Road Apples by Tim Sanders
Feb. 20, 2012
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Attack of the Killer Lunch Boxes Columnists, even lowly humor columnists, must sometimes step back, look at ourselves, and say “HEY! If this column appears week after week in a newspaper, maybe sometimes I should discuss ... NEWS.” Usually we manage to talk ourselves out of it, and write about topics we personally enjoy, like cat aerodynamics or how to reinforce your retaining wall with Quaker Oats. But then again, with the world in chaos, gas prices inching over the $4 per gallon mark, and our national economy crumbling down around our ears, sometimes a news article catches our attention because it offers a ray of hope. One such article, written by Sara Burrows, comes from the February 14 edition of the Carolina Journal and provides encouragement for those of us who might have feared that our nation’s public school systems had all wandered off into the Valley of Silly. Let me assure you that they have not. At least in the More at Four preschool class of Raeford, North Carolina’s West Hoke Elementary School, they haven’t. What an actual, bona fide, licensed and bonded government agent, under the auspices of “Child Development and Early Education at the Department of Health and Human Services” found while on the always dangerous preschool lunch box patrol, was that one of the four-year-olds was seriously endangering herself and probably other students as well by eating a home-packed lunch consisting of–WARNING: Don’t let your school age children read this–a “turkey and cheese sandwich, banana, potato chips and apple juice.” The agent informed school authorities, who immediately put the lunchroom on lockdown, quarantined the homemade lunch in their evidence room and replaced the dangerous material with an officially sanctioned, vitamin-rich cafeteria meal consisting mainly of the popular and nutritious chicken parts known as “nuggets.” The child ate three. Not three meals, just three nuggets. But regardless of the quantity of food consumed, justice had been served. The mother was notified of the incident, and charged $1.27 for those three nuggets. The story leaves a lot unanswered. • For example, one can only wonder what kind of courage it took for that solitary agent to make that difficult call, surrounded by dozens, possibly hundreds, of ravenous four-year-olds at feeding time. But we will probably never know, since the agent’s name has been withheld due to fear of recrimination by those ever-dangerous home lunch-packing cartels which according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture have “spread across the nation at an alarming rate, threatening to put our nation’s entire school lunch program in jeopardy.” • For that matter, how do Federally Licensed Lunch Box Agents move through a lunchroom full of rabid four-year-old ankle-biters without arousing suspicion? Perhaps they dress themselves as Ronald McDonald. Or maybe only vertically challenged people (whom we used to call “midgets”) are hired for the job. • But where were all of those federal and state agencies sixty years ago, when we kindergartners were sitting there in class courting disaster by trying to cut shapes out of heavy construction paper with actual metal scissors which, if they’d only been sharp, might have even worked? More specifically, where were the USDA Undercover Classroom Agents when we were licking all of that tasty white kindergarten paste off of our little wooden sticks, risking tongue splinters and even worse, intestinal paste reflux? Didn’t the adults care if we pasted our lower colons shut? Back then, kids dropped like flies from peanut allergies, given the popularity of that lethal substance peanut butter in home-packed lunches. Oh okay, so maybe they didn’t drop like flies from peanut allergies, but that was only because nobody knew enough about peanut allergies to develop the symptoms back then. I did know a kid named Rex who came close to death due to peanuts. He managed, somehow, to get a shelled peanut stuffed into each nostril, and was unable to get them out until the teacher got a pair of needle-nosed pliers from the maintenance man. Rex squealed like a pig during the procedure. Had the food police been on duty, and had proper federal peanut restrictions been in place, there’d have been lawsuits a’plenty over that incident, let me tell you. • And of course we can only wonder just how serious the national childhood obesity problem might have been back then if it hadn’t been for those oppressive mandatory gym classes and constant outdoor after school activities. We did not have computers and laptops and electronic games and so on and so forth, so our only means of recreation involved actual physical effort. It’s a wonder it didn’t kill us all. We swam in polluted rivers, rode bicycles without wearing any dweebish Flash Gordon helmets, threw ice balls at each other in wintertime, had BB gun fights, wandered all around town without supervision, and played mumblety-peg with actual, sharp pocket knives. By the way, when I was in grade school, several of the boys I knew carried pocket knives. But of course that was before any of us had learned to use them to carve chunks of other students instead of chunks of wood. And as to food, we ate just loads of stuff that was really bad for us, due to no federal or state regulations to the contrary. (As I remember it, in 5th grade some of us used our knives to cut pieces of tar from tar blocks being used to do roof repairs. The tar was very chewy, although probably also very lethal if eaten in large quantities, which we had enough sense not to do.) By the way, if you have any doubts that our governmental agencies are doing their best to make life easier for us, then consider this: Last week I received a check from the good people at Medicare. Along with that check they sent a three-page summary explaining that last year I’d overpaid a doctor. The check itself was for ... brace yourself ... 34 cents. Total. I may send it to that poor woman in North Caroline to help her with that $1.27 she owes the school system for those three chicken nuggets. |