School Lunches

At Ivanhoe Elementary School everyone brought lunch from home. We did not have a cafeteria. Your lunch and what it contained and how it was transported were matters of great importance.

I vacillated between the generic brown bags and the metal lunch box that included a Thermos. The lunch boxes ranged from The Lone Ranger to Barbie to Superman.  It was important to have the right celebrity for each year.  No one wanted to be carrying a Davy Crockett one when they were in the sixth grade. I can still remember the smell of sour milk that could never quite be removed from those Thermoses.

My gastronomic fare in those days ran a fairly routine gamut, but one of my favorite lunch additions was a wax paper bag of cherry tomatoes with a miniature Morton salt container.  I loved those shakers because I always wondered about the little girl with the umbrella on the label and, more so, because I loved pouring the salt into my hand and just eating it.  My mother, who seemingly was unaware of how much salt those baby shakers held would have been appalled.  One container probably equaled the recommended sodium intake for five heavily sweating long distance runners.

For some reason, the PB and J phenomenon was not part of my upbringing. If we had peanut butter sandwiches that was what they were. Peanut butter. With lettuce.  Rarely was there jelly or jam.  The bread was always whole wheat.  Tuna sandwiches were a mainstay, as well as left over chicken, roast lamb or turkey. Sometimes we’d get cold meatloaf sandwiches with yellow mustard.  Those were a favorite.

One day our neighbor from across the street brought over some fresh venison that he’d shot.  My parents informed us, as they served it up for dinner, that we were eating deer. They both seemed quite excited about having this rare treat. BAMBI was the first film I had ever seen and the prospect of eating her did not sit well.  The next day in my school lunch was a sandwich that had dubiously dark meat.   Racked with quilt about all the starving children in China, I chucked it into the garbage bin. My mother later told me that the sandwich was turkey.

As I reached the fifth grade a new invention began to grace our lunches.  Kraft Cheese “N Crackers.  I always felt like a bit of a big shot when I’d pull one out, tear back the plastic and watch the other kids look enviously while I spread the plasticy orange substance onto the crackers.

Every now and then, the PTA mom’s would have “hot dog day” and we could buy a dog and potato chips for 25 cents. The entire school would smell of boiling Oscar Meyer franks. I quickly learned not to call them “weenies” as we did at home.

Going off to junior high school was a frightening experience, especially since I was the family pioneer.  My fears were slightly offset by the fact that Thomas Starr Jr. High had a real cafeteria where students could make their own food selections.

The cafeteria was manned by the ubiquitous lunch ladies in hairnets who stood behind glass and over steaming trays of the day’s entrée.  My favorite was shepherd’s pie. Sometimes I would just buy a couple of bowls of canned spinach.  The Jell-O was topped with spray whipped cream that seduced me into the occasional purchase. Fruit cocktail was another staple of the dessert section. It was in the cafeteria that I discovered roast beef could contain gristle and something that looked like little tubes of vein. These never, ever, showed up when my mother made a roast for Sunday dinner.

By the time I moved on to John Marshall High, a cafeteria didn’t hold the same allure. It was a noisy room with a long line at lunch and would be transformed into a table less floor space for evening dances. I cannot remember one meal that I ate there.  I do remember the big, doughy cinnamon rolls that were sold for “nutrition” break.  There was a little campus store that sold school supplies; pencils, folders, paper and Luden’s Cherry Cough Drops.  I could down a box in one class period with no cough symptoms to be had.