To fortify the #1 son during his toothless convalescence, I brought home some mini ice cream cups. The kind that are half vanilla and half chocolate. He used to like them. Now, not so much. He has turned them down every time I offered to bring him one. And you know what that means. More for me!
No use letting perfectly good ice cream go to waste. That's what I always say. It's not like ice cream grows on trees, you know. And did you know that the chocolate half melts faster than the vanilla half? Maybe that's why they gave us those little cardboard cups of vanilla in the elementary school cafeteria. Remember those? With the wooden tongue-depressor spoon? Nowadays, there'd be too many lawsuits claiming splinters in the tongues of the cherubs who chowed down with the flat spoons. These days they get ice cream bars on sticks. Or giant multi-colored popsicle-like treats that the high school boys won't eat without breaking them off the stick. Same reason they won't eat bananas either, choosing apples or oranges instead. At least that's what I observe during freshman lunch.
And these days, schools don't let elementary students leave the campus to go to a little shack next door to buy greasy hamburgers wrapped in wax paper, and six-ounce glass bottles of Coke to drink through a paper straw, and a Charms cherry or grape lollipops that may or may not have a free sucker paper ribbon inside the wrapper. No. They have to stay in the cafeteria and eat pink slime burgers and drink chocolate- or strawberry-flavored two-percent milk. With a Little Debbie Fudge Round for dessert.
The price of progress. I'm surprised the teachers don't have to chew the food and spit it into the students mouths as they clamor for more.
3 comments:
We do, in elementary school. We figure that by middle school, they can chew on their own. (At least we hope they can...)
I hated those wooden spoons. They just made my mouth and tongue cringe. However, Popsicles were super duper - cherry, orange lemon, banana and sometimes blueberry!
Elementary school was where I learned to hate milk. We would have a recess period and they would give us little tiny cartons of milk with a straw. Yuck! Milk was warm and had wax floating in it. Never again! Other choice was water from a fountain that was nasty 'cause little boys would spit in it. I normally just went home and ate and drank. It was worth the walk.
In Junior High there was a restaurant right across the street. Hotdogs, french fries, cherry and vanilla cokes, etc. Livin' the high life as a teenager! In high school there was a privately owned restaurant that operated the kitchen in our cafeteria. Good food and reasonably priced. Yet, again, restaurants were readily available quite close by. The real problem was having the money to spring for good food. We did this buy WORKING while going to school! Mow lawns, deliver papers, baby sit, work part-time in a restaurant, etc.
I just am glad that when I went to school is was not a closed campus. Too many schools look like prisons to me now a days.
Sioux,
And you probably give them all an award for it at the end of the year.
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knancy,
Ooh! I used to pretend to drink the milk. Because we got in trouble if we didn't. So I would suck it up into the straw, but not drink it. Just to keep up appearances.
I lived one block shy of a mile from school. I know that, because the bus only picked up kids who lived a mile or more away. I could walk a block in the opposite direction to get picked up, or I walked to school.
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