Lunchbox

Growing up, I felt extraordinarily deprived because I never had a lunchbox. (And, no, having a pencil box didn’t make up for this supreme and utter loss.)

Kids of TV had lunchboxes. Kids in books had lunchboxes. Kids in suburbs had lunchboxes. But only a few lucky-ducks at OLA had lunchboxes.

At that time, unless your mother worked (huh?) or you lived too far to walk home, have a cup of vegetable beef soup and a ham sandwich, catch a few minutes of Big Brother Bob Emery on Channel 4, and walk back to school in time to have at least 15 minutes screaming around the school yard, you ate lunch at home.

What I wouldn’t have given for a lunchbox, with or without a thermos – Cinderella, maybe, to match the watch I also didn’t have but craved, or even a unthemed tartan one.  Ah, to eat lunch in the OLA school auditorium, on those cool lunch tables that folded down from the walls. (Murphy tables?)

Alas, by the time I was bringing my lunch to school, I was too old to carry a lunch box. I brown-bagged it.

That was in seventh grade, our grammar school having put the seventh and eighth graders on a different schedule and regime so we didn’t feel envy for the pubs (public school students) who got to go to ultra-sophisticated junior high school. Under the fake junior high plan, we got out at two p.m. rather than three, which meant we had to sacrifice an hour’s bite out of our lunch break. No more legging up the hill for lunch with mom and the kiddies! (The new junior high arrangement also involved shifting classes between the seventh and eighth grade nuns. At the end of every period, we gathered our books and walked into the classroom next door, passing the kids in the other grade walking in the opposite direction. As with eating lunch at school, this was supposed to replicate the experience we saw Wally and the Beav, and Donna Reed’s kids, having on TV every week. Minus the lockers. And minus much teacher variation: there were only two nuns. Enough was enough!)

Although I was now bringing my lunch to school, I still didn’t get to eat in the school hall. Because our lunch break was shorter, and there were too many of us – 100 more kids between seventh and eighth grade would have overwhelmed the “lunch room” – we ate at our desks. We all had to keep plastic covers in our desks, which we whipped out to cover those precious desks during the lunch period. Imagine what those plastic covers – untouched by a sponge for 10 months -  looked and smelled like come the end of the year.

Even if I’d eaten in the school hall/fake cafeteria, it wasn’t as if they served food there.

When it came to meals, everyone was on their own. (Enough was enough.)

High school was a marginal improvement, in that we actually did have a lunch room. And they did offer some sort of food, which I don’t recall ever eating – let alone what it was that they served, other than cheese pizza on Fridays.

No, for the six years I took my lunch, I “prepared” and ate – every single day – a baloney sandwich on white bread, accompanied by a Saran-wrapped Dailey’s kosher dill pickle and, some days, a nickel bag of Wachusetts potato chips, the only food I ever purchased in “the caf’. And the only switch in my daily fare was on Fridays, when I changed things up with PBJ or cheese (American, on white bread, again with the Dailey’s pickle on the side).

So I never ate a school lunch.

From what I understand – not to mention what I learned directly from a steady dose of institutional food during college, followed by years of frequent flyer dining – I didn’t miss much then. And with the move to MME’s – meals manufactured elsewhere and warmed up on site – things have gone from bad to worse, even if ketchup is no longer classified as a vegetable.

Enter Revolution Foods, which I read about in a recent Economist.

Kristin Groos Richmond, co-founder of Revolution Foods, says despite a $16 billion market for food in schools, she felt there was no good way of delivering healthy meals. Instead she created a school-dinners company that used healthy and locally produced food with an emphasis on using children to design, and test, the meals. Something seems to be working: the company recently won a contract to serve food to 114 schools in the San Francisco Unified School District, and subsequently the proportion of children who chose to eat the free meals jumped by 12%.

None of the fare offered by Revolution contains junk-food staples such as high-fructose corn syrup or transfats. It is hormone- and antibiotic- free, and sometimes organic. Avoiding use of the deep-fat fryer has been hard. When Ms Groos Richmond began working with Washington schools she was asked to provide a chicken wing. It took over 1,000 attempts (along with tastings and focus groups) to create a child-approved baked chicken wing infused with a spicy sauce.

The bad news is that this cost more than manufacturing a sloppy joe, flash freezing it, and trucking it to P.S. Whatever, where it gets zapped in the warm-up machine.  But Revolution does expect to eventually start turning a profit, and is doing so already in some of its regions.

Of course, given that the kids most in need of what Revolution has to offer tend to be in poor school districts - and we know how we feel about spending money on them, those rotten, selfish, seven-year-old takers – we can’t expect that most schools will throw out the cardboard pizza and fat fries and bring on the transfat free.

Still, the good news is that Revolution Foods exists, and is providing an alternative to high-calorie, low-nutrition glop.

You say you want a revolution in school foods program? Revolution Foods is giving you one.