Now school possibly isn't and never has been just a place of learning in the classroom. Kids have to learn as much, if not more, out of the classroom as well.
It was at school that I first learned something about commerce. My folks were poor and somehow I never had cards to trade or other goods to swap like a lot of the other kids. Where I learned to trade was at school dinners. What follows is more or less what I told a friends daughters who then were six and nine. At the end (in italics) are a number of answers to questions they asked me either when I finished or while I was telling it.
There were no chips and burgers then. No ice cream. No jellies. Rice was a pudding and salads an expensive dream. Every meal had to be meat and two veg, except on Fridays when it was fish and two veg, followed by a dessert and a bottle of squash. There was no choice. You walked in and picked up a plate. You moved along and the dinner ladies plonked the food on the plate. You picked up a knife and fork and carried the plate to the table and stood behind a bench waiting for grace to be said. Once the head had said grace, usually "For what we are about to receive may the Lord make us truly grateful.", we were allowed to sit down and eat. Now if you were in the infant, year one, class you went in and got your dinner first. This did have the drawback of your meal being pretty near cold by the time you got to eat it. Mind you the seniors had to cope with scalding gravy so that wasn't all bad. After the main meal, including seconds, had been finished by everyone the dinner ladies got ready to serve pudding and we all had to queue up again while dinner monitors gathered up our plates. We would this time take a bowl and pudding would be dumped into it, more often than not followed by a ladel-full of custard but at least we could go back to our places and eat it straight away. While we ate this a dinner lady would push a trolley around and give us a beaker of squash. When all that was finished we were released into the playground. No one checked to see if our hands were clean before we started. There was none of this allowing of the food to digest before going to play. That was the system and I went to three different state schools and the system was the same at all of them.
State schools? Oh they were ones run by the council that you didn't have to pay to go to.
Now I quickly cottoned onto the fact that the staff did not care who ate what as long as all the food vanished. Now most of the meals were meat and two veg. As all of you know meat has lean bits, fatty bits and bone and gristle which are impossible to eat. We knew the uneaten bones went to the glue factory but the only use we found for gristle was pretending it was a giant bogey as we slipped it down the back of someone's neck. A lot of kids didn't like the fatty bits. The two veg was either potato and cabbage, potato and peas, potato and runner beans, or potato and carrots. Occasionally we had stew consisting of meat, potato and a mixture of all those veges. On Fridays when we had fish the veges were potato and cauliflower when in season, otherwise cabbage. Notice that cabbage, peas and runner beans were green. Some kids didn't like green veges. Some kids hated carrots and some kids didn't like cauliflower. These veges were not like they are cooked these days. No! These had been boiled for ages and so were soft and often sludgy! Then the potatoes, boiled or mashed. Most kids liked mashed potato but school mashed potato was nearly always lumpy and quite a few kids didn't like that. Most kids liked boiled potatoes, that is when they were not shades of gray. Now I said we were poor at home. I had learned pretty much to eat anything that came my way, especially if it was food. So at school I traded: "Don't you want that fatty meat? Tell you what you can have either this (smaller) piece of lean for it or some of my mash." "What you don't want cabbage? Here I'll swap you this bit of (fatty) meat for it" "Don't you want that mash? Here I have loads of cabbage I will swap you half for your mash." And so on. By the time I had finished 'trading' I had usually doubled the amount of food on my plate. I rarely bothered with seconds.
The other trading was with puddings. Swapping custard for pudding or the other way around was usual. Then there was the favorite pudding bit of trading! Most schools seemed to follow the pattern of Monday: Jam sponge and custard. Tuesday: whipped desert or gypsy tart. Wednesday: milk pudding. Thursday: Jam or syrup tart and custard. Friday: spotted dick or some other steamed pudding and custard. Jam sponge was usually a block of sponge with jam on top and then custard over that. I reckon they started the week with that because it was almost impossible to muck up. It was good because if you traded for someone's custard you would get most of their jam as well. I don't know if you have ever had angel delight but that was the type of thing we got on Tuesday unless we had gypsy tart. For me, although I liked the whipped pudding, this was the worse for trading puddings as everyone else seemed to like it too. Not everyone liked the gypsy tart though and it tended to be one week whipped pudding and the next gypsy tart. Gypsy tart was my favorite so I gave away my whipped pudding for someone else's gypsy tart the next week. Milk puddings were rice pudding, macaroni pudding or semolina pudding. I liked them all. Most kids didn't. I swapped out the next days tart or custard to get extra. As quite a few kids did not like fish I was usually pretty bloated after the main meal on Friday so I traded my puddings away in return for puddings I liked on other days. It didn't worry me as spotted dick was a family favorite and we usually had it over the weekend at home.
Spotted dick? Ah that is a proper steamed pudding with currents and sultanas in. I really do not know why you are laughing. How it got its name? I think it was invented by a man named Richard because Dick is a nick name given to people with the name Richard. It was called spotted because of the currents in it. (Phew!)
Gypsy tart? That is whipped up evaporated milk and brown sugar put into a nearly cooked tart and then finished off for five minutes or so in the oven. Yes it is very sweet. Er the most I ate at one go was four. No I was not sick. No I didn't lick the filling out and then eat the tart as it tasted better together. I don't know what would happen if you stuck a straw in it and blew. Yes it could mark clothes but would easily wash out. Yes it is too sweet to give to dogs. No my cat never tried to eat it. I am pretty sure it is very bad for goldfish. No it didn't make me burp.
Yes having a lot of cabbage did make me pump* more. I am glad to hear that you run outside if you think you are going to. No it never made me do that as I could always reach the toilet in time. No I have never sicked up just cabbage.
* Pump: to break wind.