sauerkraut

This morning I heard part of Terry Gross's fascinating interview with Michael Pollan about his open letter to the President-Elect that was recently published in The New York Times Magazine under the title "Farmer in Chief." Among the suggestions that Pollan offered in this lengthy article is the creation of a School Lunch Corps program that will forgive federal student loans to culinary-school graduates in exchange for two years of service in the public-school lunch program. His discussion of school lunch menus immediately transported me back to my days at Alexander Elementary School in Jackson, Tennessee, where I attended 1st grade, 3rd grade, 4th grade, and 5th grade. (We lived in three different school zones while I was in elementary school.)

My favorite thing about Alexander was the safety patrol room. Since my mom was a kindergarten teacher at Alexander, if I was sick (or was pretending to be sick), I was not sent home. Instead, I was escorted to the safety patrol room, where I could rest on a cot until the school day ended. Such happy memories!

My least favorite thing about Alexander (besides the scary 4th grade teacher who would chase children down the hall and corner them in the bathroom, where she would beat on the stall doors with a paddle in a vain effort to force them out of hiding) was the cafeteria food. In fact, when my parents informed me that we would be moving to the Nashville area at the conclusion of my 5th grade school year, I was relieved because it meant that I would no longer have to fear being assigned Mrs. Sneed's 6th grade class. Mrs. Sneed forced her students to eat at least one bite of everything that was slopped onto their lunch trays, and, consequently, there were always piles of uneaten food underneath her classroom's designated table in the lunchroom. Fridays were the worst days of all, since sauerkraut was always on the menu. I will always be grateful to God that he provided my father with a new job in Nashville in the summer of 1975, since it spared me from a school year plagued by sauerkraut. If a School Lunch Corps program is ever created, I trust they will institute a no sauerkraut rule.