Lady Who Lunches

Yeah, like I need another blog to read. Like I need another distraction. Well, at least this way, I can claim that I'm well-rounded.

Anyway, I've added this blog to my feed: Fed Up: The School Lunch Project. It's another one of those annual "stunt" blogs, wherein the person does something completely out of the ordinary for a year, blogs about it, and then gets a book deal. I don't mean to sound overly cynical... I think many of the stunts are very interesting, I read a lot of them, and I would love to discuss, over coffee, how this is becoming performance art for the technology age (but I fear that most of you would zone out after the first cup). Plus, this one is an actual school teacher eating the lunches fed to her students, so right there, that gets my attention.

Luckily, I found this blog in January, so I didn't have too much catching up to do. I've read through the whole site, and two things are glaringly apparent:

1. Why are all of those lunches covered in plastic? Back in the day, when I was a kid, all of our lunches were served on plates or in bowls, with real silverware on actual trays. Sure, the plates and bowls were plastic, but they were the washable, reusable kind. It was institutionalized fare: probably mostly from cans, boxes, and mixes, but still required someone to assemble or cook. This crap looks like vending machine food. The pizza we got was equivalent to what you could by in the frozen food section of the grocery store. Which is to say, probably not the healthiest for you, but at least recognizable as pizza. I'm utterly appalled at what passes for student lunch these days, so I will watch this blog with keen interest.

2. The author interjects with posts about her own upbringing. Though her family was not wealthy, she had a mom at home, who reviewed the school lunch menu with her, and packed lunches for her on days she didn't want to buy. These lunches were nutritious, and filled with the encouraging love notes that parenting magazines like to suggest. This is completely foreign to me. No one packed me lunch, no one wrote me notes. Lunch money was given to me at the beginning of the week. It was my responsibility to make it last until Friday.  Fortunately, this was not looked on with pity in my school: buying lunch was cool, packing lunch was not. We were a middle-class district with a very small reduced lunch program, very different I think from the school where the blog-teacher works. I'm curious to see how her background will influence her project. Already, she is anti-fast food and soda (which seems a little sad to me...  I feel like the moderate use of McDonalds and Burger King is a fun rite of passage for children and teens, the youthful versions of a local bar or coffee shop).

So, lunch on, Mrs. Q. Can't wait to read your book next year!