other goodies.

I really liked the snack bar. I knew that stuff was bad for me, but it all tasted so good. At least I felt like I got my money's worth with the snacks.
There were two lunch counters in my high school. The regular school lunch area where they sold the stuff nobody wanted and the snack bar where they sold the burgers, sandwiches, pizza and other yummy foods.
The normal school lunches were scary bad.

They were always some kind of rock hard pepper or Salisbury steak, stale meat loaf, meatballs that were raw in the middle, undercooked pasta with watery sauce and spinach as a veggie, or some other crazy concoction made from leftovers. You couldn't possibly eat that stuff and survive. If you tried, you would spend most of the rest of the next hour or two barfing it all back up in the bathroom. I had a friend that got suspended because he decided to test the spaghetti and meatballs they were serving to see how good they were.
Coming from Italian ancestry, he told me and the others at our lunch table that there was an old wives tale that said if the spaghetti and sauce somebody was serving was good, it would stick to the wall. My friend decided to put his school lunch to the test.

He smashed a plate of spaghetti, sauce and meatballs up against the wall and pulled the plate away. The stuff just slid down to the floor. It was gross.
The sauce was like water and the spaghetti tasted like somebody cooked it last year, froze it and tried to squeeze out whatever life remained in it by heating it up in the microwave. Now in all fairness to the school lunch ladies that had to prepare the food, they were always very nice and I know they tried their best.

None of them were professional cooks and they only earned a few bucks an hour. It was the jerks in the school administration that always bought the cheapest food they could find that were to blame; but that wasn't their biggest culinary mistake.
They were always happy to accept the free food offered to them by the U.
S.

Government. It was stuff like cheese and cans of - I do not know what! The truck with the free food arrived once a month and we all dreaded that delivery. It wasn't that we didn't have a choice when it came to lunch. Like I said before, we could buy stuff from the snack bar instead of committing gastronomic suicide at the regular lunch counter.
It wasn't the choice, it was the smell. When they served up lunches made from the free government food, the stink in the lunchroom was horrible.

I mean it really smelled bad! And the one thing that smelled worse than everything else, the food item that caused sheer terror among the student body was the Mystery Meat that came cooked in big cans.

I helped set up the lunchroom a few days each week and watched the lunch ladies open huge metal cans with plain white labels on them that came from the latest batch of free government food.
Once open, you could see that the meat inside was engulfed by a weird jelly that had to be scraped off before heating it up.

When they started warming the meat, the smell was intolerable.
No one could even tell what the stuff inside the can was and the only thing printed on the plain white label was, "cooked meat.
" One of the lunch ladies said she thought it might have been pork that was actually steam cooked right inside the can.

The editor of our school paper once did a story on the Mystery Meat. His name was Derek and he was from England.
He moved here with his folks when he was about twelve years old, so he still had his English accent pretty well intact. He was also a school clown. Derek got a Sherlock Holmes-style hat and took a note pad into the lunchroom kitchen on one of the days when they were serving the Mystery Meat.

He was determined to get to the bottom of what the meat was and why it smelled so bad.
Derek watched as one of the lunch ladies opened the cans and even took some photos. He told her that he was certain that the meat in the cans must have been placed there by a serial killer to hide the bodies of victims.
"How do we know that's really from the government, Mom?" He asked taunting the lunch lady.
"It looks so gross and old," he went on to say, "that it could be from one of the victims of Jack the bloody Ripper!" I was setting up lunch tables while all this was going on and I couldn't help but crack up.

What made the whole thing even funnier was that on that particular day, the snack counter was closed.

New steam tables were being brought in to replace the old ones.
That meant that the only food available that day would have to be what was being served at the regular lunch counter.
Unfortunately, it was the mystery meat that was the main item on the menu.

It was being served with some government cheese melted on top and some over-cooked veggies that seemed to be trying to get off the plate and away from the horrible meat.
After getting all the photos and information he needed for his article, Derek had some more fun at the expense of the kitchen staff.
A pregnant sixteen year old came into the lunch room along with several hundred other students and all were immediately disgusted when they saw and smelled what was for lunch.
The pregnant girl, and I swear this is true, threw up in the lunch line from the awful stink of the cooked Mystery Meat. Derek immediately said in his best cockney accent, "Please miss, leave the lunchroom immediately! Think of your baby!" The lunch ladies were getting angry at him by this time, but Derek paid them no mind and continued his tirade focusing on the kitchen supervisor.
"Please, Misses Lady (he didn't know the names of the kitchen staff), take that horrible gruel away! Think of the students! Think of that poor girl's baby! Perhaps we can go and buy her some Mickey Dees (it was just up the street).
Does anyone have pennies for the baby so we can buy her some decent food? Please, pennies for the baby, mom! And God save us all from the mystery meat." Derek wasn't suspended, but he was banned from the lunchroom for the remainder of that semester.
He had to bring his lunch to school and eat in one of the study halls. Looking back, I don't know if that was actually punishment at all. Any chance to get away from the odor of the horrifying mystery meat was a blessing.
It's been a few years since I went to high school.

I wonder if lunch rooms in schools all over the USA are still serving that stuff.
If so, they are still haunted by the curse of the Mystery Meat.
May God have mercy on their souls (and stomachs).