Cafeteria Food

My last post got me thinking about the evolution of school lunches. 

When Farmer Boy went to school, his older sister, Eliza Jane, carried a lunch pail for the four Wilder children to share. After trudging several miles through the snow (there were always three feet of snow and subzero temperatures when the Wilder children walked to school)  and then sitting in dead silence all morning in a one-room school heated only by a woodstove, I am sure Almanzo and his siblings were starving by lunch time--particularly since--Mother's epic breakfasts notwithstanding!-- they had all been up since 4:30 a.m chasing cows around to keep them from freezing to death. 

Eliza Jane opened the dinner pail on her desk. It held bread-and-butter and sausage, doughnuts and apples, and four delicious apple turnovers, their plump crusts filled with melting slices of apple and spicy brown juice. After Almanzo had eaten every crumb of his turnover and licked his fingers, he took a drink of water from the pail, and went out to play. 

Almanzo's mom not only baked the bread and made the apple turnovers and the sausage, the family grew the apples and the wheat, raised the cows, chickens, and pigs, churned the butter, and harvested their own sugar from sugar maples. Almanzo's mom was not worried about the sugar, gluten, fat, or carbs--she was worried about the kids not falling down in the snow and freezing solid on the way home--and then getting through an hour or so of chores before supper.

My elementary school was an old brown building (called, for obvious reasons, "The Brown Building") with beautiful, high-ceilinged classrooms, grand creaky staircases with bowling-ball sized newel posts, and a cafeteria in the basement. This cafeteria was low-ceilinged and gloomy, with concrete floors and lumpy stone walls that were whitewashed and painted cheerily with large pieces of fruit--possibly aimed to distract us from the fact that we were eating lunch in a damp, cold, dark, 19th century basement. ("We are eating in a damp, gloomy--oh look, there's four foot high pear!") Every once in a while, a dodgeball would fly into one of the deep window wells, and someone on the playground would have to hop down and ferret it out--reminding us that we, too, would soon be back out in the fresh air!

Every day before lunch, our teacher would herd us into a windowless little room at the bottom of the stairs and leave us there, closing the massive steel door behind her. The room was lit only by one sad little Soviet-prison style light bulb covered with cobwebs. We would peer at each other in the gloom, some of us wondering--is this the day they forget about us and leave us down here to die?

Worst of all, this dark, creepy little holding pen was adjacent to the kitchen's industrial dishwasher, and every day,  the room would slowly fill up with the scent of hot, garbage-laden bilgewater.  (Just writing about it makes me nauseous, forty years later!) After what seemed like an hour (it was probably not more than ten minutes, but that is a very long time when a) you think you have been abandoned in a basement to die, or b) you are trying really hard not to throw up), the lunch teacher would finally open the other door and let us in the cafeteria.

For this reason, in 12 years of school, I never bought anything hot from the cafeteria. (By senior in high school I could manage a bag of pretzels, if I got through the line quickly. Any scent of bilgewater and I would have to ditch the pretzels and run.) ) Ironically, in those days, the lunch ladies still actually cooked. They started with actual meat and flour and vegetables and made Turkey Tettrazini or American Chopsuey from scratch. It was probably a lot closer to Farmer Boy's lunch than what must have been the all-time low  of school lunches, the 1990's (when as I have already mentioned, many districts farmed their lunch service out to fast food chains).

Today, thankfully, we have gone full circle with "Farm to Table" and school gardening programs. How Farmer Boy's mom would have laughed--or maybe cried-- that we have to teach kids where food actually comes from.

Child of the 70's 2: The Lunch Thief

When my sister and I were in the 7th grade, someone started stealing lunches from our group of friends. Before long, one of us was missing her entire lunch every day.  If this wasn't bad enough, when the thief saw my sister's usual  lunch--which usually consisted of four slabs of high-fiber Wasa bread which had gone soft under a layer of  Port Wine cheese--he just threw it on the floor in disgust, leaving it to be trampled into crumbs!

We were beside ourselves. Every time a lunch disappeared (or was smashed on the floor) we had to share the four lunches we still had among six of us--so we all went  hungry. And, unlike some seventh grade girls I could mention, who wore fashionable mini-dresses and had feathered hair and boyfriends--we all had braces and pigtails, were very passionate about our stuffed animals,  and really, really liked to eat. My  67-lb sister could eat 12 tacos at one sitting. Helen could put away a box of Fudge Stripes every day after school. I considered a whole bag of potato chips with a container of sour cream a healthy snack, and  Emily, who weighed even less than my sister, could go through a gallon of ice cream in one slumber party. Our parents used to wonder about parasitic worms. 

The thief definitely did not target us for our high-quality lunches, either--the ones he stole were only fractionally better than the Wasa bread and port wine cheese. We all had feminist '70s moms: they loathed housework, cooking,  and shopping, and  they made us pack our own lunches starting in like,  first grade.   My mom gave us week-old leftover chicken legs, which sometimes made me throw up; Montana’s mom was experimenting with algae; Helen’s parents were in the middle of a divorce, so she usually had cold pizza; Amy usually had a Thermos of macrobiotic tofu casserole, and Emily brought the same PB & J every day.  

A few weeks after our food started disappearing, everyone's lunch (except Samantha's!) was gone on the same day. We were miserably sharing four soggy Wasa Bread and Port Wine cheese slabs among six people (even though they had been stepped on) when Helen dropped her tiny portion of Wasa Bread and gasped: 

“Oh my god!  Garret Smith is eating my sandwich!” 

She knew it was her sandwich, because her mom had just made spelt bread, and the inside was sprouts and leftover turkey pot pie. Despite the fact that Garrett was nearly six feet tall in the seventh grade, shaved, and wore all black leather, Helen (she had guts!) walked up right up to him and said, 

“Hey! That’s my spelt bread, spouts and leftover turkey pot pie sandwich!” 

 “No dude, it’s mine,” said Garrett.

“Oh, really? What kind of bread is it then?” demanded Helen, her hands on her hips.

“It’s my f***g bread!” said Garrett, while all his friends laughed. “Now f*** off!” He swallowed the last of the sandwich, smirked at her, got up from the table, and sauntered away.  

Helen stormed back to our lunch table: “That ***hole is eating my spelt bread, spouts and leftover turkey pot pie sandwich, and he told me to f*** off!”

“By the way,” she added, looking at Manth and I, “I think one of his friends had one of your mom’s chicken legs!”

We were furious! Aghast! Livid! Not only was this  jerk stealing our food and handing it out--he was eating it right in front of us! He could care less if we knew it was him. This would never happen to the popular girls. 

We came up with a plan: we would booby trap our lunches with food so disgusting that Garrett would never steal our of our lockers again. We went from house to house (except Emily’s, whose mom had permanently banned us from her kitchen after that unfortunate ice-cream-and-steak-knife incident). Amy had the weirdest stuff in her kitchen: mysterious Asian hot sauces and fish past and creepy frozen stuff her mom kept in ice trays in the freezer (which turned out to be homemade pesto and was probably delicious), and Montana’s mom had stashes of algae and tofu.

Helen’s mom had nine cats.  

On Monday, we each left a fish paste, hot sauce and cat food sandwich in our lunch bag, cunningly surrounded by normal food like Fudge Stripes and granola bars.  Now that we knew who the thief was, we kept on alert for any sign of him--but he normally ate outside  in the smoking area (it was 1982).

At lunch on Monday, the booby-trapped lunches were gone, right on schedule. We retrieved  our real lunches from deep inside our book bags, where they were flattened but intact (room temperature chicken legs never looked so good!) 

It only took one round of cat food sandwiches, and our food never disappeared again.

We never once considered telling an adult. 

If this happened now--there would be emails! Meetings with mental health professionals!  New school policies concerning booby-trapped sandwiches and allergies! Probably Garrett’s parents would have sued us for feeding him cat food and fish paste, and we would have all gotten detention for bullying. 

I don’t think any of us ever considered the idea that Garrett  (not his real name) stole our lunches because he was actually hungry. If we had told someone, maybe he could have been set up with a school lunch account if he didn’t have one. But no one really fell through the cracks in our tiny little school--I am willing to bet that Garrett was probably was eligible for school lunch; and probably even had an account--but that he preferred to steal, so he could eat in the smoking area.  I could be wrong. I'll never know. 

At least our little group tried to teach him it’s wrong to steal--even from geeks.