I like the word “kerfuffle.” It describes perfectly a rather minor scrum-scrimmage among divergent opinions about a subject that affects a lot of people but is not life threatening. I thought all of the publicity about school lunches in the area lately was really a minor “kerfuffle.” Suddenly I realized that with all of my experiences with schools and school lunches I have a fork in this colorful omelet.
   First, I actually ate “school” lunches for 12 years, from first grade through high school. Then I ate meals in the college cafeteria for four years. After college I spent three years in the Marine Corps eating in mess halls and Navy ship wardrooms and enhancing C-rations with onions and hot sauce while in the field. Adding onions and hot sauce to sausage patties, franks, and other mystery meats in C-rations of an indeterminate age just about turned mystery meat into filet mignon.
   After Marine rations, I ate school lunches and supervised students in the Fargo Central High School cafeteria while teaching English and journalism there for eight years. As a matter of fact, when Central High burned in April of 1966 from a fire that started at noon, I was supervising the lunchroom. After going into administration, I served as principal for South High, North High, and Horace Mann Elementary for a total of 23 years. Each one of those school days I could be found in the lunchroom. Only occasionally did I wonder about the mystery meat. With 47 years of exposure to school lunches, I think I have earned the right to comment.

We Ate Everything
That Squealed, Mooed,
Clucked, Whimpered,
Or Hissed

   In 1938 I started to carry my inscribed syrup pail to school filled with all of the goodies that a 180-acre pile of sand and rocks near Little Falls could produce. About two dozen students attended District #54, Morrison County, most carrying two-quart syrup pails that protected lunch from other students, accidents, or marauding cats and dogs. With a strong handle, it was the perfect lunch bucket. I carried it one-and-a-half miles to and from school, all uphill.
  In that we still did not have much refrigeration available, my French mother canned all meats except those smoked in our homemade smoker, whether beef, pork, rabbit, goose, chicken, or duck (wild or tame). After butchering cattle or pigs, we could expect all kinds of exotic parts in our sandwiches: liver, heart, tongue, gonads, kidney... Head cheese made from the boiled head and blood sausage from blood were great treats on a cool fall day. We also filled out with radishes, carrots, and other veggies.
   As the youngest in the family, I had to hoe the garden. We raised everything from asparagus to Swiss chard. There’s nothing like Swiss chard smothered in cream sauce. Rutabagas, turnips, parsnips, parsley, several kinds of beans, kohlrabi, onions, and other veggies were always in our diets. We had an orchard that provided terrific apples and plums. Strawberries, raspberries, gooseberries, and chokecherries were grown. And musk and watermelons. When the old school stove was going in the late fall and winter, we would bring potatoes and put them on the top in the morning. They would slowly bake until noon. Then we would bring out the home-churned salted butter carefully wrapped in wax paper and smother the potato in it. Now that’s living.

   We couldn’t afford bananas or oranges except at Christmas. We might get one in the stocking. A bottle of soda pop brought ecstasy. As farmers, we learned to eat practically everything that walked, crawled, flew, or grew. And we most often ended up liking it. Nothing like a good squirrel stew. Today the only food I can’t stand is buttermilk straight. I love it in pancakes. My mother had a strict philosophy: “It’s on the table. Eat it.” One of my earliest memories was being bit in the butt at five by Momma Goose when I threatened to pick up one of her young gaggle. Later, I did enjoy eating part of her in a sandwich.

What A Bunch Of Crybabies And Political Racists

   Here we have 30 percent of our young ending up obese before they hit their teens, and some people bitch about the “nanny state” telling them how to feed their kids. They need to be bitched at. Try being a parent instead of a submissive friend for your kids. One mother wrote, “My kids don’t eat half of what’s being served, and they are always hungry.” Well, kiss my grits. When people are hungry enough, they will eat shoe leather, grass, rats, and mice. Those kids aren’t really hungry yet. Leah Swedberg had it right when she wrote, “Hungry is normal.” By the way, students can have second helpings of fresh fruit and veggies today if they are still hungry.
   I see a football coach is complaining that his players aren’t getting enough to eat and he has noticed a “decline in performance.” His players say they are “starving.” Eat what’s served or provide your own food. If a teenager is too dumb to find food when he really needs it, he is too dumb to learn plays and block a defensive lineman or run a pass play. I played eight years of high school and college football and baseball, participated in all practices, and never saw a player faint from starvation. I also coached the Fargo American Legion “B” team for eight years. Never had a kid collapse between third and home.

The Forum Didn’t Say
What Happens When
You Eat Crap

  I see the Forum Editorial Board in its infinite wisdom says, “It makes no sense for public schools to offer an allegedly healthy lunch menu that students won’t eat... Not gonna happen in an era of taco Tuesdays, double cheeseburgers (you want fries with that?) and a super-size Mountain Dew.” And these health and food “experts” at the Forum say nothing about what happens when you eat crap. Did they describe what happens to diabetes victims? No. Well, some die, and some have to have rotting limbs chopped off as the disease progresses. Did they describe how nutrition affects the brain and nerves? No. What do French fries (which are not French, by the way) do for the brain, compared to broccoli and green beans? Fries turn the gray matter into mush. Did they mention that our lifespan is decreasing because of fast food junk and the lack of fresh fruits and veggies in our diets? No. Want to live an average of three years shorter than European countries? Eat American. That editorial was irresponsible and sucking up to our worst failings as a culture.
   The school lunch guidelines developed by the Agriculture Department under the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 were pushed mightily by Michelle Obama and the White House. Remember how with the help of school kids from D.C. she tore up some of the White House lawn and grew a nutritious garden of vegetables for use by the chef? There is a noxious mixture of politics, stupidity, and racism involved with these discussions about school lunches. First we have the “nanny state” people. “No one, particularly the federal government, is going to tell me how to feed my kids.” I don’t think most of these people know Swiss chard from celery or broccoli from parsley.
   Then we have the Republicans, caterwauling against the interference of the government between parent and child. They are the same people who fought the removal of pop and candy machines in school lunchrooms because it removed “choice.” They also want the “freedom” of not wearing seatbelts when flying through windshields or dying under vehicles. One writer wrote, “Liberals even mess up lunch!” What a sound political argument. Some parents need a lot of “interference.” I still remember the parents of an 18-year-old senior brat who bought him a new car so they could take it away from him when he screwed up again! And then we have the racists all over the country who mean to say, “No darky First Lady is going to tell me what to do.” After all, some of her ancestors were slaves. They are the most despicable.

How To Feed
Students Right

   The Escondido Union High School District in California has been serving the prescribed new menus for three years. One sample menu: a southwestern salad of black beans, salsa, mixed green lettuce, corn, and shredded chicken, milk, baked corn chips, fresh mandarin oranges, and an apple. Junior Angel Bravo says, “And the food becomes the energy that I need to be a football player.” All meals are low in salt, sugar, and trans fat and meet federal requirements. The district has five high schools that have a free lunch rate of between 40 and 85 percent.
   My French relatives in the old country have learned how to eat food in school while having a rich diet loaded with saturated fat that really makes things taste great. They drink a lot of red wine instead of water at meals. As one French elder said, “Water is for ducks!” By the way, the French have the best health among European countries—and have the highest-rated health care system in the world. There is an enigma called the French Paradox: Why is eating fat and drinking alcohol good for the French heart? The most common foods in France are chocolate, butter, wine, eggs, and milk. A few reasons for French health: (1) They use only fresh and whole foods, (2) Food is only good if you can pick it off a tree, catch it in a river, lake, or ocean, or raise it on a French farm, (3) They do not eat frozen or processed foods, and most of their stores do not stock them, (4) They do not use fats and oils made in labs, (5) The French eat much smaller portions than we do (they do not drink 64-oz. Dews at one sitting), and (6) French children are taught early that eating should always be enjoyed, that every bite is chewed and swallowed with a purpose.

The French Know
How To Do Things Right

   An article by Vivienne Wall in Time outlines why the French are the healthiest people in Europe. They teach children in preschool how to eat. All the students eat the school-provided lunch and parents pay what they can afford. Students are not allowed to bring food to school. An American mother was shocked to learn when she was picking up a child that he would not be released to her until her child had finished his dessert.
   School menus are prepared for a two-month period, and every school in France posts the week’s menu outside on Monday morning. The variety is amazing, according to visitors, with no single meal repeated in a 32-day period. Every meal includes an hors d’oeuvre, salad, main course, cheese plate, and dessert. The menu also includes suggestions for the evening meal that fits the school menu. Wall cited this example: “If your child has eaten turkey, ratatouille, and a raspberry-filled crepe for lunch, we suggest pasta, green beans, and a fruit salad for dinner.” All meats served in French schools are from French farms. Wall adds, “In a country where con artists and adulterers are tolerated, the laws governing meals are sacrosanct and are drummed into children before they can even hold a knife.”
  All eating is done at tables. Children learn quickly that they won’t be fed anywhere else. Eating is very serious business. Snack and soda machines are banned in all schools. Parents generally are not allowed to eat with their children at school. French restaurants emphasize that eating is a serious and yet very enjoyable business by allowing no loud music and no TVs. The French do not use telephones or answer them during meals.
   The French are so serious about their school lunch program that they have done extensive research into French eating habits and the results of having such a carefully crafted set of laws. It has paid off, with much lower health care costs than our messed-up, Rube Goldberg system. Even with universal care, the French pay half of what we do to carry everybody. Of course, these “know-nothing” socialists save hundreds of millions on health costs. This is a “nanny” state that makes economic sense.
  We have politicians who often laugh at the French for making decisions that are inimical to ours. Remember that France decided not to get involved with our invasion of Iraq. The French helped us in the Afghan quagmire, but they decided early on that it was a disastrous policy and pulled out. They were right then—and are certainly right about how to handle school lunches. The French obesity rate is about 10 percent. Ours is 30 percent. And even our dogs and cats are obese.