Good Cafeteria Lady Is Hard to Find

Friday, January 12, 2007

Page 15

AT THE SIDEBAR (Column)

By J’AMY PACHECO

There’s nothing I appreciate more than a good cafeteria lady.

I don’t mean the kinds who work at places frequented by tourists or businesspeople; I mean the ones who dedicate their lunch hours to feeding children at school.

I never really knew how valuable a good cafeteria lady could be. I’m not sure I ever bought a hot lunch growing up. Mine usually consisted of a brought-from-home bologna sandwich wrapped in waxed paper and stuffed into a paper bag.

When I reached junior high school and could usually scrape up some spare change, lunch was frequently made of the chocolate donuts I could buy for a dime. Good eating, those were.

But now that I’m a mother, I know the value of a healthy lunch and wouldn’t think of letting my daughter get by on a donut. (For lunch, anyway. Dinner is another story.)

I had it pretty good for her first four years of school. She attended an elementary school where the cafeteria lady was so good I sometimes arranged my schedule to be able to eat lunch with the kids on pizza day.

It’s not that I especially love pizza. This cafeteria lady was famous for hers; particularly the special stuffed-crust pizzas she made for teachers and was happy to sell to visiting parents as well.

I loved sending my child off to school with a pocketful of money. It was so much easier than getting up before the sun to pack a lunch.

When my daughter changed schools, I realized how good we’d had it. I thought she was being picky when she complained about things like tough chicken nuggets and pork substituted on macaroni day. (My daughter refuses to eat “pig,” as she says, and would therefore come home starving.)

But when she refused to buy lunch on spaghetti day, I knew something was up. Spaghetti is not only her all-time favorite food, but one would have to be especially gifted to make spaghetti that is icky.

So I went to school on spaghetti day to observe. The problem on spaghetti day, I discovered, is that the kids were given one ice cream scoop sized hill of pasta, one tong-full of salad, two carrot sticks, and a piece of bread to hold them through the afternoon. Even my unusually petite fifth grader was leaving the cafeteria with unfilled space in her tummy.

I subsequently saw some pretty unappetizing-looking things served to kids. Boy, whoever said there was no such thing as a free lunch was right, because even kids who get free lunch from school have likely learned there is a price to be paid. Yuck.

I know it can’t be easy cooking in institutional quantities intended to serve a thousand kids. But I know it’s possible, and even wrote a letter nominating our old cafeteria lady for cafeteria lady of the year. (She won.)

These days, lunch is my albatross. Every weekday, I get up at the crack of dawn to try to pack an interesting lunch that my little gourmet will actually eat.

It’s hard to make interesting lunches in the dark. Some days, my daughter will inhale an entire tuna sandwich. Other days, 99 percent of the sandwich will come back home, squished.

(Fortunately, she hasn’t yet figured out that if she throws away the contents of her lunchbox after eating, I’ll never know what she ate. So my daughter dutifully brings home her trash, allowing me to see what is working, and what isn’t.)

I bought a container designed to keep food hot, but using it means I have to get up and make something hot to put in it. She loves soup, but that always seems to end up leaking.

On one especially cold day, I delivered hot chicken soup to school in a nice thermal cup from Disneyland, only to have a boy across the table from her talk with his mouth full and spit his chewed food right into the steaming soup. That was more disgusting than anything the cafeteria has served. Yet, anyway.

I’ve read magazine articles that recommend making interesting sandwiches out of things like pita bread. I tried that once, and my daughter accused me of feeding her cardboard.

At this point, the best I can do is slap tuna or peanut butter on bread cut into cute shapes with cookie cutters, carve up an apple and hope for the best.

No doubt about it, a good cafeteria lady is a valuable asset. If you have one, let her know how much you appreciate her. Better yet, send her to my daughter’s school, and tell her how much I would appreciate her.

Especially on pizza day...