Vamanos Almuerzo!

As I set myself to the task of writing this, it is by any sensible measure time to eat lunch. I would like to have it now, but am missing a crucial ingredient to my traditional midday repast of hot dogs: the buns. It's impossible to overstate the value added simply by combining the frankfurter and ketchup with the buns. It takes a meager, unsatisfying thing and makes a filling meal of it. Perhaps when I'm through writing this I'll embark on a mission to reconnoiter the grocery store and return with buns in tow. Until then, only the promise of hot dogs to come keeps me going enough to write. It's a unique opportunity for you, the reader, to see real-world conditions influencing my work. My God, I'm hungry.

Of the three traditionally recognized meals (which definitely exclude the ones ginned up by fast food restaurants to maximize overhead), lunch is the one most inextricably intertwined with a day at school. It was really only grade school when a lunch at school was a "school lunch". They began to trust us with greater discretion over our own nutritional intake, and that was surely a mistake. Until then, though, there was the centrally-planned lunch. I remember certain ones fairly well. Naturally there were burgers. Some days it was a plain burger, and other days it was a cheese burger. At the time, I wasn't aware that the latter wasn't Kosher. I don't know that they took that kind of thing into account. Probably a lot of kids languished for lack of the school district giving their dietary needs consideration. I guess that changed over time.

Two other reliable staples were pizza and burritos. The former was generally passable. The latter could be all right, but was no match for its counterpart offered in authentic restaurants. Often I opted to perform an invasive autopsy on my burrito, seeking to uncover the obviously malicious source of its unpalatable nature. This is the sort of behavior that adults observe which makes them conclude that a child has an aptitude for things like engineering. No such luck with me. I took apart foodstuffs, telephones and toys, but never proved to be any good at such practical pursuits. You'll pardon that digression, I'm sure. The point is that the burrito often needed to be helped along by a quantity of salsa and sour cream that exceeded the burrito itself in weight and volume.

We did fool around with the food about as much as we ate it. Probably we trouped back into the classroom dead on our feet as much because of hunger as because of vigorous school yard recreation. I remember very fondly when they transitioned from milk cartons to milk pouches that resembled Hawaiian Tropic juice. It was very quickly learned and disseminated that one could exploit the new package's design to project a stream of milk as far as desired. It was a marked improvement in food fight technology, but I think they probably went back to the old container. I really can't imagine why. It's like they didn't have any thought for our development.

Later, a few forces long at work resulted in changes to the school lunch. As I said, a more sensitive- perhaps an over-sensitive- attitude about dietary requirements led to wholesale changes in lunches. At the same time, the school cafeteria was seemingly co-opted by the fast food industry. By the time I was in high school, there wasn't just 'pizza', 'burrito' or 'hamburger'. There was Pizza Hut, Taco Bell or Burger King. We had, like I said, free reign to make our own choices by this time. Often my choice was none of the above, but instead a simple lunch of cherry cola and an ice cream cone. Years of good intentions losing out to better marketing resulted in progressively less nutritious lunches, but I escaped with a tolerable body mass index.

I didn't escape with my innocence, though. I very much miss the traditional school cafeteria. I liked it the way that makes people good-naturedly and nostalgically complain. We had the grizzled, hardened lunch lady. We had the bad food that bound us together in suffering. We had the training ground of salesmanship that resulted when a room full of kids sought to turn the lunch they had into the lunch they wanted. We had the crude conversations, the cool tables and the tables on the margins. We had food fights. All the good things went by the wayside. Of course, I don't know how it is now. I really am out of touch with such matters. I hope the kids are still all right in the cafeteria.