> We don't know about you, but we're
> still haunted by the "food" we were
> served in school

No, I am hardly "haunted." It occurred many years ago and I have since grown up and learned that my past need not control me.

Get over it already.

I remember my favorite thing to do was bury the spork in the mashed potatoes (or whatever) to get it to melt.

Thanks for this piece. Also note the stunning successes of the Appleton (WI) schools, where they have documented the benefits (behavior, performance) of real food for students.

Has a section profiling one school which bucked the trend of processed meals and now serves healthy, made from scratch food, and good ole' Morgan Spurlock says it costs about the same as the processed stuff..  

So what's the excuse for not changing again?

down the lunches prepared by the Seattle school district. Just unreal what that bureaucracy trucked to the cafeterias for kids to eat. Even I couldn't stomach some of them and I'll eat just about anything.

but what is the dish called  "Mexican Hat" that is mentioned in the intro to this article?

   My lunches were simple and freshly prepared.  I have actually pleasant memories of them (Richmond, VA in the 1950's and 1960's).

   However I volunteered in a school in Boston in the 1970's and was disgusted when I went to see what the kids had to eat, frozen peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that had been under-thawed in a microwave oven.  And a piece of fruit and a carton of milk.

   It has always amazed me how the richest nation in the world can be so mean hearted when it comes to its own children.

   I wish Ann Cooper the best of luck, and thanks for the post and Tom for the interview!

patrick

I recently started working part time as a lunch lady. I cannot believe some of the things that are served. Yogurt with lots of sugar, the same with some of the cereal. The cooks do try to add fresh produce and they do make many of the main dishes. The menu is made by the people in the head office and the amount of processed food offered has to do with budget. But even when the kids are offered fresh fruit, mixed salads and from scratch wheat rolls they tend to throw it out. Also the cooks can get in trouble by vearing from the set menu, say offering an apple instead of canned apple sauce. Another disturbing trend many new schools are not installing dishwashers and using all disposables to serve the kids.

were what I ate for lunch nearly every day of high school, along with a Diet Coke. Oh, the irony.

Yes: children, when offered the choice between a chocolate doughnut and a green apple, will not always make the healthy choice.  Neither will most adults, for that matter.  But isn't it the job of parents, teachers, lawmakers, etc., to limit the choices that children have until they are old enough to make rational decisions (and to accept responsibility for the consequences of those decisions)?  Give your average kid the choice between two hours of mindless TV and doing homework and I'm willing to bet that TV wins out every time.

I'm guessing that if blue popsicles and mini doughnuts were not offered in my high school cafeteria, I would have found something else to eat; likely the least healthy of the available options, but even a slice of pizza every day would have been better than the all-high-fructose-corn-syrup diet.

That would be a slice of fried bologna with a scoop of mashed potatoes on top.

My sister, who went to a different school, remembers it too. "Why even fry it?" she wrote to me. "Because a 'hot meal' is more nutritious than a slab of baloney on a plate?"

But then she admitted: "I liked the way it cupped up. Plus, it was always served with these unbelievably heavy mashed potatoes which were also deliciously unlike anything we had at home."

Delicious and "nutritious."

Right, Roz, I am similarly mystified.

Mexican Hat is the name of a town, more like a crossroads, in southeastern Utah, on a popular tourist itinerary between Cortez, CO, near the fantastic Mesa Verde National Park, and the Navajo and Hopi Reservations in northeastern Arizona (well, the Navajo Res. sprawls into UT, AZ and NM), and onward to the fantastic and, needless to say, much better known Grand Canyon National Park.  Mexican Hat is apparently a decent jumping-off point for visiting Monument Valley, background to countless Hollywood Westerns.

Not impossibly, some culinary delight was concocted there, once upon a time, which found favor with tourists stopping at a particular luncheon spot, and which in my long life I have somehow missed out on.

Otherwise: "Mexican Hat" may be the naive invention of some Anglo school chef, involving some sort of mess of beans and ground meat, with who knows what else, mixed vegetables, rice, whatever, and a bit on the "picante" side, but not too much.  And the cultural pluralism angle, the "It's a Small World After All" angle, would be, this is the banquet that the Mexicans make when they have their "Mexican Hat Dance" fiestas.

But the latter suggestion is way too cynical, and surely cannot be correct. : (

Fried balony and mashed potatoes? Yeech! That said, I have many happy memories of doing "The Mexican Hat Dance" in elementary school in the mid-1960's, where we would dance wildly in a circle around a small object (an eraser?) placed on the floor where the "Mexican Hat" would theoretically have been and the teacher would play the 45 record while all of our dancing made the needle skip. That and the Virgina Reel. It prepared me for all the Contra-Contra Contradances later in life (i.e., contradances to raise money to fight the Contras, if I remember correctly.)

Why did you have to ask? Why?

If I have nightmares tonight of being smothered by dripping bologna grease while being pelted by dense mashed potatoes, I know who to blame.

peanut butter that smelled like tobacco, milk that was always going sour, rubber hamburgers, tuna pea wiggle (oh my god!) on saltine crackers, canned beets (that I never ate but that totally turned me off beets until I finally dared to taste some from a friend's garden about ten years ago (totally different, I grow them now, too), and vats of ketchup to pour over everything. We need to encourage school gardens kids plant and maintain and eat from. There are programs that do this. I don't think they allow blue popsicles (I used to love them!) or powdered donuts anymore.

Ew, I mean seriously, that recipe gives me the shivers.... and I love mashed potatoes. But, ew.  I assumed the recipe was something that looked like a sombrero, but I guess I was thinking of a tower of tortilla chips and salsa or something. (Well, I hesitate to admit that the first thing I thought of was a Mexican Mr. Hat, Mr. Garrison's hand puppet on South Park, complete with cheesy handlebar mustache and requisite sombrero. But, I digress).

I'm thinking even blue popsicles and doughnuts are healthier than Mexican hat.

Tuna pea wiggle??  Nightmares, indeed!

Having grown up in a town that was a) heavily Roman Catholic and b) a commercial fishing town, tuna sandwiches were on the menu nearly every day, as were fishsticks (Gorton's of Gloucester, naturally) and only fish was served on Fridays.  To this day, I detest tuna and I don't like the rest of the sea's offerings much better.

My dad used to fry bologna for me when I was a kid--in butter, to his credit, not the margarine that was so much in vogue in that time. It was sort of ... good. Not that I'm recommending it for school lunches -- or defending mega-producers of industrial bologna like Hormel.

But if someone were to apply traditional bologna-making techniques to meat from pastured hogs, and then someone else were to fry a few slices of the product in some thoughtfully made butter, and that person were to eat it mindfully, as part of a modest week's ration of meat, well, that fried bologna wouldn't be so bad.

I meant "a week's modest ration of meat," not "a modest week's ration of meat."

   Turning my wayback machine to that era, I remember sloppie joes, and homemade pizza that was amazingly thick and full of stuff, as well as all sorts of vegetable concoctions that had lots of different names.

   Gourmet, not!!!  Nutricious?  Not perfectly, but cheap and sometimes hot.  

   Even the bologna and mashed potatoes doesn't sound so bad (compared to partially defrosted peanut butter sandwiches, turned out the brother of a school board member had the contract, I seem to recall he went to jail for it, as well he might!).

   Given kids eating habits, I would settle for something with moderate amounts of fat and sugar, rather than perfect nutrition, and of course, the presence of a veggie option (grin).

   Certainly freshly cooked is best.  Simple is okay.  Nag the kids to eat it (just like home!).

   There are two problems.  One is the tendency to have mass produced school lunches (I am voting clearly in favor of local on this one!), and the other is the tendency to spend as little as possible.

    Shame on a nation that is too cheap to feed its school children decently!!  Really, this should be considered a moral outrage!  Sigh.

patrick

Patrick, I have no idea if they would have this in China (or if you would want to eat such a thing), but Fantastic Foods makes a vegan sloppy joe mix to which you just add, i think, a can of tomato paste and some water.  I really like it, as such tings go, although I admit I always thought the idea of something that messy served as a sandwich was suboptimal. :)