Gramps
Mayor
No one worried when I was a kid if my lunch was healthy or not. WE rarely ate lunches prepared in cafeterias, mainly because the schools I attended in lower grades had no such animals. The head chef around home, MOM, packed a lunch from whatever food sources we had on hand -- peanut butter was popular. There were many ways to disguise peanut butter. I used to ask mom to put a few bread-and-butter pickles between the slices of home baked bread she used which gave the PB a tart twang I liked. My older sis like PB mixed with honey, My macho older brother would take it however it came and after dad butchered a hog he would insist on having the brains mixed with his PB.
Mom died while I was still a kid and be packed my lunch as well as a lunch for my kid brother. Yeah. PB, plain PB wrapped in newspapers sometimes because our supply of wax paper petered out. Sometimes the bread would absorb the newsprint and we could not only read the news while we ate but we could digest it;. Deserts were an exception. Apples were most common because most of us had apple trees in our own back yard and would store them in the cave to keep them edible longer.l
There were no free lunch programs. They hadn't yet been invented. School lunches were a remedial method of teaching economics to the student body. It was "swap time" after the dinner bell rang and we'd get down to some serioous trading techniques to garner something different. One girl in particular who came from an affluent family brought scrumptuous lunches and never offered to trade with anyone. She would turn up her nose when she watched the rest of us eat, never really saying much because "gross" hadn't been invented yet either. Most of us envied her but didn't let on. Only a fool wouldn't have wanted to have a big bite out of one of her beef sandwiches; unlike our own, which was drowning in condiments.
Looking back, we were disgustingly healthy. Living in rural areas we were not overly exposed to rich kids to set the standards. We were taught hygeine but didn't practice it very well because we had no running water or inside toilets. The older boys pumped a pail of water when needed and the whole class shared a big dipper when they got a drink from the pail. The room was heated with one pot-bellied stove. The younger kids were seated closer to the stove because, as the teacher explained it, older kids knew how to adjust to the miserie of being cold, but we didn't know that.
I scanned the new menus. They're okay, I guess. But I'm still okay with a PB sandwich, or a PBJ, or a PBP (pickles) and an apple which back then was touted as a method to keep doctors away. They worked. WE kids rarely went to doctors -- well -- not professional practitioners anyway. Mom the chef did alright in the dispensary, too; the dispensary being our dining room table, close to the kitchen in case Dr. Mom needed some water to clean a wound -- water dispensed from the big ladle.
Talk about having it made and not realizing it? I doubt there was any surplus in the national treasury back then to have funded a school lunch program. Those were harsh days, not like the present time after politicians have mastered the art of stretching a trillion dollars income to cover the cost of a two trillion dollar budget. My grade school math at lunch time did not prepare me for such exetravagance.
Gramps
Mom died while I was still a kid and be packed my lunch as well as a lunch for my kid brother. Yeah. PB, plain PB wrapped in newspapers sometimes because our supply of wax paper petered out. Sometimes the bread would absorb the newsprint and we could not only read the news while we ate but we could digest it;. Deserts were an exception. Apples were most common because most of us had apple trees in our own back yard and would store them in the cave to keep them edible longer.l
There were no free lunch programs. They hadn't yet been invented. School lunches were a remedial method of teaching economics to the student body. It was "swap time" after the dinner bell rang and we'd get down to some serioous trading techniques to garner something different. One girl in particular who came from an affluent family brought scrumptuous lunches and never offered to trade with anyone. She would turn up her nose when she watched the rest of us eat, never really saying much because "gross" hadn't been invented yet either. Most of us envied her but didn't let on. Only a fool wouldn't have wanted to have a big bite out of one of her beef sandwiches; unlike our own, which was drowning in condiments.
Looking back, we were disgustingly healthy. Living in rural areas we were not overly exposed to rich kids to set the standards. We were taught hygeine but didn't practice it very well because we had no running water or inside toilets. The older boys pumped a pail of water when needed and the whole class shared a big dipper when they got a drink from the pail. The room was heated with one pot-bellied stove. The younger kids were seated closer to the stove because, as the teacher explained it, older kids knew how to adjust to the miserie of being cold, but we didn't know that.
I scanned the new menus. They're okay, I guess. But I'm still okay with a PB sandwich, or a PBJ, or a PBP (pickles) and an apple which back then was touted as a method to keep doctors away. They worked. WE kids rarely went to doctors -- well -- not professional practitioners anyway. Mom the chef did alright in the dispensary, too; the dispensary being our dining room table, close to the kitchen in case Dr. Mom needed some water to clean a wound -- water dispensed from the big ladle.
Talk about having it made and not realizing it? I doubt there was any surplus in the national treasury back then to have funded a school lunch program. Those were harsh days, not like the present time after politicians have mastered the art of stretching a trillion dollars income to cover the cost of a two trillion dollar budget. My grade school math at lunch time did not prepare me for such exetravagance.
Gramps
