Over in Ballard, Archie McPhee sells a cheerful Lunch Lady action figure for $9.95. Tell the disgruntled lunch ladies in Chicago, who are demanding respect from a school system that pays them peanuts (well, $10.46 an hour) and expects them to serve slop to thousands of kids.
"We're looking at each other like, 'I wouldn't eat that.' We wouldn't give our kid that at home," one lunch lady told the Chicago Sun-Times. No wonder that kids revolt. Just outside Chicago, a vast, unsavory food fight made headlines around the world.
Meantime, there's Vincent Jarousseau, an up-and-coming Paris politician, deputy mayor of the bohemian 14th arrondissement, in charge of schools. Among other things, school lunches, which he posts on his blog. Three-course lunches, mind you, with a classic appetizer like hard-boiled eggs, or a fresh vegetable salad; a main course of beef, turkey or pork; cheese or fruit for dessert. French schools teach kids how to eat right; or, rather, they serve decent food because it's what the kids, their families, the school administrators and the country's elected officials expect.
The most emailed story over at the New York Times last week lamented the crummy choices offered by restaurants on their so-called Kids' Menus: mostly chicken strips and fries. Deep-fried crap, in other words. No wonder we're raising a nation of gastronomic illiterates. If you don't learn to eat at school, at home, or in restaurants, you end up with a range of flavor preferences that runs the gamut from Coke to Pepsi, from Mickey D to Burger K.
Posted by Ronald Holden at June 6, 2007 9:51 AM
The International Kitchen
Cooking school vacations in Italy, France & Spain.
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