Lamcashire, England, in the 1960s:
Aperitif of tap water, served out from enormous aluminium jugs and poured into polythene cups, which tainted the water with an unforgettable plastic taste.
There was no choice of courses - not even Hobson's choice of "take it or leave it". You were required to eat whatever it happened to be that day. A typical meal would consist of a rapidly cooling plate of boiled beef, lukewarm and grey, liberally marbled with gristle. This would be accompanied by a couple of scoops of mashed potato, which always had semi-cooked lumps in it, and a few slices of overboiled carrot. Condiments available were salt and white pepper. We had no ranch dressing so the only saving grace was the gravy, which was actually made from the meat and made the potatoes more or less palatable... if you could get it before it started to congeal.
Dessert would be something like what is called Bakewell Tart, or rather an apology for it, being a hard crust pastry base overspread with a cheap red jam which might have been raspberry, and topped with a thick custard made from powdered egg and milk, on which a leathery skin used to form as the flaccid abomination cooled. Sometimes there was a semolina pudding, which looked and tasted like wallpaper paste or flour and water gruel with a little added sugar, into which was spooned a dollop of that red, syrupy synthetic jam. My gorge rises even now at the recollection of it.
Some kids actually liked the cuisine (which makes me wonder what they got to eat at home), but my mother was an excellent cook and it was nothing like the food I knew at home. Eventually I begged my parents to be allowed to take sandwiches and eat separately in a classroom with the Jewish kids, whose requirement for kosher food was of course never catered for.
I have no bad memories of the food at college or university - we were treated and fed like grown-ups. The memory of those twelve years of culinary child abuse made me feel as if I'd gone through some grotesque rite of passage.
There ought to be laws against this sort of thing. Perhaps there are now, as I hear that school canteen meals have improved beyond recognition.
