I remember the smell! Bologna (baloney) sandwiches and either Hostess Cupcakes or Hostess Twinkies.

I had school lunches, usually the only cooked meal I would get that day, and sometimes it was the only meal of the day. Luckily I wasn't a fussy eater and so I ate everything. My favourite thing was Manchester Tart that we used to have for dessert - a pastry base, with jam, a thick cold custard on top and chocolate sprinkles.

PBJ. Milk in the thermos. An apple. Celery and carrot sticks. Sometimes a baggie with some potato chips. When we had chocolate chip cookies they were carob and whole wheat. A lot of times it was peanut butter cookies.

In high school I took Tupperwares with salad which consisted of iceberg lettuce, maybe some carrot shavings, and low-fat Italian dressing. Good god, that's nothing. I can't believe I considered that lunch. It might have impacted my health negatively had I not actually made up for pilfering fries and cookies off my friends' lunches.

In grade school I ate bologna sandwiches on white bread. I didn't eat the crusts. Sometimes I had soda or tea in a thermos. Once I got to junior high and high school I stopped eating lunch altogether. I was the opposite of Senyar -- I was an extremely fussy eater, and kids teased me about what I ate, or wouldn't eat, so it was easier to just not eat in front of them.

I lived a few houses from my school, and my mother was not the sort of parent to consider packing a lunch, so I tended to go home and steal money from her wallet (she did not work when I was in primary school) and take myself to the closest (NZ equivalent of) 7-11. Yep, even when I was 5.

I was a picky eater. Don't know why but my Mom let me make my lunches. I made sandwiches ....
White bread with yellow mustard, a little baggie of potato chips: at linchtime put chips between breadwich for a tasty tasty lunch!
Pretty cool Mom, thanks.

PBJ, carrots, celery, baggie of chips, cut up apples and oranges, apple juice, a cookie. I ate mostly the same thing through high school and my mother packed my lunch every single day.

Another picky eater. Which resulted in peanut butter & syrup sandwiches (since I didn't and still don't eat jelly -- I have no idea how my mom came up with that), potato chips or cheetos, and some sort of bad-for-me sweet like twinkies. This was also the preferred summer lunch to have while watching Bob Ross paint.

I got all sorts of different foods, pretty much all vegetarian -- this was in India, and I ate meat, but it wasn't considered appropriate for school lunches usually. I remember lime rice, coconut rice, various pilafs and pulaos, corn on the cob, carrot salads, pressed egg sandwiches, chappathis with various side dishes including cauliflower with mustard seeds, fried potatoes, eggplant curry and so on. I definitely enjoyed my lunches. I'll also note that we had a cook who prepared all this, so it wasn't my parents cooking all of this.

Sandwiches on Roman Meal bread: PBJ, tuna, bologna, liverwurst, pimento loaf, egg salad, devilled ham and probably a couple others I'm forgetting. We always had a piece of fruit: usually a banana, apple or orange, sometimes a peach or apricot or pear (they were more expensive). A few vegetable sticks: cucumber, celery, carrot (I threw away everything except cucumber sticks). A couple homemade cookies or a brownie (I really don't know when mum found time for baking), milk in a thermos. All of it put into a lunch box that I was sooo excited to pick out at the beginning of every school year. I specifically remember a tin Holly Hobby lunch box and a vinyl box that had a design of denim and bandanas on it.

In junior and high school I changed to brown bags and making it myself. Sandwiches were similar (less meat), same with the fruit, a granola bar (no more homemade baking!) and enough change to purchase a drink at school (usually a soda).

I ate at home. No such things as a school lunch then. Almost always a half sandwich and a bowl of soup.

Pretty much always had the school lunches, although I remember eating pops' sandwiches in elementary school for a while. (Pops has had the same sandwiches for over 20 years for lunch: fried bolonga+thin layer of mustard on white bread. Salami is an acceptable substitute.)

In HS, I ate even worse crap since we had a more diverse meal plan and typically had some pizza and a slushie (often with some form of booze in it) and frosting straight from a can. (Then before volleyball practice/matches, a bag of Skittles and a Surge. It's amazing I don't have the diabeetus.)

And this is why you're fat, Rosemary.

Tuna,bologna,pbj, american cheese sandwiches on rye, whole wheat or sourdough. When I was in 3rd grade I thought I choked on a carrot and wouldn't eat anything for months.
We bought milk at school.
Once my lunchbox was stolen and the thief ate the brownie but left everything else.

We ate Roman Meal too! I'd forgotten about that brand.

My first couple of elementary schools actually didn't have a cafeteria. We all brought lunch, and we ate at our desks.

Best I can recall, my typical elementary school lunch was a Peanut Butter and Honey sandwich, some chips, half a banana, and one of those "fruit" snack things (Fruit by the foot or Gushers or something similar). I'd buy my milk from the cafeteria, and if I was lucky and it was the right day, I'd get one of those ice cream cups with the little wooden stick for scooping.

1 bologna sandwich with mustard on white bread. 2 cookies, usually generic vanilla or chocolate cremes, and milk. Probably 80% of my lunches through high school graduation. Butter was an occasional treat. Another 10% were bologna with mayo. The remainder were salami or tuna fish.

I hate balogna on white bread.

My mother was so, so against the kinds of food other people ate. I had a regular lunchbox with a thermos, but I would always have orange juice in my thermos... which I would forget to wash out because I hated it. Oops. Stinky.

Typically a PB&J on Roman Meal wheat bread or something more wholesome, a banana, some Jell-o in a Tupperware container (ALWAYS yellow, ALWAYS with fruit cocktail in it). Sometimes I would have a little can of fruit cocktail.

Ants on a log -- celery with peanut butter and raisins. Sometimes just plain celery. Eeeew.

Yogurt cups: I liked (and still like) what they referred to as "sundae style," the unmixed kind -- which I would never mix! It was like eating jam right out of the jar, which was the closest I got to dessert.

Babybel cheeses were my faaaaaaaavorite. We didn't have them very often, but once I had them I always asked for them, again and again. I would take the wax apart and put the red wax on my nose like Rudolph. ALWAYS.

Of course, now that I read this, I see that pretty much all of us were in the PBJ-on-Roman Meal brigade :P

Funny that a few more of you also ate Roman Meal. I think my mum's thinking was that we kids wanted soft bread and RM was whole wheat and it made a decent compromise.

And I forgot! Because we were poor, from 3rd grade on I got free milk at school. Thank the gods because we had powdered milk at home. It was tolerable on dry cereal, but to drink it straight?! Blech!

We didn't have a cafeteria where you could buy food, but an outdoors area with long picnic-bench type tables. There was a nice covering of trees, so it was fairly cool even on the hottest days. If it rained we had to eat in our classes at our desks. The teachers must have dreaded those days.

If it was Friday it was salmon croquettes...

In elementary school, we usually had sandwiches of some sort. My sister and I were nuts for a cheap paté ("veal-pork-chicken spread") that came in tiny tins. Getting that paté and some ballpark mustard on whole wheat bread never got old. But sometimes my Mum would pack me one hot dog in an Alladin thermos full of hottish water, and a hot dog roll from the bread man with the ketchup and mustard already put on it. We could buy little cartons of milk from a crate in the classroom, but they were never really cold.

In high school in Montreal, we could get a hot meal with real vegetables in the cafeteria pretty cheaply, with pizza or hamburgers as a big treat once a week. When we moved to Toronto, I was shocked to find that all we could get here -- for more money -- was fries with gravy and hot dogs or hamburgers. Every day. And they weren't that good, either.

A tuna sandwich, (something) and a thermos of chocolate milk in a Hogan's Heroes lunchbox.

I remember my mom used to draw on the bags. Sometimes quick cartoons, sometimes incredibly detailed animals, like Dürer etchings. Sometimes just little hearts. I wish I had saved some of those lunch bags.

Inside, I suspect I had an apple or a PB&J. I went to a lot of different schools and I remember in Alabama, we got Krystals (the Southern White Castle) hamburgers once a month in the cafeteria and in California, we all had open campus at lunch.

PBJ. Milk in the thermos. An apple. Celery and carrot sticks. Sometimes a baggie with some potato chips.

Pretty much exactly the same here. Laura Scudder chips.

Yeah, school lunch was sometimes my only meal as a kid, too. We used to have a cold lunch, a sandwich, piece of fruit, cookie, milk. If it was salami, I used to pick out the peppercorns before I ate it. I remember bringing half a sandwich home for my mom sometimes, wrapping it up in the wax paper and tucking it in my coat pocket. That's when I lived with my birth mom, until I was nine. With my father, I got hot lunch in elementary school. I used to love the mock pizza: ground beef in tomato sauce on an English muffin topped with cheese. Yum.

After freshman year of high school I didn't bother with hot lunches anymore. I'd dash in, buy a premade sandwich, often tuna, and maybe cookies or an icecream sandwich and dash out before the bell. As long as you got out of the cafeteria before the bell, you could go where you wanted on campus, the library, band room. (There was no security needed at my high school -- such a far cry from the uniformed officers and metal detectors of the school I teach at, security I'm grateful for, mind you.). Sometimes I ate my sandwich while dissecting a cat in Advanced Bio.

If my mom packed me lunch, she was very paranoid about spoilage. I ate more cellophane cheese and pickle relish sandwiches than anyone should.

whoa, I'm going to India and getting a cook.
Also, holy cow! A hotdog in warm water, in a thermos. That is so crazy.

Wonder bread pbj and chips or something. On Fridays I totally got school lunch, pizza. Ice cream was 15 cents which I tried to scrounge every day, and I preferred the chocolate-covered ice milk bar to the fudgicle. Oh, and I remember pbj on matzoh during Passover.

grape juice, yoghurt, and plain cheerios to put in the yoghurt

I think my mum's thinking was that we kids wanted soft bread and RM was whole wheat and it made a decent compromise.

This was probably my mom's thinking too. The only other whole wheat bread that was even commercially available at the time was Pepperidge Farm, and theirs was dry and crumbly. It was lousy for sandwiches. We turned up our nose at it.