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.
I always just swallowed them whole
Learned something new today
Wait, that was the MAIN dish?
Cucumber and mandarin orange combo
Stuff like that was seriously inedible
That's the one!! Exactly that!!
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
Now that's a top contender
It wasn't pickiness, my body just instinctively refused it — physically impossible to eat
Same here
I can handle regular pickles, but whatever that school lunch version was, no way
Fish, vegetables, all of it
I ate it thinking 'this is disgusting' the whole time
About half the class threw up
Still makes me want to gag just thinking about it
I mean, prison food is probably worse than that, to be fair
Oh man, that one was bad
I remember it being sickeningly sweet
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
If anything, finding it delicious would mean your diet's out of balance somewhere else — that's the concerning part
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.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Anything Goes Live) thread “The Worst School Lunch Menu Ever.”
