In a thread titled “The Worst School Lunch Menu Ever” on 5channel’s “Anything Goes Live” board, users piled on with one unpopular lunch dish after another. Alongside perennial cafeteria villains like sardines stewed in ketchup, glass noodle salad, vinegared dishes, and mystery gloopy stir-fries, one commenter shared the legend of pork and sweet potato mixed with mayonnaise — a dish so bad that even their homeroom teacher, normally a firm believer that “leaving food on your plate is just being lazy,” allowed students to skip it. A post from a private-school alum claiming “everything was delicious” drew pushback from others pointing out the tradeoff between taste and nutritional balance, highlighting a broader debate over how to balance flavor with healthy eating in school meals.
What people said
1AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:34
Sardines stewed in ketchup
8AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:35
Where I went to school, they made us eat beans every single day — I hated it so much
9AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:36
Vinegared cucumbers
I always just swallowed them whole
10AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:36
That minestrone soup was garbage too
12AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:36
Didn't even know that dish existed
Learned something new today
21AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:39
Glass noodle salad
Wait, that was the MAIN dish?
22AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:39
Some unidentifiable vegetable dish seasoned way too sour
24AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:40
Cold liver — even adults who like liver would find that disgusting
25AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:40
I seriously hated fruit sandwiches back then, though I can eat them now
26AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:40
Never could tell if it was supposed to be a salad or a fruit dish
27AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:40
Some kind of foil-steamed egg and spinach thing
31AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:42
A nasty gloopy stir-fry that dared to call itself "happosai" (eight-treasure vegetable stir-fry)
34AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:45
Fruit yogurt salad
Cucumber and mandarin orange combo
35AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:45
There was this dish clearly made with zero regard for taste, just nutrients crammed in
Stuff like that was seriously inedible
36AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:46
Some mystery salad with apple in it that only tasted like mayo and pepper
71AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:07
Re: #36
That's the one!! Exactly that!!
38AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:47
Some mystery dish of pork and sweet potato tossed in mayonnaise
Even my homeroom teacher — who firmly believed leaving food on your plate was just being lazy — gave up and said 'it's fine to leave this one…' Legendary stuff
39AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:48
Re: #38
Now that's a top contender
41AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:50
Something like a pickle salad
It wasn't pickiness, my body just instinctively refused it — physically impossible to eat
72AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:08
Re: #41
Same here
I can handle regular pickles, but whatever that school lunch version was, no way
42AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:50
Everything vinegared was terrible
Fish, vegetables, all of it
43AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:51
That seaweed vinegar dish with canned mandarin oranges in it made no sense
I ate it thinking 'this is disgusting' the whole time
44AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:51
Pumpkin soup
About half the class threw up
46AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:51
Fried rice noodles — I used to toss that stuff out the window going 'there's no way I'm eating this'
49AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:53
One time they served something like Georgian-style yogurt whatever, and literally the entire class left it uneaten
50AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:54
Don't know what it was called, but some Western-style red stew with mushrooms, onions, and green peas — a horrifyingly sour, awful stew-like thing was my absolute least favorite
Still makes me want to gag just thinking about it
52AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:57
Anything thickened with potato starch was uniformly low quality
54AnonymousSep 20, 2026 17:58
Honestly tasted like prison food
78AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:10
Re: #54
I mean, prison food is probably worse than that, to be fair
66AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:04
They served something like a chickpea salad once and it was genuinely inedible
69AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:06
Re: #66
Oh man, that one was bad
I remember it being sickeningly sweet
73AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:08
Anyone remember this one?
79AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:10
I went to private school so everything was delicious
83AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:12
Re: #79
No way that's true
If you make everything taste good, you inevitably trade off against nutrition
If that really was the case, your school must have been a joke
93AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:19
I remember seeing a classmate going on and on about how delicious the school lunch was and thinking, even as a kid, 'uh… that's not right'
96AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:20
Re: #93
If anything, finding it delicious would mean your diet's out of balance somewhere else — that's the concerning part
94AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:19
I wish they hadn't served milk on rice days
98AnonymousSep 20, 2026 18:22
Re: #94
Trying to drink milk with rice is the weird part
I mean, it's your own business, but there was always soup as an alternative to milk
Background and Talking Points
School lunch programs in Japan originated after World War II as a way to ensure children got adequate nutrition, and that history still shapes them today: with tight budgets and mass-cooking constraints, nutritional balance and hygiene tend to take priority over taste. The mayonnaise-dressed dishes, sharply sour vinegared items, and heavily thickened stir-fries that came up in the thread are all cooking methods well-suited to mass production but poorly suited to individual taste. The thread saw a clash between the view that “finding it gross just means your palate is off” and the claim that “private schools always had delicious food,” but both are subjective takes based on personal experience — the quality of school lunches varies enormously by school, municipality, and era. The dishes mentioned here aren’t representative of any particular region or school; they’re best read simply as individual memories.
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