Part of growing up culturally interstitial is Exotic Food. One of my kids said to me recently “you know how people don’t really like school lunch? Some of it is actually kind of good. Like tater tots,” and I was transported to the Bach Elementary auditorium in about 1978 when the school first started serving hot lunch.
The pre-hot lunch days (first grade) meant I brought my lunch in a tin lunch box, and lunch consisted of a peanut butter and honey sandwich and some cashew nuts wrapped in wax paper. We always had cashew nuts around the house because Dad used them to make chicken and cashews, a popular choice from his catering offerings. Cashews came in a round tin and were salty. My brother and sisters and I were always trying to sneak cashews out of the tin. Dad let us have a few, but in retrospect, I’m sure they were expensive, so he wasn’t letting us go all out. He included them in my lunch as a treat.
Cashews were just about the only salty snack food in the house, except for the occasional peanut, but they weren’t exciting. At school there was all kinds of fancy stuff. Other people had sandwiches with bologna. I learned where bologna was found in the grocery store and would take Dad over to point it out and plead for this delicacy. After a few years, he started buying processed ham sandwich meat, but reluctantly. I was nearly a teenager before Mom and Dad lost all discipline and actually bought bologna sometimes. At which point Dad realized it could be fried, and then bore a passing resemblance to the hard salami our Jewish friends brought from Chicago. We ALL liked salami.
For a short while, cashews were a useful form of barter. In those days there were no rules about trading lunch parts and while I’m sure some kids had terminal nut allergies (particularly to cashews, which contain trace amounts of the poison ivy toxin urushiol), no one seemed to worry about it. Other kids didn’t have cashews and a few times I managed to trade my cashews for part of a twinkie. Twinkies were the ne plus ultra of exotic food. I didn’t even know what they were for a while. Hostess cupcakes and fruit pies, regulars at the first grade lunch table, were recognizably food. Twinkies’ plastic perfection was mysterious. Why was there white stuff inside? How did it get in there? What did it taste like? The ability to obtain even part of a twinkie was an economic and social triumph not to be surpassed for years. I was terribly disappointed when I tried a twinkie in college, and realized they are pretty much tasteless.
With the advent of hot lunch the excitement of scoping out other people’s lunches went away. No more waiting to see what strange substance would emerge from the Charlie Brown and Sesame Street thermoses—sticky red spaghetti-oes? Golden chicken noodle soup? So uniform and brightly colored compared to white rice, mungbean threads, and cabbage. Now I had the same lunch as everyone else, but that same lunch contained new culinary vistas that kept me on my toes for at least a full year.
Hot lunch came on a tray, and you watched the trays get filled as you went down the line, staring into the hot table. Mrs. Weiss with her white coat and hairnet scooped out a veggie and an entrée, and a lunch helper added a dessert and milk. Every day there was something to learn about the possible textures and physics of food. I had seen spaghetti, but I had no idea it could be dispensed, premixed with the meat sauce, using an ice cream scoop. I knew about corn, because on the rare occasion mom had to make dinner, she almost always made creamed peas and corn. But canned corn served with no sauce all by itself was novel. And it was delicious! Sweet, and slightly greasy. Corn days were good days. Pea days were bad days. Peas and corn at home came from the freezer. We didn’t have canned peas. That was one area where I felt my parents were correct in the general prejudice against all things canned, boxed, or vacuum sealed. Canned peas were revolting in color, taste, and texture. I’m pretty sure I got in trouble for complaining that they smelled like bodily effluvia.
Tater tots were almost as good as corn. I was quite unprepared for tater tots. I’m not sure how long it took me to figure out that “tater” mean “potato”. Dad did not cook white potatoes, only sweet potatoes. Mom made either mashed potatoes (one of my favorite special treats) or baked potatoes, which were fine, but a lot of work to eat. Tater tots were golden, symmetrical, and rolled around actively on the tray when you moved, always at risk of leaping to their doom on the floor. They might be crisp and a bit dried out, or they might be soggy, but they were always salty and perfectly bite sized.
Entrees could be unpredictable. I wanted to like the hamburgers and hot dogs. I certainly wasn’t going to complain about them. They looked questionable, in their deep steel tray, surrounded by just the wrong amount of congealing greasy water, but they were still closer to treats than everyday food. Pizza was better, in rectangular slices, usually cheese only, sometimes sausage or pepperoni. What was scary was sloppy joes. The mix was not only messy in a gory way, but it was weirdly orange and the texture was suspect. Ground meat shouldn’t slide around. And worst of all it was sweet. I’m sure it was supposed to be a BBQ kind of flavor, but whatever the geniuses of 70s era institutional food were using tasted syrupy and Just Wrong. It was the only thing I refused to try a second time.
I don’t remember much about dessert, because all sweets were good sweets. Fruit cup might be a bit disappointing and boring, but I don’t recall dessert ever seeming like it came from an alien world, which is what made hot lunch so exciting. I eventually got used to hot lunch and by middle school I went back to packing my own lunch because the line for hot lunch was so long I wouldn’t have time to eat it. By then Dad had expanded his list of things he would buy at the store to include Lender’s bagels, so for lunch for most of middle school I had a plain bagel and a very generous chunk of cream cheese. Apparently you are supposed to spread cream cheese in a thin layer like butter, not put a thick slice on like a whole sandwich filling.
By highschool, my schedule didn’t include lunch because I was in an orchestra across town. Instead I would run across the parking lot to the deli and get the bread ends hacked off the rye loaves used for sandwiches for 5 cents each, or if I was feeling flush, rolls from the French bakery. I’d eat them with butter on the bus to orchestra. Sometimes I had a container of frozen peas. If I put frozen peas in a dish in the morning, by noon, they’d be thawed out, and bright green. They would be sweet and just the right amount of chewy. Pea days were good days.
rage. creation - joy 