I’ve heard that other people have soft sensory memories of childhood–the warm embrace of a parent. The pleasing shape of a favorite toy. The mad lights of an amusement park, spangling the interior space of the file drawer marked ‘Age 10’ in the basement recesses of the brain. I chiefly remember what I ate and what I read.
I didn’t know anything about Fizz drinks until a friend assembled all of the ingredients for a Ramos Gin Fizz and invited me over for the frothy ambrosia in August of 2009. I paid little attention to what she was doing to create the drink at the time, but I did raise an eyebrow when I saw some heavy cream go into the mix. I had always assumed that gin and dairy should conduct their potentially curdlesome affair in shameful darkness, if at all, and I asked her if she was sure about this.
Spain–wonderful for cheese, and, wonderful for verse. Delicious lines from Marie-Laure.
I got hot breakfast, too (a blue ticket), in exchange for my service in the Safety Patrol. The overcast atmosphere of the cafeteria at breakfast time left me feeling a bit melancholy, drawing down my energy and honing my resignation to the impending school day. It seemed like there was always one basketball bouncing languidly across the floor, echoing plaintively, moping. The gym teacher supervised the morning cafeteria, authoritative whistle around his neck. If it was rainy out −and it often was− the half-lit cafeteria/gym served as the early morning recess area as well as a place for kids such as myself to scarf down a toasted hamburger bun (leftover from the previous day’s lunch) with melted American cheese, some canned pears and a carton of milk. I think sometimes there was the industry-standard hotel pan full of institutional-type scrambled eggs, the kind that are materialized from a carton of powder (or at least tasted like they were), but there was never any ketchup to make them more palatable. I didn’t really care what was on the menu, I just loved being able to sit down to the warm blanket of predictability. The nourishment was just a happy side-effect.
I came to look forward to the sight of the cafeteria ladies every day. Their tidy uniforms – baby blue paper hairnet; white apron and clear plastic gloves; little red apple logo on the nametag that read “Cynthia” or “Lynnette” – belied their imperfect lives. They referred to their husbands as “my old man.” They scratched their itchy foreheads with the back of their gloved wrists, and coughed into their elbows. They got a wicked case of The Mondays. They silently ticked down the minutes until their next smoke break behind the school dumpsters, after the bell had chased all the kids back to class. I wanted desperately to be one of them.
Incidentally, by the time I started sixth grade, my dad had a steady job and we no longer qualified for food stamps, but my folks were still usually short on cash and they heartily encouraged my precocious financial independence (lunch money was cutting into their cigarette budget).
So I earned my lunch every day by donning that proud uniform of the proletariat and joined the cafeteria lady workforce. Though I chose to do this for myriad reasons (not the least of which was to get out of 4th period 15 minutes early), a major one is that I’d be relieved from the rejection of having nowhere to sit in the cafeteria − in fact, I wouldn’t even get to eat until the cafeteria had already mostly cleared out. The daily white torture of looking for a seat in the cafeteria in middle school was not the bromidic downer that every overachiever tells to garner some sympathy. It was low-grade psychological warfare. I’d scan the room with my tray, hoping for a seat at a table with someone halfway “normal,” but was usually exiled to Siberia with the other poor kids anyway. It was much easier to just skip to the end and spare myself the humiliation. Middle school is a cesspit of despair and a Petri dish of sociopathy. No one escapes that.
Unsurprisingly, working in the cafeteria ended up being one more way for me to alienate myself from my peers. My thick glasses and shoddy, mom-selected (or worse: hand-sewn) clothes were the first alert to my peers that I was an easy target for bullying. My propensity for pointing out Mrs. Reinhorn’s spelling errors in front of the homeroom class was another tip-off. But if all that didn’t warrant the derisive name-calling and attempts to lock me in the girls’ room, then my paper hairnet and plastic gloves surely did.
My socioeconomic status was perfectly exposed behind that plexiglass sneeze-guard, yet I felt somewhat protected by it. Even if all I really wanted was to become microscopic, I had nothing left to hide and had no choice but to suck it up and get over it. Behind that plexiglass, I was one of the crew, in the trenches with the other poor kids (and the grown-up poor kids).
I mostly washed dishes or served the vegetable dish at the end of the line, but was sometimes left in charge to take the teachers’ lunch orders from a Dutch door that led from the cafeteria kitchen to a secret lair where the teachers ate their lunches. A teacher would lean in the window and bark out her order, or if I saw her coming, I’d sometimes surprise her by remembering what she always ate and announcing her order before she had a chance. Serving the teachers their lunches offered me a glimpse into their preferences, a secondhand peek into their private lives. One of the younger teachers used ketchup as salad dressing, changing my opinion of her forever. This was an insipid use for ketchup – even I knew this, and she went suddenly from being cool to completely déclassé.
Sometimes instead of putting the teacher’s money in the cash box, I stuffed it into my apron pocket. Sometimes I went into the walk-in refrigerator and drank more than my daily allowance of chocolate milk. I defended this behavior in my head by telling myself that I was entitled because of the shitty hand I was dealt, the one that required I work for my lunch at 11 years old.
Before I get on with the story, I have to make a few things clear about touring, and my job as a lighting designer. (Henceforth referred to as “LD”)
LD’s are a weird bunch. They are often loners, and not well understood. In the grand scheme of things it’s a lonely existence being surrounded by the sound guys, all chummy and high fiving about PA systems and amps and guitars. Rarely is there anyone to high-five the the LD about getting all the moving lights and dimmers to fit on one DMX line. Yeah, I know. Nerds.
(ed: To celebrate National Poetry Month, I embark on my most ambitious, artistically questionable endeavor to date in the Add-Verse series: man-handling Chaucer. I dedicate these efforts to my most beloved medievalist, my mom: little did you know what reading Piers Plowman to me as a bedtime story would one day engender. Fair Audience: should you read to the very end of this offering, email your mailing address to ‘[email protected]’. I will send you a limited edition sticker, you glutton for punishment, you.)
I held my purple ticket so tightly that it conformed to the heart line of my palm. We lined up at the classroom door, and then marched down the hall, single file, alphabetically by last name (or in boy-girl-boy-girl order if there had been any acting up that necessitated a squelching of horseplay), to the cafeteria. All of the different classroom lunch lines were tributaries to the main cafeteria river-line, and the confluences were where I saw my other, luckier friends − ones who weren’t in Mrs. Pukey’s class. The savory aroma would jog my appetite, and I would begin to salivate. I tried to make idle chitchat with Corey Simpson and Christine Flatt while we were queuing up, but I was too distracted by the tremors in my belly. I’d had my eye on the lunch calendar all week, and it was spaghetti day. It was finally here! Sure, I got spaghetti all the time at home, but this was school spaghetti: rich and meaty, with noodles so tender that they fell apart into bite-sized clumps when served brusquely with a stainless steel scoop. It came complete with carrot “coins” topped by runny, dill-flecked ranch dressing and a slice of chewy garlic bread. Sometimes the coins were cracked at the edges, all the way to the carrot’s circular heartwood, but these imperfections only further endeared them to me. I gingerly nibbled the outer ring off my coins like a rabbit (I could feel my eyesight improving with every bite), and savored the tender centers.
School lunches have been the bane of a kid’s existence throughout history. I’d hazard that for some kids, it was the worst thing about school. I figured kids only ate them when their moms were too busy to make a thoughtful and well-balanced sack lunch. They ate them because they were relegated to it. I didn’t have a choice, but I didn’t mind. I actually loved all of the school’s hot lunches.
At their worst, school lunches were still a lot better than my dad’s shrugged attempts at feeding us. When summer vacation dictated that our care be left in the hands of my shirking father, he’d make sandwiches of cold hot dogs sliced lengthwise, slathered in ketchup on white bread, or similarly disgusting sandwiches of peanut butter and mayonnaise (this attempt at a prank backfired – the PB&M was actually one we liked). School lunches were at least somewhat balanced, and at their best, were satiating comfort foods. Mainstream chickenwiches were a favorite, and more exotic-sounding fare like turkey à la king had me swooning in visions of ermine-bedecked monarchs, lavishly supping upon the shredded turkey suspended in thin, beige gravy ladled over a perfect sphere of instant mashed potatoes.
At lunchtime, the cafeteria was a din of outdoor voices. On Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, it was the gymnasium where I learned to jump double Dutch through clacking plastic ropes. For three days every two years, it was where I got distracted from standardized testing and spent several minutes copying a recipe from a story problem about baking, instead of solving the simple fraction equation. One time an overweight disabled kid fell off the bench and everything shook, went quiet, and then erupted with cruel laughter (including my own, though I was ashamed of it). The cafeteria was where I started to catch first glimpses of how different my classmates were from myself.
At first, I was completely oblivious that other kids judged me based on the fact that I ate school lunch, or that mine had been bought by their parents’ tax dollars. And even though I liked the cafeteria food, I was a little jealous of kids whose moms took the care to pack them lunches, even if it was weird food. For instance, Tarah Spellman’s mom bought special razor-thin bread from the German deli. She always seemed so smug, with her papercut-inducing PB&J, or her leftover chicken legs (“the veins are my favorite part!” she’d say, sucking the gross connective tissue off the bone). She even bragged about eating blubber while living in Juneau. Coupled with the fact that she came very close to beating my score on a spelling test that one time and then had the gall to congratulate me, I found her completely insufferable. Needless to say, this made our assigned pairing as Safety Patrol guards almost too much for me to bear. I spent most of the time blocking out her chipper squawking about how worms come out to the sidewalk during rain because they’re drowning, and mentally mocking her Gumpian pigeon-toed gait. But truth be told, I’d have done anything to get one of her mom’s fancy-bread sandwiches.
Every school day at noon, Mrs. Uttke (“Mrs. Pukey”) attempted to shush us all into submission, and if that didn’t work, she’d resort to raising a shrill voice that echoed against the classroom walls. Her eyes flashed red, and the flab on her cheeks and arms quivered with impatience. Strung out and running on fumes, we’d manage to assemble into a fidgety line with our little hands out, and she checked our names against the list that sorted us by Poor, Kind of Poor, and Not Poor. She walked down the line, doling out a little purple ticket for all of the hot lunch students from the roll she kept in her yellow oak desk.
Some kids’ families paid full price for the luxury of not having to rustle a lunch together, some paid a reduced price, but mine paid nothing for my hot lunch. What I ate for lunch on any given day had been preordained by Portland Public Schools nutritionists, and was already up on the calendar with alphabets, numbers and star-spangled performance charts, tacked to the classroom wall.
Like the families of the other full-strength purple ticket kids, my family was also on food stamps. These were the actual giant, conspicuous paper food stamps, before today’s discreet EBT cards that allow the recipients to maintain a shred of dignity. When pulled from your mom’s purse, food stamps were a flashing neon sign with blinking arrows pointing at you, that announced “Hey Everybody! Everybody, Look. These People Have Made Regrettable Decisions.”
Since there were no grocery stores in the neighborhood, my mom would either have to ride the bus to shop at Kienow’s a mile away, or would just buy what she could at the little convenience store on the corner (the Korean owners were wary of robbery and kept menacing-looking Doberman pincers on the premises). Food stamps were primarily used to pay for anything we couldn’t get from the food bank − mostly stuff like frozen fish sticks, hot dogs, or bags of Red Delicious apples (which, truthfully, are accurately described by only one of those adjectives). I would sometimes beg my mother to buy liver for a good old L&O, but I think she was a little embarrassed to buy this humblest of meats, and would shy away from it most of the time with a “No, honey…” Or maybe it was too sketchy to bring home a sloshy tub of blood and organ on the bus and she was just thinking practically.
We’d get the giant bag of generic “Cheery-Os” from the bottom shelf of the breakfast aisle, never the preferred, brand-name cereal that had popular cartoon characters on the box and prizes inside. Nonperishable foodstuffs like canned vegetables and pasta usually came from the food bank.
One of my favorite parts of being on a federally-funded diet was the proverbial “government cheese” – the foot-long, 5lb box of sliced subsidy. We didn’t get it that often, so I never had a chance to get tired of it. It had a delightfully unassuming flavor and melted if you even breathed on it. A box would last so long that by the time we reached the end of it, the edges had gone all orange-plasticky and hard like the bait on a mousetrap.
I ate pretty much anything that was put in front of me. If I turned my nose up, it meant I didn’t get anything for dinner, and it probably meant I’d get my ass whupped, too, depending on my dad’s tolerance for bullshit on any given night. Most of the time, I needed no such goading to clean my plate – having a littermate to race for seconds was usually enough of a motivation. I handily defeated my brother in this competitive feeding frenzy. I usually hoovered my lunches, too.
Farmer, shepherd, author, blogger, banjo frailer, fiddler-player, and graphic designer–Jenna Woginrich is one busy lady. Which makes us all the more excited that she took time away from her farm to answer a few of our questions. I’ve been eagerly reading her words since the publication of Made From Scratch, and following the growth of her flock at Cold Antler Farm during her first lambing season. Jenna’s wry honesty and passion for her land are the perfect antidote to a long winter of inactivity–as well as inspiration to get out and to get busy with the business of growing your own food.
Dear Rennie,
Even knowing, as I do now, that the smell of one’s urine has nothing to do with a potential sexually transmitted disease, and everything to do with having consumed asparagus recently, those slender stalks still strike terror into my very heart whenever I espy them on a menu. How would you recommend that I conquer this fear? I don’t want to forever look like a culinary rube when Spring farm-to-table time rolls around. Nor do I want the continual night terrors.
yours truly,
Fearful Of Pee in Poughkeepsie