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Mem BY
LINDSAY C VANASDALAN
DNY59 / E+ / GETTY IMAGES
very school cafeteria offers a familiar
scene. As lunchboxes open, eyes dart
from one child to the next, and then
comes the classic question: what ‘cha got?
School lunches draw up memories even
years later of what was traded, of special
items brought from home with a note from
mom and dad, of the weird combos only a kid
would request, of sandwiches with the crusts
cut off and, of course, of what you would buy
with your lunch money.

Kelly Simmons built an entire busi-
ness based off of the cookies she used to
buy for lunch.

The owner of Aunt Kelly’s Cookies, featured
in our sister publication Baltimore’s Child’s
Winter 2022 issue, was inspired by Linden’s
butter crunch cookies—which she grew up
buying for 35 cents a pack at her Baltimore
City elementary school. In recreating that rec-
ipe with her grandmother, Simmons was able
to recall memories of the two of them baking
together when she was just 5 years old.

There’s no doubt food creates strong mem-
ories, but what is it about school lunches that
forges an even stronger bond?
The Cat Dish.

She fondly remembers the freshly baked
bread she would get with almost every
lunch—and how she would make trades just
to get an extra roll.

Part of the allure of lunchtime could be
owed to its social and cultural ties. Everyone
can tell when you grew up based on what your
mom packed in your lunch. Popular school
lunch fads over the years include pizza and
PB&J in the 1960s; snack-based items such as
Fruit Roll-Ups, Lunchables and Dunkaroos
in the 80s and 90s and more organic brands
such as Stonyfield Farms in the 2000s.

Of course, popularity also varies by area.

In Philadelphia, some children were noshing
on Italian hoagies, Utz chips, Huggies and
butterscotch krimpets for lunch.

“There was creamed dried beef on white
toast, and “Sloppy Joes”… and there were
always breaded fish sticks on Fridays,” writes
Kristina M. Victoreen in her Philly blog.

School Lunch Memories
The Evolution of the School Lunch
“It’s funny how we all—no matter which
school we attended or how long ago that
was—have fairly fond memories of school
lunch,” writes Catherine Toth Fox, a former
decade-long newspaper reporter and cur-
rent editor of HAWAI’I Magazine in her blog,
14 Washington FAMILY AUGUST 2022
The first official school-day lunches came
about in the late 19th century. Philadelphia
and Boston were the first major U.S. cities
to have a school lunch program. Before then,
children would often to go home for midday
meals with their families
Bon Appetit references a Culinary Institute
of America food anthropologist who named
pickles as the “addictive junk food” of that
time period.

Though there was federal support for these
meal programs, a big shift occurred in 1946,
when President Harry Truman’s National
School Lunch Act made it a more permanent
commitment. The Child Nutrition Act in 1966
added subsidies for low-income families.

The early focus of school lunch programs
was on nutrition, but standards relaxed by
the 70s, when even candy counted as nutri-
tious under minimum requirements. By the
80s, ketchup was considered a school-ap-
proved vegetable and fast food appeared in
cafeterias in the 90s.

the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act signed
by president Barack Obama in 2010 revamped
nutrition standards for the first time in about
30 years, pushing whole grains, fruits, vegeta-
bles, and protein.

Apart from health, as early as the 1940s,
anthropologist Margaret Mead encouraged
food choice and an expansion of cultural
options. Since then, schools have gotten
rather creative with their choices.

The Washingtonian published an arti-
cle in 2016 about the best school lunches
in town. Holton-Arms School, a private all