Yes but I wouldn't say it was necessarily a result of being "poor". Moreso a product of abuse. My bio dad sucked and not only made enough that I didnt get free or reduced lunch as a kid, but also wouldn't buy food for the house or put any money on my lunch account.
I remember all through elementary school I would sneak over to the cubbies during the schoolday and sneak little things out of classmates lumchboxes. I always felt really bad and was super scared of getting caught because I was such a quiet kid, so it would usually be like a single packet of fruit snacks or a banana that I was eating for lunch. Sometimes I couldn't get away from people enough to sneak into lunch boxes, and on days I was super hungry I would find an excuse to linger over near the garbage can and pull out whatever was on the top tray that had just been thrown in. Usually it was whatever fruit or vegetable we were required to get with lunch when we bought it at school that the other kids left on their tray, but sometimes it would be like a couple of chicken nuggets or a little handful of mashed potatoes. Kids threw away a craaaaazy amount of food in elementary school, but I didn't really understand germs at the age and was scared that if I went further down to grab anything that'd been touched by something else in the garbage can I would get super sick and die.
I think that got a little bit harder by Middle School. There was one large Central garbage can that we all threw our lunches in, and the lunch monitors all stood near it. But my middle school also had an "extras" table where you could throw out anything you didn't want. But after the first couple of months of me taking stuff off of it every, single day, the lunch monitor started to notice and I got called to the counselor's office and they were asking a bunch of questions about my home life and how much food we had in things like that. And I was like 11 at that point and old enough to know that if I answered wrong I would probably be put into foster care. So I lied my way out of a phone call home (which would have had really awful results) and stopped chilling near the garbage cans and extras table 😂
As a result I ended up super hungry throughout most of sixth and seventh grade, until I met my best friend who was a freaking angel and alwaaaays shared her food. If I got lunch detention (which was common, because homework was really hard to get done in a abusive household) she would save half of her lunch for me and bring it to me on the bus after school. She never asked about my home life after that first time, and when she saw it made me uncomfortable she just dropped it, and from then on began pushing half of her lunch over to me without saying anything about it
I do remember one time in 6th grade though where I had been sick for three days with literally no food in the house but mayonaise and wilted lettuce, and when I came back to school I was starving but it was so soon after being called to the office that I saw the lunch attendants staring at me when I tried to approach first the garbage and then the extras table before school started (they offered breakfast as well as lunch). So I had to turn around and walk back the table and sit down like I wasn't hungry and had eaten breakfast at home. And our cafeteria was two levels, with a platform along the outsides of the room that the 8th graders got to sit on above us all. And I remember someone shouting, a folded omelet plopping down on the floor in the middle of the cafeteria on the lower floor I was on, and a bunch of eighth graders above me laughing. And it stayed there for a good half an hour before the bell rang for us to go to class, and I snatched it up and ate it on my way to my first period. THAT probably should have genuinely made me super sick, but nothing ever came of it.
I will forever be an advocate that all lunches at school should be free to all children. It makes ZERO sense that prisoners get their meals paid for, but underaged children who are in the care of the school all day long, and are required to be there by law, do not get free food. Its unacceptable that there are still open in the exact same situation and everything. As an elementary and middle schooler I felt super grown up because of all that I lived through, but I wasnt a grown-up. I look at middle schoolers now and see actual babies. And I don't understand why we aren't taking care of those babies in every way we can.
