Has that shit gone downhill, or did I win the lottery of school lunches without realizing it?

I think it’s a little of both. School lunches definitely have gotten worse, but they’ve also always kinda been bad in many parts of the country. I think a lot of people don’t realize how good their lunches actually were compared to what the kids in their neighboring districts were getting. When I was a kid, we moved one city over and I was in a new school district; went from having pretty decent lunches with lots of options for everything, to having small portions of awful-tasting food with few options, if any.

IMO, it’s one of the reasons why local politics are so important, because the schools with bad lunches are typically severely under-funded.