|
Philip Spiess
Thanks, Steve.
Dale: I don't remember much about sweets in the cafeteria food line, as half the time I brought a lunch from home, but I do seem to recall that in our earlier years at WHHS, there were vending machines for candy and nuts -- and maybe snacks and soda pop -- in the cafeteria, at what was considered the back of the cafeteria (although it was really the front of the school, under the front steps, i.e., by doors that were used as fire escapes only). Perhaps some cafeteria pictures taken in that direction in The Remembrancer (what a name!) would show them (or lack thereof). Collaterally, I also seem to recall a recall of these machines (i.e., getting rid of them) somewhere along about our sophomore or junior year -- and they were gone, for the same reasons you cite as current "nanny" state "emergencies." However, there is one other thing I strongly remember: in 9th Grade, when I had English class over the lunch period (4th Period?), some organization was selling boxes of the candy known as "Turtles," that divinely gooey combination of chocolate and pecans and caramel. I went long stretches buying them and having them as my only lunch (that is, the whole box), hanging out (with a couple of others) in the English classroom to do so. I did not, however, add any weight at the time; that came years later (and with it something of a reshaping) -- and that was due, so my doctor tells me, to alcohol, not to sweets (though I believe they both have to do with sugar). And, of course, there were the bake sales that you mention.
Having taught for eight years in a Middle School, I find that current nutritional experiments are troublesome: every child seems to have some allergy, ailment, food disorder, or food dislike these days. If it's not peanut butter, it's gluten (I prefer to pronounce it "glutton"); if it's not dairy products and lactose intolerance, it's chocolate intolerance. Then there's the promotion of vegan values. (As a red in the tooth carnivore, I appreciated it when my son, home from his 8th Grade trip to Arizona, brought me a tee-shirt that read "'Vegetarian' -- Ancient Indian Term for 'Bad Hunter'.") [N.B.: Yes, I love fresh vegetables and fruit, and don't begrudge vegetarians anything, except their proclivity to try to force their ideas on others.] But I'll shut up now, except to relate the story of when I was a teacher on the lunchline at Browne Academy where I taught: My role was to hand out the napkins, plasticware, condiments, snack bags, and the fresh fruit, in order to move the line along. The kids took the bananas and oranges, but never the lovely apples that the caterer provided. One day the caterer asked me why that was. "Because they all wear braces and can't chew them, you idiot!" was my response.
Oh, and (apparently I won't shut up) birthday treats and class parties (don't even speak to me about Valentine's Day, the worst day of the year) got completely out of hand at Browne Academy and had to be curtailed by the administration (it was all the parents' fault). And I know, from my several years as the "visiting curatorial scholar" at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History's Division of Medical Sciences, where I was in charge of the national dental collections, that the decline of Western Civilization's collective teeth (caries is the official term for tooth decay) began with the serious introduction of sugar from the east into the western diet.
|
