There's a pleasant whiff of Elmer's glue and hand sanitizer in the air, because it's back to school week at BonAppetit.com. Every day we'll be celebrating the good, not-so-good, and artificially-colored snacks of childhood, school cafeterias, and beyond.

A sickly pale square stretches across a thin, metal expanse. Chewy and pliable, the doughy landscape showcases a lukewarm “red” and a curious “white,” burnt brown at the edges. Children beg their parents for the chance to experience its delight, lining up after Science and before English to take in its glory alongside a cold carton of milk and an even colder story about how unfair mom is being. Yes, my friend, we are talking about school cafeteria pizza, a sense memory many of us—though our lives may be disparate and our paths may never cross—share. But exactly how did this exact pizza make its way into all of our lives? And how did it achieve its, let’s say, distinct flavor and texture? Huh. Good questions.

Before setting off to find answers, it seemed wise to consult a few pizza experts. In New York City and beyond, there are few pizza experts better regarded than Bushwick pizza shop Roberta’s rebel chef and co-owner Carlo Mirarchi, who shared his own school cafeteria pizza memory: “Every other Friday was pizza day at my high school. What I do remember about it is that it tasted like French fries and they served it all day, from 7 a.m. until 5 p.m. Some kids would be eating these French-fry-tasting, Ellio's-looking square slices at 7:30 a.m. with a pint of chocolate milk. It was intense.”

Intense.

There are few Facebook groups more explicitly dedicated to public school rectangle pizza than "Public School Rectangle Pizza," created on March 11, 2010, with 2,244 fans. The owner of the "Public School Rectangle Pizza" group, no doubt a pizza expert himself, had this to say on May 15: "I get a lot of messages about where to buy the beloved pizza. I do not know. So please ease up on messaging me until a solution is found."

Resolute.

In my life, there are few pizza experts I am more fond of, personally, than my 6-year-old cousin Kate, who explained, “Um. [School pizza] is pretty good. But I like my mom’s pizza better."

Incredible.

In the past few years, partly due to Michelle Obama’s Let’s Move! campaign against childhood obesity and the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, USDA regulations have gotten a bit more strict concerning the type of pizza garbage you’re allowed to feed children in schools. (Though not so strict, and more in theory than in practice. Remember “pizza is a vegetable” ?)

This may be why it has become so difficult for a common pizza reporter to get answers about school pizza from some of K-12 cafeterias’ largest foodservice providers—Aramark, Sodexo, and Chartwells largely successfully fought Congress on the healthy initiatives. They may be skeptical of any reporter’s agenda, pizza specific or not. Fair enough.

I just wanted to learn about their pizza, however.

After a little prodding, Aramark, a Philadelphia-based food provider that “provide[s] nutrition services for over 2 million students daily and serve[s] over 300+ million meals to K-12 students annually,” sent along some information that I believe you’re going to find quite startling:

We offer a variety of pizza options that meet or exceed all USDA guidelines. As part of our Aramark FUEL® promotions that introduce students to new recipes and taste profiles while complying with the USDA regulations. Pizzas are made fresh and feature whole grain crust and low fat cheese. There are a few pizza options in addition to the standard cheese or veggie toppings. Examples include the Sriracha-Glazed Pizza (Sautéed peppers and onions, diced chicken, and blend of cheeses, on a whole grain pizza crust glazed with a BBQ and Sriracha sauce) and Mac & Cheese Pizza which features seasoned macaroni and cheese with diced chicken on a whole grain pizza crust.

Sriracha-Glazed pizza? Mac & Cheese Pizza? Compliance with USDA regulations mentioned with a frequency one has no choice but to describe as “very suspicious”? Come on!

It seems safe to say that this style of pizza is not the style of doughy, bland, red-and-white Ellio's-looking pizza you remember when you think “school cafeteria pizza.” Yes, it seems that, to understand the classic “school cafeteria pizza”’s origin, we may have to look elsewhere. Luckily, a clue is hidden in Aramark’s USDA name-dropping.

The USDA’s 1988 Quantity Recipes for School Food Service recipe book provides recipes for a number of school cafeteria staples: meatloaf, apple crisp, fruit salad, yellow cake, and so on. Its 320 pages hold the secrets to tastes once offered so freely, now lost to time. But where to find such a document? In caves on the northwest shore of the Dead Sea, perhaps; the papyrus face mask of an Egyptian mummy, maybe; in the lost catacombs of our youthful— oh nevermind, you can download a PDF .

“Pizza Crust,” “Pourable Pizza Crust,” “Pizza With Cheese Topping”—my friends, we’ve hit it big.

Yes, it looks like we may have found her—the pale, square pizza of our past. The recipes have since been updated to reflect changes in USDA guidelines, but only ever-so-slightly. The dough now comprises half whole-wheat flour , the pizza is made with light mozzarella cheese , and while the modern-day versions may not be exactly as we remember them from our youth, they are, at least, the direct descendants of the sickly, doughy square we all cherished so deeply.

In the most recent post on Facebook's semi-popular "Public School Rectangle Pizza" group, the owner writes, “This page was made as a joke and for nostalgia that I sent to a few friends. It has grown to have a lot more followers than I expected. But understandably so. The pizza nourished us through the first part of our lives. And because of it we grew up right.”

Indeed. Or, uh. Well. We at least liked it, back then. Even though it was doughy. And soft. And oddly sweet. And bad for us. And, of course, not nearly as good as mom’s.