Okay, before you read any further, Internet, I want you to get a picture in your head of what school lunches looked like through the ages. Remember that the National School Lunch program started in 1946, but some schools served lunch much earlier. Okay, got the picture in your head? Check this out. It’s a girl eating a school lunch in 1936, during the worst of the depression, and it looks like she’s got some soup, an apple, a tall bottle of milk, and maybe a sandwich in that little package on her left. Unless my eyes deceive me, that’s a simple, healthy lunch made from fresh, inexpensive, (probably) locally sourced ingredients. Were you expecting some ghastly gruel-sludge? Perhaps a hamburger where the meat is dry and the bun is inexplicably soggy? That’s what I thought I’d see. How did we get where we are today? That little girl’s lunch from the depression seems like the simplest, most effective solution to feeding kids at school. What happened here?