I don't know a lot about American school cafeteria food. I went to public school for one year in fourth grade and that was about it. I remember it being...alright? They had good polish sausage and pizza? I ate cafeteria food my whole time in college and THAT was good (except when I worked in a cafeteria and saw how it was made *shudder* So...much...Sysco...), but I think college cafeteria food and elementary/middle/high school food is way different.
That said, my school cafeteria food is good. As in really, really good. The last school I worked at's food was good about once, maybe TWICE a week on average, but mostly bland/bad, etc...The worst part is that they were really nice and insisted on giving me lots of free food. In massive bulk quantities that would go bad in a week. I had about 50 pounds of kimchi in my fridge at one point that I kinda sorta ignored for four, five months and then decided to see what it looked like. It was kinda like that one "Cowboy Bebop" episode with the lobster...Throwing that all away was fun since I had to scoop it all out into a bag piece by piece. Kinda wanted to burn the container after...
ANYWAYS. Here is a week in the food I eat. Kind of. You see, I only have 3 days here of cafeteria food, and that's how it's going to be for awhile, because we're eating out a lot right now for lunch since there's new teachers and lots of welcome lunches and dinners. Also, I kinda forgot my camera a lot, but still only missed one meal. I think you'll get a good general idea from here though. :)
And without further adieu: Tasty Cafeteria Food of Korea!
This was Monday's fare: Rice with little beans mixed in, a chili-tomato based soup that has chunks of ground pork and ground tofu and some seaweed and onions in it, Asian spinach (which is really different from Western spinach. It's...smaller and thinner and tastes completely different but yet you can still tell it's spinach. If..that...makes...sense...?), cabbage kimchi (a staple!), and...fish fillet with sweet and sour chili barbecue sauce, and a tangerine. It wasn't bad. The problem with eating fish in Korea is that there's usually ten million bones in every bite so you spend more time spitting out bones then actually getting to eat the fish (You end up spitting out both), but this one had...minimal bones! Yay! It didn't suck. Tuesday I went out for lunch with the Chinese language teachers. We spoke in Chinese and went to a generic restaurant that everyone goes to all the time and it's TECHNICALLY good, but you get tired of it fast. It's called a 백반(Baek Bahn) restaurant. This means you get a crapton of side-dishes, and a bowl of rice, and usually a soup or two, plus maybe a main dish if you feel like being a baller. 
This is the first round of side dishes. Um...from bottom left to top you have: cold jellyfish strips with eggs and veggies (Bleh), spicy cucumber kimchi, and delicious radish kimchi. From the other side you have spicy chili clams (I avoid most seafood here like the plague since our province is landlocked and stuff from the ocean that's not freshwater has given me really bad stomach problems before. You don't come to my province and eat fish. You go to Busan or Gwangju for that, yo.), chili sesame leaves, and jalapeno peppers with dried anchovies. 
From bottom left to "L"-shaped top little bowls, we have my favorite sidedish of all times, soy sauce soaked quail eggs with strips of marinated pork, strips of ginseng in a chili sauce, garlic roots, and dried seaweed with which to eat your rice. The big plate has an assortment of veggies, bean sprouts, and shrimp. It was underwhelming. 
Finally, there was spicy bean paste soup (됀장지깨) with onions, zucchini, and tofu chunks, salad that I don't eat since mayo-based dressing (Actually mayo in general makes me dry heave), steamed egg in a bowl, and way in the back there's little patties you make using egg and meat and veggies. I missed Wednesday's lunch. Well, I forgot to bring my camera. It wasn't a big loss though. It was curry. In Korea, their cafeteria curry...well, imagine regular delicious Indian curry. Now add about two liters of water to it and really low grade meat, and throw it on some rice. Bada bing bada boom. They also had mini-hamburgers that I couldn't eat because they had, once more, ketchup and mayo. It's weird. Yesterday for lunch I went to a not so classy part of Seoul and had chili pig intestines, and despite the horrible, horrible things they did to my stomach, I enjoyed them. Yet ketchup and mayo and mustard and pickle relish makes me feel ill. Indeed, just the smell and having them in my vicinity can do horrible things to me. So for the first time I barely ate lunch, and went out and got ddeokbokki, and had a lovely chat with two nice ladies from Jeolla province who ran the food cart and they gave me free stuff and it was nice. Alas, no picture.
Thursday's fare was much, much, much better. We have cabbage kimchi, my SECOND favorite side dish, dried anchovies, some chicken, cabbage, and potatoes stewed in a chili sauce, some rice, and some seaweed soup. Why is this portion so much smaller than the Monday and upcoming Friday portion? Welp, I forgot to take a picture of my food, so I grabbed a bewildered student and took a picture of his tray. In my province, they have free lunches for the kids (alas, not the teachers. :( I have to pay about two bucks a meal but it's all you can eat. Huzzah!) , but the kids don't get to get as much as they want. The cafeteria ladies serve them. The teachers can serve themselves. Huzzah! 
And finally, my Friday food. It was lovely and slightly overflowing. We have quail eggs (See, I love quail eggs in Korea. You know why? They're so #@@%#@%# expensive and classy in the US and I never got to eat them there, but here they're cheap and available and when soaked in soy sauce with pork, so, so, so good), we have seaweed paper for me to wrap my rice in, and then we have cabbage kimchi. The soup is called "Sujaebi/수재비" and it's kinda like American dumpling soup, because its flour and a broth, but...it's kinda bland. No matter where you get it. Eh.
And thus, because I feel lame for only having three cafeteria meals, here's what I had for lunch in Seoul Saturday!
Cheesy Kimchi Fried Rice! I would have loved it, but...they microwaved it. And there was barely any kimchi. But it was really, really cheap, and look at the side dishes that came with it! 
We got, from bottom right to top, a broth of...soy paste? Chicken? I'm actually not sure what it is, but in kimbap shops it's actually quite common. On top there's spicy odeng (kinda like a fish cake...sausage...thing? It's Japanese and lovely. I'll make a post about it sometime.), potatoes soaked in honey (more delicious then one would think!), cucumber kimchi, and cabbage kimchi. I hypothetically might have eaten this all in less then three minutes. The side dishes that is. Plus in Korea you can get as many refills as you want of side dishes (I've never tested to see how many refills you can actually get. The max I've ever tried is 3. Now, the amount of times I go back to get hot water for the same tea bag...)So that's kind of a week in my lunches. Except for one.
The Korean phrase for the day (probably horribly misspelled) is what I say whenever I leave a restaurant: 좋은 하루 되시고 수고 하세요! (Joh-eun- ha-lu-day-shee-goh-soo-goh-ha-say-yoh). This means, "Have a nice day and good business!" or something like that. They always smile and thank me when I say it so I'm pretty sure it's correct. O_o
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