School Food


From time to time, there are national conferences to discuss making school lunches tastier and more nutritious.

Each time, I think – more nutritious food for our youngsters? 

Sure.

Better tasting? 

Absolutely not!

It’s not right.  I didn’t have tasty school food.  My kids shouldn’t either.

Understand – I’m no finicky eater.  I’d wolf down a bowl of wallpaper paste as long as I could put a little mayonnaise and garlic salt on it. 

So, when I tell you that the worst food I ever tried to eat was in elementary school, you can be assured that it was so bad it would make a housefly hurl.  Compared to my school food, K-rations – or even month-old roadkill – is a delicacy that would melt on the palate.

For example, once a week, we were fed beets.  Beets – garish red roots stored in large vats the size of oil drums.  They don’t even feed beets to the serial killers on Death Row. 

And, then, there was the chipped beef.  I’m not certain what they chipped it off of, but it was definitely not a cow.

We were also served weird little weenies.  They bore a slight resemblance to Vienna sausages, but were most likely a distant cousin, perhaps Antwerp sausages.  They came in a puddle of strange orange fluid – au jus, as it were –  probably the same stuff they use to preserve frogs and earthworms for Biology class.

And how can I fail to mention mystery pudding?  It was like some primordial goop.  I half expected some creature to rise up out of it one lunch hour and go on a killing spree.  For a long time, when I heard that some evildoer was going to get his “just desserts,” I thought he was going to have to eat mystery pudding.

The absolute worst was the sauerkraut, or cabbage from hell.  If you’re a kid, the very word sauerkraut will put you off your feed.  No child in the history of the world ever came home from school and said, “Hey, Mom, can we have sauerkraut tonight?”

This stuff was vile, with a capital “Yuck.”  And what a smell – so thick and heavy, it hung in the air like a shroud.  I once saw a skunk pass out from the fumes.  Sewer rats and cockroaches wouldn’t come within blocks of the school on Sauerkraut Day.  I must say – I envied them.

It took me years to realize that there’s good sauerkraut and bad sauerkraut.

But I never got over the beets.

Obviously, it’s not fair that kids today should have delicious food when I didn’t.

I know what you’re thinking – who says life has to be fair?  You’re exactly right.  There’s a much more important reason for not having tasty food in schools.

Years ago, there was significantly less crime and violence in the United States.  That was because family values were stronger.  Families stuck together.  And do you know why?  Because home was the only place where you could get a good meal.  Kids were better behaved back then because they couldn’t take the chance of missing any home cooking.  The worst possible punishment for a kid was to have to go to bed without supper.

Today, the family unit is already threatened by fast food franchises and food courts at malls.  Yummy food at schools would be the final nail in the coffin.

I realize we can never go back to the days of toxic beets and Antwerp sausages and mystery pudding and industrial-grade sauerkraut. 

But perhaps a compromise is possible. 

At school, we could serve our kids airline food.