Flip in particular seemed to aim consciously at inculcating a humble outlook in the poorer boys. “Do you think that’s the sort of thing a boy like you should buy?” I remember her saying to somebody–and she said this in front of the whole school:
“You know you’re not going to grow up with money, don’t you? Your people aren’t rich. You must learn to be sensibe. Don’t get above yourself!…”

Worse yet was the detail of the birthday cakes. It was usual for each boy, on his birthday, to have a large iced cake with candles, which was shared out at tea between the whole school. It was provided as a matter of routine and went on his parents’ bill/ I never had such a cake, though my parents would have paid for it readily enough. Year after year, never daring to ask, I would miserably hope that this year a cake would appear. Once or twice I even rashly pretended to my companions that this time I -was- going to have a cake. Then came tea-time, and no cake, which did not make me more popular.

…The food was not only bad, it was insufficient. Never before or since have I seen butter or jam scraped on bread so thinly…

As usual, I did not see the sound commercial reason for this underfeeding. On the whole I accepted [the headmaster's] view that a boy’s appetite is a sort of morbid growth which should be kept in check as much as possible. A maxim often repeated to us at St. Cyprian’s was that it is healthy to get up from a meal feeling as hungry as when you sat down…

But the underfeeding was probably less flagrant at preparatory schools, where a boy was wholly dependent on the official diet, than at public schools, where he was allowed-indeed, expected–to buy extra food for himself…At Eton, for instance…a boy was given no solid meal after mid-day dinner. For his afternoon tea he was given only tea and bread and butter, and at eight o clock he was given a miserable supper of soup or fried fish, or more often bread and cheese, with water to drink. [The headmaster] went down to see his eldest son at Eton and came back in snobbish ecstasies over the luxury in which the boys lived. “They give them fried fish for supper!” he exclaimed, beaming all over his chubby face. “There’s no school like it in the world.”

Fried fish! The habitual supper of the poorest of the working class! At very cheap boarding schools it was no doubt worse. A very early memory of mine is of seeing the boarders at a grammar school–the sons, probably, of farmers and shopkeepers–being fed on boiled lights [liver and lungs].

–Orwell, “Such, Such Were The Joys, describing a boarding school in pre WW-I England.

Is Chen Xiao a celebrity I should have already heard of?

No, I just thought it was an interesting story.

This is just terrible!

At my daughter’s school, about 10 yrs ago, they brought in some fast-food shit as an option for kid’s lunches, and I wanted my daughter to continue to eat the “good” (well, by comparison, anyway!) school lunch. She had a fit, and I finally figured out that the more expensive fast food had more “class” associated with it than the “regular” cheaper school-provided meal… and most of the kids eating the “school food” were poor.

It had become yet another class marker. Fast food!

So, I believe anything now. :(