Food Theory: DON'T TRUST Your School Lunch!

The “fries” that are shaped like smiley faces are god tier when it comes to school food

Matpat: “Don’t trust your school lunch!”
Me: “Never did, never will.”

Matpat dunking on and name dropping the mean “sporty girls” will live in my head rent free for the rest of my days

1:25 when he talks about his " experiment " its so goofy j mean bro hung on for dear life

Matpat sitting crossed leg, refusing to be lifted by “Sporty Girls” lives in my head rent free 😂

Matpat definitely seems like the guy to unironically remember the exact names of 5 school bullies for years

I had something like "Cheezy Dippers" when I was in high-school in Eastern Tennessee. My Mom would give me $2 for lunch and I would bypass the regular food line and go to where the Cheese Bread sticks was being served and it would only be $1 per Cheese stick. Maaann those were the days!!! 😅😂❤

Everybody’s favorite thing they had on the menu at my school was pizza crunchers and they were basically breaded on the outside and cheese on the middle with sauce surrounding the cheese and it had the best cheese pull. But personally, my favorite is the pepperoni pizza that wasn’t shaped like a triangle but more like a boat… Not many people liked them, but I loved them lol. BUT THE HOTDOGS??? THEY WERE SHRIVELED FINGERS BY THE TIME OUR LUNCH CAME 😭

I considered myself lucky in high school when I learned that the sweet lunch ladies would work with the culinary class to chop fresh vegetables and grill chicken for our boxed salads. These big homemade salads would count as an entree because of the chicken, hard boiled egg, and breadstick that came with it, but would also have all kinds of good stuff in a couple varieties. I would always pick them up and thank the lunch lady that told me about it, because she definitely felt more like a lunch mom to the students.

I actually did a survey about school lunches at my school. Most people said the lunches were okay, a few kids hate the lunches, and the kids who think that the soggy fries and the dry spaghetti is to die for.

My number 1 favorite school lunch is when they served orange chicken and chow mein, I also liked the Thanksgiving and Christmas dinner that they served when it was like a week or something from Thanksgiving and Winter break, I also liked when they served Spaghetti, I also remember we got garlic bread with the spaghetti which makes it a lot better

0:01 tuna sandwiches ( my favourite ) and chocolate cake ( big serving ) with custard on the top

The best food my school had ever given me?: Prepackaged Chips that have literally no way to expire or be cooked wrong, or get infested with insects.

My school has a student's mom as the main cook. So we always got traditional home cooked meals in the selections of food. It's actually very nice. School usually just gets the raw ingredients delivered by a nearby supplier. (This stuff is cheaper in my country)

used this for my essay in writing class, thank you

My favorite school lunch was called “super nachos” it was basically just nachos with cheese sauce, taco meat, and the kind of chips you usually put in nachos and you could even take a pack of sour cream if you wanted

The best thing my school ever served was the “Holiday meal!” This included stuffing that strangely tasted like Rice-a-Roni, mashed potatoes, green beans, and two slices of turkey and the whole thing was covered with turkey gravy! Back when the the Pandemic was bad and they send lunches and breakfast, and when they were delivering the “Holiday meal” I would order extra because it was that good 😋

My school used to have a fruit requirement. You could not have your meal unless you had at least 1 fruit (an orange, apple, or banana). They later changed it that you didn’t need anything except the food you wanted (but they would charge you more without telling you). There was a rumor that went around that the janitor would dig through the trash and pull out any fruit that looked like it could be served again. Almost everyone just assumed it was fake, but still didn’t eat the fruit because it was not very fresh. I did an experiment with an apple and really didn’t think anything of it. I made a mark on that apple that looked like it could’ve just been natural, but it was just different enough that I could tell the difference. I was actually disgusted when I found that same apple 2 days later. I never ate anything from that school ever again

My high school lunch was terrible! Any chicken was VERY pink inside, all the toppings of pizza (including the cheese) you could pull off in one piece, the milk was spoiled a lot. The most semi acceptable thing was the salad. Especially with goldfish and ranch on it. I also found it weird that all the vegetables we grew in agriculture class and gave to the cafeteria were never used?

My school give us these burito bowl with rice bean chicken or beef and you have the option to add lettuce bits and cheeder cheses and I always thought it was the best

In my research, those "cheesy dipper" breadsticks were called Bosco Sticks in many places. They're still around too, if you're feeling nostalgic and want to see if they are still as "good" as you remember!

I'm a lunch lady (no my names not Brenda!) and I seriously had so much fun reading the comments below on everyone's favorite school lunch foods! Best part about being a lunch lady is serving those cute kids and seeing them get excited about the food. And seeing that a lot of your favorites are my kids favorites too was awesome! I love that Matt talked about the vegetable serving in the pizza's sauce, it always confused me too. I know there's a lot of controversy when it comes to school lunches but we really do try to make things as healthy as we can with, like Matt said, all the rules and regulations, budgets and people pushing decisions in all directions, there really is soooo much more that goes on in those Nutrition Offices than you realize and it's mostly about making the kids happy and healthy with what we have to work with. I've worked summers in test kitchens and it can be tough to get food to hit all the marks. (stepping down from my soapbox) This was a fun episode, loved that it hit so close to home for me!! My favorite foods from school lunch as a kids were the homemade rolls they used to make and the chicken fried steak with mashed potatoes and gravy! And back then (when dinosaurs roamed the earth) they still made desserts for us everyday - Yummmmmmmm!!!

When I was in elementary school, they used to serve pasta once or twice a month. They were the best compared to what we usually ate back there(glowing curries, food that smelt like it’s older than the 6th grade class, and rice that’s sometimes undercooked.)

Our school has Italian dunkers which are basically cheese with some bread rolled around it. They’re really good. They also have cheesy French bread which is some bread that looks to be from a more rounded prince of bread cut into quarters horizontally and vertically if that makes sense. With butter and cheese on top. Not to mention quite a few people seem to like crispitos which are basically ground beef with some sort of seasoning to them wrapped in what I can only assume is a hard tortilla? Besides those food quality had been declining except for the fact they’re finally getting better tortillas which my friends and I are quite pleased with.

I love how two thirds of this video is Mat talking about the history of lunch food and the rest is the actual math for the theory, this is what we come here for. Mat feeds us more than our schools do

My high school had these cookies that were practically the size of your head. They had either chocolate chips or M&Ms in them, and sooo much butter! Weirdest (and in my opinion, best) part of these cookies was that because they were so big and so buttery, they were never totally cooked all the way through. The outside edges were crispy and chewy, but the inside was like safe-to-eat raw cookie dough!

12:40 Tbf, that's about how many packets you need for a serving of fries or tots.

12:41 this made me LOL SOOOOO HARD 😂😂
I was in the QSR pizza industry for most of my professional career… I set up and ran many school lunch programs at many different locations, and they all ordered the exact same way: extra sauce, light on the cheese
And they were MILITANT that they be made properly

“DON’T TRUST YOUR SCHOOL LUNCH”
Doesn’t take a genius to know that

I love the story of matpats science fair experiment, him sitting at a bunch of different tables to find out who would be the most hostile to him is so cool

my school in the uk was some type of apple crumble like but with different fruits best food with custard

The thing my school makes the greatest profits off of are vending machines and FRUIT at lunch. The vending machines have like gatorade, water and juice but alot of people weather or not they buy lunch, come up and get an orange or two, or some sliced pineapple some grapes, etc. they introduced it last year and it makes them so much money its crazy

The best meal my southern schools would give us was the thanksgiving meal: turkey chunks, bread roll, gravy, stuffing, peach cobbler, and the casual veggies and milk. We never got anything like for the rest of the year and it tasted a lot better than the weird baked chicken they would serve.

The funny part of school lunches is every person's dietary requirements is different. For me I required double the food they'd normally serve a single person because I was malnourished and underweight. Where other people around me were fine just eating a salad crouton.

The soft pretzels with the cheese. That meal was a shocking chefs kiss 💋👩‍🍳

the best thing in my school lunch was one of the only palatable things. a "smoothie" that was a pouch of fruit juices either lukewarm or so frozen it takes all of lunch to make it edible. the presliced oranges sealed via tape in those stretchy impossible to tear plastic bags get honorable mentions for worst idea. it was legit harder to open those than peeling an orange.

I would like to see more of this cafeteria territory encroaching experiment. It actually sounds fascinating.

As an European, American school lunches scare me. In my country school cafeteria was more like a non official restaurant. You could pick from a meniu what you wanted to eat, from soup to fish to meat and other meats and a full meal+drink was usually around 3-4 euros and that's not talking about the pastries and pizzas( yes, a whole pizza, but it was only one kind) for around 2-3 euros. And you knew what was in the meat, so you were certain that your burger wouldn't come alive once it was on your plate
EDIT: I'm from Lithuania and I went to a public school. In my schools there were also programs for parents with very little income where the kids would eat completely for free as well as there was a program where you could pay for the school to provide a meal for your kid and ensure they were eating if you weren't sure if your kid could be responsible with money and would actually eat instead of saving it to buy toys

The best school lunch at my school was French Bread Pizza with a miniature bag of goldfish

The sausage in the sausage biscuits was top tier. Just amazing.

In high-school we had a few different "restaurants" where students who volunteered (and got paid) made fresh burritos, pizza, salad, sandwiches, and sub sandwiches. It was so good

I remember being in high school when they started claiming the tomato sauce on a slice of pizza was 2 servings of veggies. It was laughable then!

3:04 'malk now with vitamin r' got me dyin'💀💀💀

Matt’s story about the science experiment is so absurdly clever it sounds exactly like something he would do

Fact: brands that have their snacks in school lunches actually change their recipes to meet school lunch health standards, even though their store bought food is MUCH MUCH UNHEALTHIER

0:05 nachos my school never did serve them often in fact i think my whole time of being there I only seen them serve them 3 or 4 times.

Elementary is smiley fries. Middle to highschool is chicken and fries. But for holidays pumpkin pie and stuffing out does everything else

My old school had this separate stand just for slushy’s and Ice cream, and another stand just for "Wookiee’s" warm chocolate chip cookies that would melt as you eat them. Those two stands were the most popular at the school, and they were the cheaper options, so people would order those instead of a salad, or the actual meals etc. because they only had a dollar for lunch, not three.

One of the best school lunches I had was probably the Buffalo chicken nachos

Rib sandwiches, bbq nachos... The old square pizza they took away...

It is always better to cook your own lunch at home with your family and bring it to school because school lunch is overpriced.

Bosco sticks were so amazing. They were so simple yet so precious, everyone was happy on bosco stick day. Its literally just dough sticks filled with cheese which u can dip in sauce, but it just tastes so good compared to other things.

Now that I watch this video years later I get flashbacks of when matpat was the host of the theory channels I'm really sad that Mat how to retire but you know what they say all good things must come to an end eventually and I hope he's doing well wherever he is

As a refined Aussie, we have 'tuckshop', with really yummy fresh baked muffins, cakes and biscuits, sushi, meat pies and other really good quality items 💅. it was also mainly preordered so you didn't have to worry about getting there on time!

The lunches at my high school are made by students taking culinary arts, so we get different meals everyday. If you want to know I'm from Canada, and yes the students made poutine for one day.

Food Theory: Can soup actually help a cold, and what other alternatives are there?

I had cheese dippers, they used to be melted mozerrlla style breadsticks with sauce to dip . After a year or so the cheese stopped being fully melted.

It’s the fact that he even had this experimental hobby as a kid 😂 he was made for these videos

“DONT TRUST YOUR SCHOOL LUNCH”
Doesn’t take a genius to know that 😂

We kind of had cheesy dippers! We called them “cheese-stuffed breadsticks” and they were, well, warm breadsticks filled with gooey cheese that you dipped into tomato sauce :)

Our school also has the smiley fries but the Mac and cheese and pretzelwich is god tier

Matpat:don't trust your school lunch
Me:maybe that's why I never take it ever

There was a saying in my school: "50% of the (school) lunch is plastic, and the other 50% is lies".

My school didn't have the "line up with a tray" cafeteria, rather food stalls where someone can take the spot and sell what food they were selling. Kids who couldn't afford a meal everyday were given food coupons instead that they could claim and these things lasted the entire school year. They eventually moved from a coupon to an electronic card to lessen their use of paper.
Where is this? Singapore.

My school had snack and lunch and the best things were at snack but the best thing was a crum cake. Every Wednesday it was there but then all the good snacks like crum cakes, cinnamon rolls, and other pastries were removed. So now the best thing you can get is Cheerios. The lunch was always gross but the best things were the smiley face fries and chicken nuggets.

I never had lunch in my school.
Always would use the old trick of bringing your own food to school.
(and with food I mean cookies and juice.)

I LOVE THIS GUY
“the sporty girls threw food at me and they physically tried to lift me out of my seat for the entire hour in an attempt to get me to move BUT SCIENCE MOVES FOR NO ONE!!”

Me: has never experienced the school cafeteria food experience.
Also me: “Let’s watch this food theory video!”

my school didn't have school lunch, we had a break by 10 and school ended at 2 ,i brought sandwiches to eat in the break and lunch at home by 3 , school cafeteria sells snacks and juice some schools sell doughnuts

I LOVED The meatball sub ! They were rlly good

My school had a separate “snack line” aka they wouldn’t yell at you if you didn’t get certain things you were supposed to get. They sold baked potatoes in there and for two and a half years when I learned that I had two potatoes a day, so much so I was known as potato girl by the staff and classmates would ask if I legitimately did that.

The average lunch at my school was a slab of “meat” sometimes between two pieces of “bread”. Sometimes we unironically questioned whether or not we were actually getting real food. It also doesn’t help that our school building looks like a remodeled prison. I’m not joking about that last part, our school actually looks like it was once a prison but got turned into a school.

The best thing my school served were Max Sticks, people loved them. People would trade their whole lunches for them and when we found out they would be on the menu that day we would all immediately try to get them, they only were on the menu like once a month.

This year, the food is actually good quality. Like, the pizza they mad last year was.... bad... but this year, it is amazing

I never went to a school that served lunches, though there was a program at my middle school where you could sign up for lunches delivered by this third party company (paid service) and they were pretty good. My high school also had a kitchen attached to the cafeteria, but you had to manually order and by any given item. No “everyone lines up with a tray” type of thing. I live in Ontario, Canada.

The pre-packaged warm cinnamon donuts served for breakfast in PALM BEACH GARDENS HIGH SCHOOL were so, SO good. It was crazy moist because it was warmed up in the individual plastic pouches they came in, which was full of air so when you opened the bag it would pop and warm cinnamon steam would slap you in the face and make you call it mommy.
Good times.

French toast sticks were amazing with syrup(I guess that's why they were rarely ever served).

Last year when they announced they where closing this school (we've got two more) they started seving pizza with peppers and pepperoni and hot sauce in the sauce station and that was a great combination

the best thing they served was basically the same: breadsticks stuffed with motzerella cheese (they were always kinda soggy until they changed it one year to be like nice hot crispy breadsticks)

Mom's theory to improve school lunches, have every school put in a greenhouse so that they can grow their own food. It could also be a part of science class.

my best friend at my school goes absolutely feral for the chicken burgers (every friday), and my favorite thing is either the normal burgers (every wednesday) or the cheese pasta (like... every three tuesdays roughly)

My best school lunch was, and I am not making this up, "Big D's BBQ Chicken Sandwich", Big D being a nickname of one of the kitchen staff. Frozen chicken patty on a whole wheat bun with barbecue sauce and funions or something similar on top. Consistently warm and flavorful, which is a low bar to clear, but I went to a public US high school, so

the best thing we had was thanksgiving dinner lunch. The last day of school before thanksgiving break our lunch ladies make us a whole thanksgiving dinner. Turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, mashed potatoes and gravy, rolls, ham, pumpkin pie. They did so much and i’m always thankful for them. They also decorated the lunchroom for every holiday.

Brings me back lol... We were forced to have one fruit and one vegetable on our tray to be able to buy lunch (k-12) or they wouldn't let us have lunch. Which really sucked for some people because there were days they only offered a single fruit / veg -- which some people were allergic to. And without the thing we were allergic to on our tray, we didn't get lunch, so we usually opted not to eat. Then we were asked why we never bought lunch. "Because I didn't know you were serving something I was allergic to today, you only gave us the menu for main items"

My best school lunch is cheese sticks that are fittingly enough, filled with cheese with a side of frozen yogurt

Nachos with special cheese was the best thing we have at lunch to me. We call it special chess cause we see little chunks in the cheese sometimes, some ppl still don’t know if it’s mold or if the cheese is just ruined

Being homeschooled, I never had the joy of experiencing school lunches. Glad to hear I didn't miss much.

As a Swede: Our school lunches are free, and we’re served complete meals, there are usually two dishes and one vegetarian to choose between, and a few vegetables to choose between. And there is milk, water, bread and butter to take in any quantity you want.
American school lunches are weird.

Our school didn't have Cheese Dippers, but something very similar. They're called Bosco Sticks and they're bread sticks but with mozzarella cheese in them

Grew up in a poor neighborhood, school somehow managed to avoid using prison food. They contracted some premium vendor for food. The school's argument was it was likely the only real meal we were getting in our lives, which was mostly true.

me, a teenager in school who eats the disgusting lunches daily: ooh this video looks good!
btw: I have these... bread stick... things? covered in grease, garlic, and cheese. they aren't good. but they're definitely the best!

I'm so glad that finnish schools have lunches with real food. Good food.
My absolute favourites were:
- Baked salmon with mashed potatoes
- Perunavelli (runny mashed potatoes)
- Creamy spinach soup
- Fries and chicken nuggets (god-tier at the time)
- Riceporrige (all-time favourite)

My middle school actually has really good food but my favorite would have to be the chicken nuggets even though they never served enough...

Ok so we had two things that are tied for first place. Number one is Italian Dunkers, or Pizza Boats as I liked to call them, and there’s a reason I called them Pizza Boats. They were a boat shaped slice of bread with melted cheese on top that you’d dunk in marinara sauce, and it was the greatest thing ever.
Next up was something I don’t remember the name of, but I definitely preferred to the Italian Dunkers. They were essentially sticks of mozzarella cheese wrapped in dough and then baked just enough to melt the cheese, but not enough to fully bake the dough. And of course you’d get some marinara to dunk them in.

My districts "Cheesy Dippers" was cheese stuffed dough filled with mozzarella that was cut into 3 sticks and served with some weird factory made marinara sauce. It was one of our schools most popular items.

My school had these things called “hot lunches” were once (or twice) a year you had to prefill out a sheet for what food you wanted for school (6 separate days not for like a full school year) and these food items came from places like Dominos or Subway
The weird thing (to me anyway) is, I wasn’t from like some elite or rich neighborhood, it was just your average US public school

My college has homemade fried chicken and mac n cheese every Wednesday, literal childhood gold

In my school, they served chicken and potatoes. It was exactly how it sounded. Chicken nuggets and potato wedges, but they weren’t made from the box. It was a special occasion and they were made by parents, homemade chicken nuggets and potato wedges. It was perfect.

Theory: how much sour food can you eat before your stomach feel acidic

Food theory idea: how long could you last in a carnival eating only what they have in the carnival?