Back to School

I wanted to do a back-to-school post and considered topics like buying school supplies, homework and teachers when I hit on the perfect subject.  Why not write about everyone’s favorite part of the school day, lunch?

First grade brought a number of firsts for me, including my first experience with a school cafeteria.  The upcoming week’s menu was printed in the paper so you knew in advance if it was going to be a good week.  Friday was the wild-card day because the public schools didn’t serve meat in a heavily Catholic city like Cincinnati.  On a good week that meant grilled cheese or macaroni and cheese; on a bad week, it meant dried-out fish sticks or something called a coney island.  I’m not sure what was in those coneys but I never found a hot dog there.  (Don’t ask me how you can have a coney without a hot dog - this was the 50’s so the Communists were probably behind it.)

I liked most of the food – my friend Emmy’s grandma was the head cook and she was great – I know she is long gone but I’d love to have her recipe for barbeque or Chuck Wagon Chowder.  I usually ate everything which was lucky because, back then, membership in the clean plate club extended to school, and the janitor, Mr. Snyder, was the enforcer. He sounded gruff and looked scary with an iron gray, spiky crew cut and eyes magnified by thick glasses like some malevolent bug. He towered over the lunch tables, a huge Macy’s Thanksgiving Day balloon in overalls, deciding whether you had eaten enough to go out to recess. It was always a relief when he gave you the nod to take your tray to the dirty dish drop-off.  One of my friends was a picky eater – she made hiding uneaten food an art form – peas crushed under the rim of the plate, cornbread crumbled and scattered over the tray, bread crusts and green beans stashed in her empty milk carton and any other leftovers smooshed and smeared around the plate.  I learned some valuable techniques from her.

After lunch you could take a penny and buy a cookie or one of those big pretzel rods.  I learned how to skin

a pretzel from a girl named Cheryl.   You suck on it until the brown crust is soft, then you scrape it away with your teeth, being careful not to break the pretzel – if you’re good at it like she was, you can wind up with a totally naked pretzel which, for some reason, tastes better than the conventional kind. I still do that some times but only in private because my mom always said you should never play with your food.  Don’t try this, however, if you’re missing your front teeth.

The cafeterias in junior high and high school offered lots more choices, but none of the items that today’s schools are supposed to include.  No salad bars.  No baked sweet potato wedges.  No veggies with low fat ranch dressing.  No fresh fruit –the closest we got was canned peaches or that thin orange drink, which has no nutrition and not even the body and personality of Sunny Delite. I ate French fries, mayonnaise-y coleslaw, meat loaf, turkey and dressing, steak burgers and pie or peanut butter cookies almost every day.  They also served these big, soft , yellow rolls, colored with something that has since then been shown to make mice into social deviants.  I loved the mashed potatoes in junior high but stopped eating them in high school because kids routinely tossed their used chewing gum into the potato mashing equipment when the lunchroom ladies were busy adjusting their hairnets.

When I was in college, I ate most of my lunches at the sorority house.  I know Georgia, the cook, prepared delicious meals for us; but all of my memories have been blurred and overshadowed by the powerful image of those magnificent, colossal, stupefying platters of store-bought cookies she served every day.  The selection ranged from semi-healthful oatmeal raisin cookies and Fig Newtons  to solid standbys like Coconut Chocolate drops  and Pecan Sandies, to outrageous frou-frou cookies with vanilla wafer bottoms and pink, coconut covered marshmallow tops. Finally, there was the piece de resistance, the ne plus ultra, the rama-rama-ding-dong of cookie-dom – a confection the size of my fist with a graham cracker base, a marshmallow center and a thick, hard outer coating of dark chocolate.  I think reasonable people will understand the passion that drove my friend Sue and me to pick the cookie closet lock with a credit card one night and make off with our own private stash while our housemother dozed over “Marcus Welby, M.D.”

When David started first grade, I was happy to find out that, in addition to a great Montessori program, the tuition included lunch everyday.  Each child brought a piece of fruit to share but packing lunch wasn’t even an option –talk about mother-friendly!  The school’s goal was to provide nutritious lunches free of additives and sugar and to introduce the kids to a variety of foods. That was fine with the boys when the variety included tomato basil soup and macaroni and cheese and not so fine when it included Brussels sprouts and soy cheese on pizza.  One year, just the mention of school lunches sent John off on a ten minute tirade, although, at a certain age, complaining about school food is every kid’s favorite indoor/outdoor sport, no matter what is on the lunch menu.

Regardless of what the boys said, I always looked forward to those lunches on the days when I volunteered at school. After John moved on to junior high, I joined the school staff and continued to enjoy coming into the building in the morning to the promising aroma of teriyaki chicken or turkey chili.  Myra’s baked fish, sprinkled with herbs, her thick crust pizzas, her tempting salads and her chicken pot pie made my day.

The summer of 2009 ended my 15th and final year on the school staff.  Since then, I’ve found plenty of activities to fill in the time I spent there; but I do still miss two things – the people I worked with and the lunches. If I want some of Myra’s Asian chicken salad with cashews or her spinach burgers or her cauliflower quiche, I have to make them myself.  Well, nothing lasts forever.

P.S. I didn’t have any school lunch photos so I’ve included some first-day of school photos – me, my brother and our neighbors - September 1959, David’s first day of kindergarten and John starting first grade.