School dinners, as satirised so accurately by The Simpsons (zoo animal meat, creamed corn, grease vats, et al), were a grim reality for most of the population of the UK at one time or another. Your typical school dinner involves either chips and beans, or various pieces of unidentified meat and grey boiled vegetables. Dessert was usually some kind of cake or pudding served in a blue plastic bowl with the option of custard or chocolate gloop from a truly gargantuan metal jug. Drinks were water or milk (water served in reusable plastic beakers).

Some amazing foodstuffs were sporadically sighted in school dinners which crop up nowhere in the outside world, such as the delectable cheese wheels. Scotch eggs and roast potatoes also featured heavily. (I once put away an entire buffet plate of roast potatoes on a school trip. And I'd do it again!) School dinners are a great example of skirting at the very boundary of health and safety laws, and flatly contradict the healthy eating thread of the national curriculum. And of course, they fund the machinations of that mysterious sect, the Dinner Ladies.

School dinners, like anything truly evil, inspired a great number of protest songs. By far the most famous of these was the cunningly titled "School Dinners", by person or persons unknown. Sung to the tune of Frere Jacques.

School Dinners,
School Dinners,
Mushy peas,
Mushy peas,
Slimy semolina,
Slimy semolina,
I feel sick - get a bowl quick.
It's too late - I've done it on my plate.

There were a thousand variations on this song, usually stating that the end result of vomit on a plate was indistinguishable from the meal you were served, but this was always the general gist.

School dinners at my primary school weren't excessively evil - provided a pupil had been properly educated about the dangers of Cowboy Hotpot (which looked, smelled and tasted like rotting baked beans) and knew how to avoid the dinner ladies obsession with coleslaw, they could usually keep their insides in.