Ms. Laura Raedle
Assignment #1 – School Lunches (Rewrite 1)
October 28, 1998
Lunch Time Trauma
In fourth grade, the world seemed to be divided into two distinct castes, which were defined by whether you brought a lunch to school or not. The upper class (those who brought lunch) insisted their mom’s always pack their meal so they would maintain their status, while most of the lower class (those who got school lunch) resigned themselves to their status as second rate citizens.
People who brown-bagged it were guaranteed to have an edible lunch, even if it consisted of a boring bologna sandwich on plain white bread and an occasional piece of fruit. At my school, very little social mobility took place through sandwich swapping, because everyone’s sandwich was cold and dull. The important part of the lunch, and the most varied part, was the drink. At the top of the cool ladder were the kids who brought a can of soda. Dr. Pepper and Coke were always in style, although for some years orange soda and 7-Up were okay too. After soda, the next coolest thing was to have some ultra-sugary fruit drink like Hi-C. Farther down were genuine fruit juices, especially if they did not come in their own container; a thermos full of anything was always awkward. Only the losers had thermoses anyway, because no self-respecting kid in the 80’s would dare own a lunchpail. The biggest dweebs were the ones who had hot soup in their thermoses. Secretly we all envied them because soup looks pretty appealing on a rainy day when all you’ve got is a cold PBJ.
More interesting than the brown bag culture were the wretched souls who got their lunch at school. Their fate belonged to the federally subsidized hot-lunch program, which we all called cafeteria. Of course, cafeteria is quite a lofty term for the lunch program, since it implies that a student might actually have some choice about what he ate. There was no real cafeteria at my school, not even so much as a vending machine. Eating in the cafeteria referred instead to waiting in a long line in the auditorium, missing half the lunch break while the brown-baggers played kickball outside.
At the front of the line, each student received a small box of grissle and an expired carton of milk. Don’t get me wrong, the lunch program did have menus, just without any choices. They said things like Monday – lasagna, Tuesday – chicken, Wednesday – pizza, and so on. In reality the meal was the same every day: a uniform glob of mush that was probably the result of an illegitimate marriage of mashed potatoes and pigeon. To make matters worse, once you got to the end of the line, one of the trollish serving women would have already stuck her finger into your lunch to verify that it was hot enough. Since the 300 boxes of sludge had been sitting in giant furnaces for the entire day, the meal was always hot enough. Fortunately, to counteract the scorching gruel, the milk was always frozen. Presumably they thought serving chunks of milk-ice might make us not notice that the sell-by date had come the week before. But what do you want for a dollar anyway?
That’s right, a dollar. And that was only if you’re family’s income was above a certain level. More than half the kids at Our Lady of Loretto (Our Lady of the Ghetto?) ate for free. No one was supposed to know who was getting a free lunch, but somehow ten year olds all know exactly who is on welfare and who isn’t—especially in East Los Angeles.
No one liked the cafeteria, least of all me. Nevertheless, the grade school lunch world probably didn’t produce the life-long psychological scars that Freud might have predicted. Its possible the sympathy and the shame that arose from eating in the cafeteria molded people forever, but probably not. Most of us surely shed any emotional baggage from grade school as soon as we started high school, where the real emotional trauma would take place. At least the lunches were better in high school.