Old School Lunches in the New School Lunch Room

I hope to heaven that Jamie Oliver, Michelle Obama, Rachael Ray, and whoever else is involved all have great success re-vamping the school lunch philosophy because I don't want any kid to go through what I went through.

I grew up in a different time where kids walked unsupervised to elementary schools, and often walked home for a luxuriously long hour-long lunch break. Tres Francais, n'est pas? The kids who had impossibly long walks, working moms, or took the bus found it more practical to stay at school and have a brown bag lunch on neato-keen picnic tables they set up in the auditorium. When the corny, old, nonsensical joke: "do you walk to school or carry your lunch?" was first posed to me in jest, I didn't get it. What? I walked to school. The kids who took the bus or got dropped off carried their lunches. What?! I was definitely in the "walk to school" demographic, as my house was literally across the street from my primary school, BUT, from time to time I wanted to hang out with my pals who carried their lunches and ate at school, so I started brown bagging it, too.

Well, I did it for a short while anyway.

You see, my mother and grandmother were very involved in making sure I had a nutritious and, dare I say it, sophisticated lunch. They didn't call it "foie gras", rather just plain old "goose liver", but the super-fatted liver of some delectable creature was a frequent lunch staple, dressed with spinach between two pieces of dense-as-deep-space brown bread. There was usually some fruit or leftover cobbler as dessert.

Awesome, right?!!

Not when you are eight years old.

Oh, the insufferable ridicule I was forced to endure by the glamourous types with one piece of a malnutritous Kraft American single between two pieces of Wonder Bread (no condiments, EVER!) coupled with an Oreo dessert. I also caught hell from the PB&J set who got Twinkies for dessert in their lunch box. My lunch was, um, weird. Everyone else, it seemed, had a "cool" All-American lunch. I had the scary stuff of Eurasian peasants. Ooof.

I gave up, after a while, and just walked across the street where I could eat my foie gras in peace while enjoying the added benefit of black and white "Gomer Pyle" re-runs in the comfort and privacy of my own home.

Meanwhile, at another school, not 2 miles away, a pair of sisters, first generation German-Americans, and now among my best friends, suffered a similar fate. Oma's "braunschweiger" had them ostracized to the far corner of the lunch room. We connected on this point years after the fact, but I took great comfort in knowing that I was not alone in being ridiculed for eating something slightly more advanced that the garden-variety All-American junk of the day. These gals of good German stock are my soul sisters in more ways than this, but I'll be honest, this lunchtime ostracism continues to stick out in my mind as an important connection.

I've heard similar stories from Italian-heritage kids, Greek-heritage kids, and Lebanese-heritage kids whose parents took the time to give them nutritious lunch-box delicacies only to be met with abject social grief at the communal table, where "crap" is the norm.

I sincerely hope things are changing. Not everyone can slink across the street like I did, so I hope a healthy lunch now looks "cool".

Please, parents: start a movement. Make no child squirm like my German friends and I did. Talk about the movement, stretch your children's taste buds, embrace your culinary heritage, and pack the things your grandmother would have packed for you. Remind your kids that those addictive junk items lead to the obesity problem that WILL get them picked last for the kickball game. Remind them that we are pushing through to a new era..by eating old-school stuff in the new-school lunch room.