For any elementary or high school student, hot lunch is the ultimate gamble. You buy your tickets at the start of the week and pray that sometime that week something good comes up.

So what made hot lunch so special? Better yet, what made it so bad? Why were there so many brown baggers in the school? Adam Sandler said it all with his “Lunch Lady Land” song: “Hoagies and grinders, hoagies and grinders … ”

The Good

There was always the holy trinity of hot lunch, the “Three C’s,” if you will: chicken patties, chicken nuggets and cheese fries. To get two of these in one week was a miracle, and to get all three? Man, you must have attended a rich school.

Chicken is expensive, even if it was processed, shrink-wrapped and frozen beyond recognition.

Cheese fries may have just been cheese pizza cut differently, but without the marinara sauce, it would have never made this article. Even brown baggers bought a ticket on cheese fry day.

Honorable mentions include Salisbury patties, buttered noodles, the ice cream cup and Jell-O cake. Sure, Salisbury patties used to be hamburgers, but, damn, that gravy was good. Buttered noodles were a good break from meats, and the ice cream tasted like Cold Stone Creamery because it was hardly ever served. And Jell-O cake? Gold in the form of baked goods.

The Bad

There were so many bad aspects of hot lunch, but it’s easy to pinpoint the king of the crop. The No. 1 worst of all hot lunches ever conceived in the history of hot lunch would have to be hamburgers.

They were dry, small and tasted horrible. These were so bad, not even cheese could save them.

The path of the uneaten hamburgers was very easy to follow because they usually showed up the next day transformed into one of three choices: Salisbary patties, meat loaf or sloppy joes.

Basically, you had a one-in-three chance of the hamburger making amends to your stomach by becoming something better.

Honorable mentions for the bad side include macaroni and cheese and spaghetti. The cheese in the macaroni wasn’t really cheese, but rather just a cheese-resembling sauce that tasted nothing like cheese. The spaghetti was a close runner-up to the all-time worst, but it usually included garlic bread, which saved the meal. (Curse the days when there was no garlic bread!)

With so much good and bad, it’s easy to see why other students brown bagged it through those pre-college school days. What is not understandable is why they would try to pawn off some of their food for yours.

“You want my Fruit Roll-Up? I’ll trade you for it,” one brown bagger would say.

“What for?” the hot luncher would respond.

“Um, how about that Jell-O cake,” responded the brown bagger.

Worst trade ever. But back in the days before we had cars and food courts, did any of us truly win?

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