The Scary Things Schools are Feeding Kids These Days

I'm glad my mom never let me eat that junk when I was little. I think she was more trying to save money by packing my lunches and not giving me lots of extra snacks but I stayed slim throughout my school years and I'm glad she never gave me much junkfood. When I see obese children it's just sad that their parents don't care about their child's health.

I remember recently watching one of the Sara Chronicles episodes where a guy developed a computer, called the Turk (I believe) that would create world weapons but was disguised as a chess-playing computer game. Yes, there should be an sequel to this.

I believe I only ate cafeteria food once, and then only because a friend didn't want to eat it. It was a slice of "pizza" (note quotation marks) with the most cardboard-y taste... From the first day of first grade to the last day of high school, I always brought lunch from home and never bought any cafeteria food. Admittedly, for most of elementary school I was curious, but that taste of what was mistakenly labeled "pizza" disabused me of any delusions I might have had about it.

The yellow ooze that is identified as "cheese" in the pictures is actually not. As a cheese connoisseur, I can assure you of this.

I teach nowadays, and have noticed that some school cafeterias are getting rather fancy and a few are even putting veggies on students' trays. Unfortunately, when serving cafeteria duty, I see a lot of food (including entire servings of fruit and veggies) wind up in the trash cans. While many people in the USA could certainly stand to eat less, it doesn't help if they're throwing away the food that's actually good for them.

There's also just a lot of general ignorance about what food is and where it comes from. When I was in college, I would collect my lunch at the cafeteria and take it to my dorm room, so I could bring some with me to my next class and save the rest for later. Some guys thought this was funny (I guess their habit was to cut class for lunch) and of course had to investigate the contents of my tray. They were astounded to see nothing on it that they would eat. "Where's the meat?" they'd say. "I'm vegetarian," I'd foolishly answer. (I have an enzyme deficiency and can't digest meat.) "So, like, you eat only chicken?" they'd say, looking for the nuggets that they thought were chicken and finding none. "No; chicken is meat, therefore I can't eat it." They freaked out and insisted that chicken is not meat. I found this a profoundly idiotic claim, but still respected the intelligence I assumed they might have. So I decided to let them puzzle it out. "Think about it, guys," I said. "What is 'chicken' made from?" "Uh, it's just chicken," they said. "Whick comes from..?" "Well, they just MAKE it. At KFC!"

These promising young college men honestly thought chicken was a man-made food created at Kentucky Fried Chicken stands. Very "Eraserhead." It grossed them out when I explained that chickens are a kind of bird. I should have told them it was made from people or something.

Oh and I actually binge-ate when i got home from school because i was so hungry from all the work suckng the energy out of me (i went to a really tough private school) and skipping lunch... that's how i started gaining lots of weight. After all the snack eating, was dinner in a few hours of course...

Yeah I never ate lunch in high school. Didnt help with my concentration one bit