Tasting History does school sloppy joes...

[Bogie]

Oh, and... a modest walk off campus - the other side of the "downtown" area, Richmond, Kentucky had Ma Kelly's Restaurant.
 
https://www.eku.edu/news/eku-hosts-event-to-honor-bessie-ma-kelly/

Down home comfort food cooking - when the Cracker Barrel grows up, it wants to be Ma Kelly's...
 

[Big Hairy Bee]

70s elementary lunches were the bomb!  Pizza, tacos, sloppy joes.  We even had ice cream and if you think about it, you can still taste the wooden spoon

[Bogie]

Around here, a "Lunch Lady Pizza" store would make money. Retro!

[Big Hairy Bee]

I'm an elementary teacher and the school lunches are awful.  They aren't cooked in the cafeterias--its all reheated processed garbage

[K Frame]

"Just for clarity, the places I mentioned in my above post were all on campus, most in the UCEN, and not in town."

Yeah, I think we understood (at least I did) that you were talking about on campus eating. The UCSB was probably about the same size back in your day as it is today, or between 20-25,000 students. Which made it around 10 times larger than where I went to college.

We had three on-campus food options -- dining hall, SNAR, or snack vending machines in various buildings.

Not enough population density to support anything else.

Hell, UCSB's student population is the same size as the population of the entire borough of Carlisle.

[HeroHog]

I hate to admit it but we would throw the nasty "grilled cheese" sandwiches at the tile lunchroom walls and see how long they took to slide down to the floor every now and again when we could get away with it.. (Elementary school)

[K Frame]

I don't remember us ever having grilled cheese at my school, not even with tomato soup.

That's kind of odd because that's a freaking staple of just about everywhere in the US.

And that government orange cheese melted absolutely beautifully.

I'll have to ask on the FB class channel.

I do remember that we'd occasionally have fried chicken that was pretty decent, but it really reminded me of Banquet heat & serve food service style that we got in college. It as passable, but nothing as good as Roy Rogers fried chicken or the fried chicken at Mrs. Stamm's Deli. That stuff was the absolute best fried chicken I've ever had.