As a grade schooler, I had a lot of weird cafeteria food slopped onto my lunch tray: Pizza that tasted like cardboard (that now qualifies as a vegetable!), mystery meat burritos, a sealed applesauce cup with a fly in it — the list goes on.
But Tennessee’s Hawkins School District took horrifying lunches to a new level by serving unwitting students straight up EXPIRED meat. And by “expired,” we don’t mean by a few days or weeks or months; we mean meat that could’ve been served at Obama’s inauguration — the first one. Last week, the school cafeteria system doled out lunches featuring frozen pork roast that expired between 2009 and 2011. GAH. :(
“They go to school, and that might be the only meal they get all day long, and it just […] upsets me that these kids are going to school to get that meal,” Michael Harrell, the Hawkins county commissioner, told the Tennessean.
Thankfully, the school district has since updated its food inventory regulations. This doesn’t mean kids at Hawkins will be eating fresh, healthy food anytime soon; getting locally grown food into school cafeterias isn’t exactly easy. But maybe it’ll keep them from being served food that was fresh when we still cared about Avatar.
