School Was Hard. These 12 Classic Canteen Snacks Went Harder

Unless you were the kind of kid who was strictly bound to the lunch order your parents scrawled on a brown paper bag, buying food from the school canteen was probably the first financial decision you had any sort of control over. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the power of a few gold coins against a roster of snacks that were pretty much universal in the 1990s and early 2000s. So, I made a miniseries about them for my food podcast, Ingredipedia. Choose your fighter – these are the canteen snack battles that still rage on in our millenial hearts and minds.

Pulling either one of these bad boys out of your lunch order bag had (almost) the same cultural cache as having your birthday party at Timezone. And while they’re essentially just bastardised versions of iconic Italian dishes, in my opinion, they were still the best savoury item on offer at the canteen, hands down. Regardless of which one you ordered, licking the melted cheese off the soggy cardboard was a perfect entree. The sweet presence of pineapple (tinned, naturally) puts pizza over the top for me.

Flaunt either of these, hot from the pie warmer and slathered in squeeze-on tomato sauce, and you’d be the envy of the sandwich-toting masses. Fables exist of some schools going the extra mile and encasing their pies in a buttered bread roll to curtail the messiness (my podcast co-host Ben Birchall swears it was a thing). But if you raw-dogged meat-filled pastries like everyone else, I think you’ll agree the pie always came out on top. The filling just tasted better, and the pastry didn’t flake off and stick to the edges of your mouth. Even better with a golden potato crown.

I never understood why other kids frothed over Ovalteenies, those choc-adjacent pills made of low-rent Milo. It comes as no surprise to me they were developed by a Swiss chemist in 1904; I’d prefer to eat a vitamin C tablet. On the other hand, remember carob buds? Carob is produced in a similar way to chocolate, but to me, the gritty, powdery results taste like the absence of chocolate. I personally wouldn’t go back to either, but if I had to eat one, it’d be Ovalteenies. At least they have cocoa in them.

You can’t trust kids with tanbark and bubblers, let alone boiling water. But young growing minds required a steady intake of instant noodles, and so dried bricks of them by Malaysian brand Mamee became a culinary force in the playground. The blue cookie monster-ish mascot on the packet (whose name may or not be Mamee) made you the chef: break up the noodle brick, add the flavour sachet, then tip the lot down your gullet like a heathen. Vege Chips, while still a clinic in savoury crunch and pretty tasty for something sans gluten, just didn’t have the same interactive allure.

There’s no question Zooper Doopers were superior to Sunnyboys. Why? Because you can still buy them today. Sunnyboys were discontinued in 2016, which isn’t surprising. How does one even fit a tetrahedral-shaped ice block into their child-sized gob, anyway? Plus, Zooper Doopers were better bang for your buck, especially so if your school sold the now-discontinued Cosmic Lemon Sherbert flavour for 10 cents less than the others, presumably due to rampant unpopularity. (Space Sherbet has since been replaced, thankfully, by the less polarising Space Pineapple.)

Popping these intensely sour lollies was one of the biggest, cheapest thrills you could get at school besides actually going home for the day. While both options are sour as hell (or at least were, before our tastebuds became desensitized by citric acid warfare), one of them had a secret one-two punch: Ghost Drops changed the colour of your tongue, which is basically the equivalent of getting a tattoo in kid world. Hardcore.

Listen to Ingredipedia’s School Snacks podcast miniseries.