Anyone who went to school in the 2000s will remember the good old days of school dinners, before Jamie Oliver's campaign for healthy lunches made us say goodbye to reconstituted poultry dubbed Turkey Twizzlers, pizza and chips, and other delightfully cholesterol-boosting meals in the canteen.
In hindsight, kids and teenagers really shouldn't have been stuffing their faces with processed grub before an afternoon of learning, and it turns out that school dinners can be both tasty and healthy - who knew?
Well, the reform clearly didn't reach all corners of the globe, as a high school student shared pictures of their carb-heavy and frankly disgusting-looking canteen lunch on Reddit.
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In the Reddit post, the student - who didn't say where they were from - shared their meal with the internet: a carton of milk, some fries with ketchup, a bag of carrots and some miscellaneous slop purporting to be chicken mac and cheese.
On the plus side, they didn't pay for the unappetising plate, explaining that lunches in their city had recently been made free.
"Ever since lunches have been made free, the quantity (and quality) has decreased significantly. This is what we would get for our meal," they said.
The student said they finished the mac and cheese in just three bites, and that if students wanted anything else to eat, they'd have to pay.
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"Any snacks you want cost more money and if you want an extra entree, that’ll cost you about $3 or $4," they said.
The student was appalled that their school thought this meal would "fill up hungry high schoolers", and their fellow Redditors were also horrified.
One said that the plate "looks worse [than] jail food", while another wrote: "That made me gag… [what the hell] that is not Mac n cheese."
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Others noted the lack of variety in the meal, with one saying: "Do you want some carbs with your carbs?"
"This looks like too many calories and too little nutrients," wrote another.
Apparently, school dinners can vary greatly depending on where in the world you get your education.
"I lived and went to high school in France for 3 months for an exchange. Everyday you'd have a hot lunch typically a protein, pasta ect. Plus a fruit, yogurt, personal baguette and something like jello, custard or something else small and sweet," one person wrote. "It was literally like going to an average restaurant everyday."
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Another Reddit user from Sweden said their lunches had been like an 'all you can eat buffet' with food that was 'always pretty decent and healthy'.
"I feel sorry for the rest of the world who get this 'lunch'," they added.
Topics: US Food
Rachael Davis