Into The Mouths Of Babes

When I Think Back On All The Crap They Served In High School

There was a brief mention last time of creamed corn, and the question: Why is it even served in school cafeterias, since almost no kid will touch it with someone else’s fork, much less their own? That got me to thinking about some of the other crap they used to serve us when I was in school, carrot-raisin salad and Waldorf salad and stuff like that. And creamed corn, for that matter.

I tend to remember the quality of school lunches in inverse order of the schools I attended.

As a youngster at Caldwood Elementary, I recall the lunches being pretty good, for the most part. Although there was one day I’ll probably never forget, when they served us, as the entrée, fried bologna topped with honey and raisins; with beets and rutabagas as our vegetables. I don’t think anyone in the whole school ate that. Bologna was like the tenth best choice for a sandwich, and sautéed with honey and raisins (which looked like dead flies) on it? No way. And no one I have ever known likes beets, which were served at our school occasionally. I think they were more popular up north, but around here no one would eat them; and, if you did have anything good on your plate, the beet juice would encroach and ruin whatever it was.

And no one even knew what a rutabaga was. I still don’t.

After that it was on to Memorial Jr. High (now Vincent.) The food there did not leave much of an impression on me at all, in a gustatory sense. At that stage, ages 11-13, we were as interested in throwing the food as eating it, anyway.

The chocolate pudding at Memorial was of an excellent consistency and viscosity for use as an ordinance. You could make a catapult out of a spoon and a folded-up milk carton (the fulcrum), load it up, and see how far up the retractable dividing wall between the gym and the cafeteria you could stick a blob of pudding. There was a guy we called Montrose, who was a legend in the lunchroom; late in our sixth grade year he stuck a dollop of chocolate pudding almost all the way to the top of the wall, maybe thirty feet up (our lunchroom was part of a “cafetorium”, a gym and a cafeteria combined.) After that, when we remembered to we’d look up, and that pudding would still be there. It was reassuring, in a way; a symbol of consistency in that period of adolescence when raging hormones and social awkwardness made life confusing and difficult at times. Anyway, by the time we were in eighth grade, that pudding was still up there, although we noticed something greenish and fuzzy had begun to cover the surface of it. I have not thought about that in years; that by now fossilized blob of pudding may be up there on that wall, still.

The chocolate pudding was also useful for a long distance artillery barrage, aimed at the sixth graders’ table up in the front of the cafeteria, by where the teachers sat. Of course, sometimes your coordinates would be a bit off, and you’d overshoot the sixth graders’ and land a big dollop of pudding in old Ms. Wilkinson’s lap. Then the fun would really start.

That was one funny thing about jr. high school. Food fights, which happened two or three times a month, took precedence over everything else. I remember sitting down at the table one day with a perfectly good lunch in front of me, a rare thing. Faux veal cutlet and gravy, green beans, roll, chocolate pudding. . . right then a roll arced in from on high and hit a glancing blow off the table next to me, between me and my friend Ricky (who we called “T-Bone”.) It was a shot across our bow, courtesy of the little sixth grade dickheads, who I could see giggling at their table. I looked at T-Bone, and he looked at me. And then I grabbed a handful of green beans and he grabbed a roll, and we fired back. And then they fired back, and then we did. By the time the teachers shut us down, after maybe forty-five seconds, I’d thrown my entire lunch at the sixth graders’ table. I wouldn’t have got to eat it, anyway; by then I was on my way to the vice principal’s office, with about ten other guys.

By the time I got to high school, lunch became almost an afterthought. We had a large student body, so we had two lunch periods; and each one was maybe thirty minutes long. So even if you wanted to buy a lunch, by the time you got through the line you had about five minutes to eat it. Most people passed (not that they were missing anything), and went and bought some junk food from the snack bar. Or just headed on out to “The Field”, as we called it, a big, open area between the back of the school and the baseball field, where one could sit around and smoke cigarettes, while the administration mostly looked the other way. Well, cigarettes, and other things.

For some reason the cafeteria at my high school (Forest Park) served something they called carrot-raisin salad every other day. Shredded up carrots with raisins it, covered with a runny, vaguely sweet-smelling sauce. Gross. On the days I did eat in the cafeteria, I would take my tray up front when I was done, and the cafeteria lady would dump whatever food was left into a big 60-gallon garbage can. And I’d look down, and that can would be almost full to the top with carrot-raisin salad, several hundred pounds of it. Double gross.

We never could figure out why they would serve the same thing over and over when it was obvious no one was ever going to actually eat it. They could have saved some time and effort and, after they had made up their carrot-raisin salad batch for the day, just dumped it directly into the garbage can, instead of going through the motions of putting it on everyone’s plate.

There were two prevailing theories as to why they kept serving that crap, day after day. One was they were doing it to meet some sort of quota for “nutritional content” in our lunches. This was back before the Reagan era, and the classification of ketchup as a vegetable; so I guess carrot-raisin salad was the next easiest thing. The other one was that our cafeteria was part of some government surplus program (it was a public school.) In this scenario, the Department of Agriculture was subsidizing farmers after the bottom dropped out of the carrot futures market; and after the harvest they would have all these surplus carrots sitting around. And instead of letting them rot, they would ship them to the schools, who could not think of anything better to do with them than shred them up, mix in some raisins, and dump some kind of balsamic vinaigrette crap on top.

I have no idea which one of these theories was correct, if either one of them was. But I think I like the second one best. Pretty complex thinking and plot structure, for high-schoolers. I guess we were smarter than I thought we were. Due to good nutrition, no doubt.

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