I remember a decade later the school mac n cheese that was actually pretty good. There was better balance in school lunches then. There were some areas of the country that used their budgets better than others, and although the food was not always from ‘scratch’, it was not that bad in my area.
I remember my parents having me take the lunch program one year at my grade school back in the sixties. The food was so horrible (they had “peanut butter” that looked and tasted like industrial sludge) that I was overjoyed when the principal told me I lived too close to school (one mile) to take the program. You wouldn’t believe the slop they served at those school lunches. Boy was I happy to run one mile home to eat my mother’s lunches.