Has that shit gone downhill, or did I win the lottery of school lunches without realizing it?

I think it’s a little of both. School lunches definitely have gotten worse, but they’ve also always kinda been bad in many parts of the country. I think a lot of people don’t realize how good their lunches actually were compared to what the kids in their neighboring districts were getting. When I was a kid, we moved one city over and I was in a new school district; went from having pretty decent lunches with lots of options for everything, to having small portions of awful-tasting food with few options, if any.

IMO, it’s one of the reasons why local politics are so important, because the schools with bad lunches are typically severely under-funded.

School funding is incredibly localized in the US.

Same here, and no it’s definitely gone downhill. And even if we ignore intentional changes in some areas, inflation has outmatched school funding. Costs get cut wherever they can when there’s never been enough to go around.

I went to schools that were so shit the teachers got part of their student loans waived for teaching there if they did it long enough. You’re about my age, and I would say the pic in the article does look worse than what we ate most days but not by much. Add canned corn or green beans to it and it’d pass for one of the less appetizing meals that we got.

The main difference is almost certainly funding. The really nice neighborhoods probably made both of our lunches look like prison food.

70s and 80s school food was revolting, though a fair bit better in high school.