Years ago we lost the battle of the homemade lunch with the girls. It wasn’t worth the battle to constantly have them deciding they didn’t want to eat the things they brought and throwing away food, to say nothing of going hungry. Even when they hated half of what the school lunches provided and ate only the starches they at least didn’t starve.
But they’re both teens now, and attending a creative arts day camp for the first part of the summer, and they have no choice but to bring a lunch from home. One week down and so far, so good. They know their hunger and what’s expected and have been good about requesting healthy, lunch-worthy items. Perhaps this forced march through the making of a lunch can be the reset button for the coming school year.
In that hope I’ve dusted off a previously unfinished ode to the time-honored tradition of kids making their own lunches.
A Balanced Meal
I brought my lunch to school today
With all my favorite stuff,
Like French toast topped with gravy and
Some burnt marshmallow fluff.My sandwich includes pickled eggs
With jam and sauerkraut,
Hot mustard and green jelly beans
Between two slabs of trout.Inside the Thermos that I filled
With cream of liver soup
I added chocolate covered ants;
They melted into goop.“And don’t forget to take some fruit
For snacks!” my father brays.
I prefer green seedless grapes
All smeared in mayonnaise.I have the finest lunch around,
The best in any grade.
You’ll never see a finer lunch
So . . . do you want to trade?
I thought back to some of my favorite sandwich creations of my youth – peanut butter and grape jam with potato chips, pickles with cheddar and pickles on raisin bread – and recalled that the girls would recoil in horror but the boys were usually more curious in a “Are you really gonna eat that?” sort of way.
Is this just another “boy thing,” another manifestation of the boy-girl divide where the girls reason out their tastes while boys have to physically explore them?
Poetry Friday, Independence Day Weekend Edition! Andromeda over at A Wrung Sponge is hosting this week. Wishing everyone a safe weekend (remember, the secret is to control the fire, no matter what you use it for) and to enjoy and honor ever food combination you can!
