Hooker Oak is really trying to move to green school status. This is quite an endeavor as you can well imagine. We have an extensive recycing program and many worm bins throughout the school for composting. The school garden is in need of renovation, but is being worked on. This year, in order to support the green school endeavor, my class had two sessions of waste free lunch during our regular lunch period each week. Children bringing lunch from home were encouraged to avoid pre packaged foods, use reuseable plastic containers, cloth napkins etc. Those children eating hot lunch were to get foods that could be composted and also tried to take only as much food as they could eat. During one occasion of waste free lunch period we collected all the waste at the end of lunchtime and compared the amount from cold lunch from home and hot lunch from school. With only 3 out of 20 lunches that day from the cafeteria there was substantially more waste from the hot lunch. Because the children cannot control the amount of prepackaged foods, utensils wrapped in cellophane etc. from the cafeteria we decided it was time to take action. Each child wrote a letter complaining about the amount of waste in school lunches. We directed our letters to the district food service administrator. She wrote a response, letting us know she understood our concerns and promised to visit our school. The latter never happened and no action has as yet been taken, except styrofoam trays have been pretty much abandoned at Hooker Oak. Educating children and parents about reducing waste is imperative at all levels and we haven’t given up yet. Next year we will continue to communicate our concerns to Chico Unified, perhaps in a more public way, in our pursuit of a greener school.

With the exception of some months during fifth grade when I decided to walk home for lunch, I think I ate a “hot lunch” at the school cafeteria throughout elementary school. This was in the days of yore, oh so long ago now, when there was a kitchen and a cook at each school.

The best thing in the world about those lunches was fresh-baked dinner rolls, served twice a week with mysterious, gravy-soaked meat entree and obviously (to any savvy grade-schooler) toxic vegetable (the spinach puree was notable for its ability to stun children into grimaced silence, simply through its appearance). But back to those rolls. They were served still warm, with a generous pat of melting butter (something like a quarter stick, probably) already stuffed in their midst.

One unusual aspect of the school lunches was that we could request seconds if we had cleaned our plates. My friend Mitchy Cox and I would actually attempt to stomach the nastiest things possible, just so that we could get more of those dinner rolls. Sometimes, though, as with the vomitous mass of spinach puree, it just wasn’t possible, so stealthier means of cleaning one’s plate were necessary. The old “stuff the nasties into the empty milk carton” ploy was good for dozens of dinner rolls, until mean old Mrs. Peck, the first grade teacher whose students got sympathy from even the most hardened schoolyard bullies, started checking people’s lunch trays. A clean plate was not enough for her; no, she had to come over, carefully grasp the milk carton between two scary, bony fingers, and disdainfully lift it up, as though it was a particularly noisome stocking, or perhaps a baggie filled with dog droppings. If it was a microgram heavier than the weight of the average empty milk carton, she would actually fill her face with the ghost of a smile as she denied us our oh-so-ardent desires for more dinner rolls.

I’m afraid I haven’t even time to comment on the school’s reaction to discovering that Friday Pizza was filled not with ground beef, as we had surmised, but with fish paste. You’ll have to imagine for yourself the riotous outbreak that ensued.

St. Lucy’s Priory High School (all girls Catholic institution) did not have a cafeteria. Instead, at lunch time we had the lunch truck. I rarely ate from that truck, but I did as the Senior Social Chairman have to take a turn once every two weeks as the security person for the truck. That meant watching to make sure that none of the lovely girls in little blue plaid skirts forgot to pay for their gourmet treats – burritos, burgers, etc. When I was off duty, lunchtime was all about sitting in the sun in the beautiful amphitheater or the shade of the breezeway gabbing away with two or three really good friends, gossiping, making plans, or griping about our teachers and assignments. Being an only child, and a spoiled one at that, my lunch was always a cornucopia of delights. My mom packed my lunch until the day I graduated and it was always plentiful. It was not uncommon for me to pull out a prime rib sandwich on a French roll, cake, chips, fruit, a little bowl of potato salad, on and on. I always had plenty to share. My mom was desperate for me to reach the 110 mark on the scale before I went off to college and paranoid that people would just think she didn’t feed me, so she was big on overcompensating. Lucky she put all that stuff in my lunch because by noon that big homemade breakfast burrito could have been wearing off. This isn’t making me sound too good, is it?

It’s hard for me to write about school lunches. Right now, I am experiencing the trauma of school lunches all over in again in my mind. I was one of those weird kids forced to bring her lunch to school each day in an ugly, brown paper sack. What was contained in the sack was even worse than its boring exterior. Inside was a smashed peanut butter and jelly sandwich, a bag of pretzels, an apple slightly bruised, and a granola bar. Yuck. I envied the people in the lunch line who got to eat triangle shaped frozen juice pops; or the hard, square peperoni pizza; or the spaghetti that hovered a-top a thick layer of orange grease; or the burritos fried beyond human recognition. How I wished and longed for such a meal. Oh the pain still lingers… Even my other weird friends, always forced to bring their lunches, at least had a better menu selection than me. Their lunches consisted of Capri Sun juice drinks and those hostess chocolate cupcakes–two items I was not allowed to have due to “hyperactivity.” Their mothers packed their lunches and they always had napkins and those ice packs that kept all their food cold. My dad packed my lunch and it was always sloppily shoved down into the bag, all smashed together. I know he was trying to do a good job… keep me healthy and whatever, so I never said anything. I did have one thing on my brown, ugly bag that one one else would ever have… a really cool boat or car or helicopter drawing on the front of my bag… his attempt at making it all look better under the disguise of cartoon artwork.

While many longed for the respite of lunch recess, I was the kind of kid who often felt safer and more myself in the company of a respected teacher during lunch. Elementary lunches were often pretty serene in my tiny school where I had established my place among my peers; middle school lunches were entirely opposite, where I’d not only lost my place in a carnivorous sea of cruel indifference, but would have to fight to survive the open exposure of quads and hallways for forty-five minutes. In high school, I’d developed enough social insulation with enough people to need to neither fight nor flee.

The food itself, therefore, blurs with the context of the food. Serenity in elementary lunches are pre-packed by mom, ready to eat: pb&j, hohos, maybe a bag of cheap chips. I envied my friends who got the shiny Capri-Sun drinks which had just come out, not because my family was fiscally poor, but psychologically poor: in my mom’s mind, Capri Suns were expensive, I guess, compared with generic juice boxes. Middle school food was pretty bad, I suppose: greasy pizza, cold burgers, limpy fries, soda, just a step below drive-in movie dining. High school, bringing your lunch was for dorks, and mom certainly didn’t pack this anymore, so, being pretty dorky, I packed my own. The cool part is that I could actually think about what I was eating for the first time; the lousy part is that what I liked was seldom in the kitchen.

Even in my own family, my taste for fresher food had singled me out. Driving thru everywhere as we had all of my life no longer appealed to me, let alone the boxes canned fruit of food in the cupboard since I was in elementary school. My mother was a shopper of the middle of the store, where nothing goes bad, perhaps from years of ‘duck and cover’ drills and being raised in a home where Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Communist and an adulterer. So, we are what we eat. I cannot separate feeling unsafe at lunch through my adolescence with how unsafe the food actually was. How strangely the Establishment pervades itself at lunch recess.