Not terribly long ago, I wrote about how terrible high school lunches are.

There’re plenty of lelfies (lunch selfies – a word I’m pretty sure I just made up) being posted up to Twitter with the hashtag #thanksmichelleobama demonstrating how awful they truly are, so the evidence is clearly there. And I recall it myself from one million years ago – it’s just that, sadly, nothing’s improved since I left. But how’s the rest of the world eating? I’d imagine they were dining like Olympian gods compared to us. And when I happened upon this article photographically detailing exactly what they ingest during their educative intermission, my suspicions seemed to be accurate.

I mean look at this:

At first as I scrolled down, I thought “Jesus! No wonder we’re so disgusting and obese and falling apart by age 35.” I mean, really. We get battered (which is just as violent on our systems as it sounds when describing a domestic dispute) mystery meat, and they’ve got lovingly prepared rice lathered in curry and miscellaneous herbs? Fresh tomatoes? Shrimp? Gazpacho? Cuts of chicken versus fried and greasy chicken tenders that’re still chilled in the middle? And WTF is in Greece’s side yogurt-at-least-I-think-that’s-what-it-is? Are those… pomegranate seeds? Seriously?

Then, in a paradoxically depressing relief, I scrolled down to see some of the comments on these global lunches collectively agree that they disagreed with whoever wrote this article. One poster volunteered, “…I am Greek and let me tell you, we have no school lunches,” right before a couple replies corroborated the allegation.

Next, a Finland resident piped up saying, “I have NEVER seen anything like that in schools! 😀 It’s totally different in real life.”

Right before a Brazilian commenter chimed in with, “this is ridiculous! not even in private schools in Brazil children will eat like this! most of them don’t even have lunch in schools.”

It was around this time that I realized, something.

No one from good ol’ ‘murica had commented saying the same – but one of us totally should’ve.

Because as I scrolled back up to the U.S.A. snap, I realized that – yes – if you just said the name of the things sitting on that tray, those are the names of the foods that all neighbor one another on a traditional American high school lunch tray. But it sure as shit looks nada like this:

First of all, you’d hafta burn the nuggets, singe and clump the mashed potatoes, and then squash and putrefy the peas until they look like they’ve been sifted out of a soup made in a latrine.

Then, for the final touch, place the whole thing in the machine from “Honey, I Shrunk The Kids”.

That’s the only way we could finally settle on some realistic portion sizes.

This is what a typical American school lunch looks like – posted by a tweeter eating it:

I am officially interested to see what the rest of the national noontime noms look like.

Worldwide internet addict attention whore tweener tweeters… where you at?

Let’s get on this.

(And no, Michelle, you’re still not off the hook just ’cause we’re not the only ones.)