School lunch has never been the stuff of foodie dreams. I’m still haunted by the memory of my elementary school cafeteria’s “brain pizza” – a lumpy oval thing topped with fleshy white strips of barely melted mozzarella that clumped together like neurons.
And it looks like America’s school cafeterias are still turning out the culinary abominations, judging by the images on , a fascinating online project showcasing school lunch photos submitted by students across the country.
The project is the brainchild of Farah Sheikh, who manages education campaigns for , a nonprofit group that helps organize young people to take action around social change. She got the idea, she said, while researching student dropout rates. Nutrition, she noticed, “has a pretty big impact on student concentration and student performance in school,” she tells The Salt.