It’s strange how much you forget as you grow up. Most of the stories I read about adults who become involved in the politics of school lunches only realize the problem when their own children start going to school. I know I can hardly remember what I ate at school when I was little, and that wasn’t so long ago. It all comes flooding back, though, when I read the blog posts of Mrs. Q, a school teacher who decided to eat lunch at her cafeteria every school day for a year. The steamed carrots, the strange beef variants (Mrs. Q had “salisbury steak,” I remember “shaved steak”) and most importantly, the lack of choices. Once we can choose what we eat, it’s easy to think of eating wilted broccoli and semi-frozen chicken tenders in the same sense as wearing light-up shoes and obsessing over Pokemon. Think about every “kids’ menu” full of bite-sized hot dogs and chocolate milk, or the dreaded Lunchables. Most of the time, we just think of this stuff as the food kids like to eat, as if there is a certain age before which humans can’t handle good food. Most school lunch decisions are made with budgets in mind, and that is a consequence of free education I will gladly accept, but I think the point of Mrs. Q’s experiment is that the adults that make these decisions do not have to live with them in the way that the kids do. There are a lot of “eco-stunts” floating around the media these days. Think “Low-Impact Man” or more generally food-oriented experiments like the “Julie and Julia” blog project (now a major motion picture) and these are all excellent vehicles for attracting attention (good or bad) to a worthy cause. Mrs. Q’s blog, though, is probably my favorite experiment of these. She hasn’t told us what school she works at, or where in the country she is, and the blog doesn’t read like an angry confrontation with the school board. Mrs. Q simply draws out attention to the end result of a decision made by adults who do not have to live with the consequences.
