[DRAFT FORM]
When I first began teaching, I viewed children’s snack and mid-day meal as prime opportunities for students to express their autonomy with minimal intrusion from adults. I set some basic priorities: justice, (“Take TWO crackers, ONE-TWO crackers”); health, (“Let me help you peel the egg, the shell is not good to eat”); and sanitation (“Clear your place. Your cup, your cup, put it in the sink.”) Apart from that, I was reserved, allowing children to express their own interests and follow their inclinations. Children who wanted to eat, ate. Children who wanted to talk, talked. Children who wanted to take apart their sandwiches, lick the butter off the bread, and tear pieces of ham into clingy pink scraps, did that. I sometimes sat alongside diners who were especially young, sad, and/or combative, but I moved freely throughout the meal. When conversation seemed to be leaning in troubling directions (for example: poop – as discussed in a previous posting) the variety of foods and dishes that children brought from home served as immediate, high-interest diversions.
Tina brought a tiny cellophane envelope half-filled with weightless dried fish. Sweeping up after lunch I would find these scattered, like feather down. It was not possible to ignore their leathery eye sockets, arresting though infinitesimal, in the dust pan. Kaspar often brought soy yogurt and raw foods. Every day, he opened his BPA-, lead-, and phthalate-free lunch containers and closed them again on the spears of organic carrots and red peppers. He ate pretzels, sometimes, but mostly waited to wolf the fresh, out of season fruit his mother brought for him at the end of each day. My memory is that he ate out of her small, cupped hand, right at the classroom door, like a fawn, but this cannot be true. Kaspar was jealous of the meat and dairy enjoyed by his peers. He cried at lunch time – in a despair concocted of hunger, anger, and loneliness. “I don’t like this,” he wailed. We said, “Well, let’s tell Mommy what you would like to have for lunch.” His voice resonant with mucus and burred, I thought, by a kind of malevolence (toward whom or what?), Kaspar immediately replied that he wanted to eat CHICKEN and yogurt made from COW MILK. “Every mommy thinks about what food is best for her kids,” I would say, “and different mommies have different ideas.” Each year there was a child whose mother sent a thermos container of hot noodle soup, or hot hot dogs. The vacuum that formed as the hot food cooled presented daily challenges for teaching staff – but no child ever went hungry because we couldn’t get the better of a lid.
There were children who brought one single item (mammoth croissant in a grease-speckled brown paper bag straight from the bakery.) And children who brought five or six things – like Albert in Bread and Jam for Francis (edamame, Veggie Booty, kiwi slices, cheese stick, cherry tomatoes, fruit leather.) Some children brought a range of savory and sweet foods. Some brought only sweet. One child subsisted on large, hard sausages, goldfish crackers, and assorted juice boxes. The sausages were rustily assertive, with their jaunty studs of pearly fat. They caused me to reflect, repeatedly, on a piece of Joseph Beuys’ work that I saw in 1983 – a glass case containing several shriveled cylinders – sausages under their pelt of blue mold.
In all cases it must be assumed that parents sought to provide their child with favored food/s in hopes s/he would actually eat. Children ate only what they wanted and selected items in whatever order pleased them. It was a sort of paradise - except in the case of children who missed mommies too much to eat – or who did not like what mommies had sent. Ok, or daddies. My first year of teaching one father insisted on sending his child to school with a ceramic ramekin containing various preparations including mini quiche. This despite our ‘no breakables in school lunches, please’ policy and despite the fact that his child rarely ate anything while on the premises. Of course it was the mini-quiche and not the breakable ramekin that rankled me. This father, towards the end of the year, called me a Stalinist because I declined to plan for or encourage children to make some sort of mother’s day gift project. We had an ongoing clash of expectations, generally, he and I. Yet we were cordial enough. But back to meals.
In my publicly funded school, meals are cooked on the premises and served “family style.” Not in the style of the Papa Mini-Quiche family, of course; in the style described with soul-crushing detail by the city-agency-under-whose-regulatory-oversight-we-operate-family. Our family style meals mean that everyone shares items that no one is especially comfortable with. We are instructed to "model" what it is to eat these sometimes uncomfortable dishes and encourage children to try them...and talk about them. But before all that, it means that children set the table (more or less) and a teacher then arranges the food while children sit at the rug where a story is read. There is a feeling of the Easter Bunny bringing treats in stealth. Just without the treats, generally.
Today I placed dishes of quinoa on the table, lentil stew, roasted beets from our farm share, and orange wedges, along with pitchers of milk and water. Children who like oranges ate oranges (you can tell how many by counting the slender, grinning rinds the children are too young to think of hiding.) Some children served themselves a small mound of quinoa and pushed it around their plates. Only a few tried the lentils which were soothing, earthy and floury – a texture and flavor that takes some getting used to, perhaps. I tried to bully children into taking a taste, from my low vantage, seated on a small chair alongside them mid-way between our two large tables. “L-L-L-LENTILS! I said – it’s another kind of soupy bean” (most children DO like the soupy beans that are frequently served.) “They look like Little Money! They are L-L-L-Lentils like L-L-L-Lollipops!” These encouragements did not work. I moved on to the beets (tough, irregular slices and chunks, lightly slicked with oil.) “WHO will try a beet? Who will try a bite? They are pink purple, they are dark pink! Who likes purple? Try a beet?”
The children were starving after rest time. I fed them everything we had – the snack itself plus apples spared from breakfast and cheese sticks we had hoarded in the fridge. Cups and cups of milk. Our family style means I admonish children “STOP, that is the serving spoon. That does NOT go in your mouth!” Our family style means, “Oh, a spill, go get paper towels, get some paper towels and put them on the puddle. Now! The puddle is creeping and spreading over to Eoghan and Rita, they don’t want to get wet.” Our family style means children sneaking extra fruit after I have said, “Please take two oranges to start. Just two. We can have extras after everyone has had their TWO slices.” Our family style means children can waste or avoid food without enormous censure. They have the power to devour or reject. They don't have the power to ask for and get a reprieve. Lunch is one lunch: you don't eat it, you don't eat. But usually they do eat. They squabble over chicken thighs. They direct me to find out if the kitchen has more jasmine rice, more soupy beans, more noodles for the soup, more BIG pieces of potato for the stew. They follow the fashion of liking broccoli – everyone does – and filling their cup only half way – it’s so grown-up! It has taken me 2.5 years to enjoy all this – to see how good it is, even when it is bad (chaotic, full of strife.) What is the same in the private and public pre-school classroom is the clean-up following lunch. A topic involving brooms, sponges, and muscles: for another day.
