Food Porn

Lunch time in a suburban Catholic school in the 1970s went something like this.  The bell rang for lunch time dismissal.  If you were in Grade 2 or younger you waited for an older sibling or a designated substitute or a parent (mother) to pick you up to take you home.  Or you waited for an older sibling or designated sub to take you to the gymnasium to eat your bagged lunch with your fellow 'bus kids' - of which there were only a couple of dozen in a school of a few hundred.  If you were in Grade 3 or older you were allowed to take yourself home or go to the gym yourself.

I attended a school such as this and I was a bus kid.  I was one of the very few children that had a mother that had paid employment (and possibly the only one whose mother made more $ than the father).  I was also the only child I knew that had a family that had public marital troubles in it's history (although god forbid I ever talked about that).

In grade 5 and 6 it started to become 'cool' for kids to stay for lunch rather than go home so I recall that we started staying in our classrooms for lunch.  This allowed me, an irish immigrant child, to gain further insight into the food choices of the mostly italian, portuguese and filipino families.  I would come home to my parents begging for things like nutella (on fresh italian bakery bread, OH MY).  And wagon wheels.  And pop tarts.  Their deli-meat based lunches smelled a lot different than my peanut butter and carrot (yes) sandwiches on brown whole wheat (cheap) bread.  My lunch treat was an apple and very occasionally a couple of (cheap) cookies.  I started baking at a very early age just so I could improve the contents of my bagged lunch.

Even today, the smell of the deli counter brings my mind directly back to those childhood lunchrooms.  And one of the proudest accomplishments of my parenting career is the fact that my daughter came home regularly during much of her elementary school years so she was able to experience a period of time that included a hot midday meal.  But she, like during my time, started wanting to stay with her friends in grade 6 and by grade 7 she was taking the subway downtown to an alternative middle school which ended her childhood hot lunch era.

One of my own guilty pleasures has been the provision of nutella for my daughter.  This was one item that never came into the household I grew up in and was regularly provided for my elementary school peers.  I wish I could also say that she also brought fresh homemade cookies throughout her childhood.  Let's just say that she too started baking in a quest to improve the contents of her bagged lunch.  After all, the apple doesn't stray too far from the tree :)