Lucy Shaeffer’s marvelous book, School Lunch: Unpacking Our Shared Stories, was released this month, and even if you only have a permanent pile of your three-year-old’s crap in the middle of your living room in place of a coffee table, you would be wise to find a place for it there.
This is such a gorgeous, thoughtful essay! It is so interesting to me how moms (still mostly moms) of a certain socioeconomic class are driven to burnout by the tasks of upper middle class parenting, but still reject concrete things that would help, like public school lunch. I've seen this play out in social media spaces. No one would ever put it as clearly as you did--"good enough for other kids but not mine"--but that's what it is.
Kate maybe I'm getting too dark here, but I've been rereading this passage in Sheila Heti's Motherhood over and over where she talks about how women are "miserly with ourselves when it comes to space and time" and how motherhood "makes that impulse into a virtue." What is loving and caring for your children, joyfully nourishing them, and what is what she refers to as "self-abnegation"? I think about the incredible lunches I have heard described that mothers make for kids in Japan. If I romanticize it, it's the former, but I'm sure at least for some people, some of the time, it's self abnegation.
I went to a private high school as a free riding faculty child. So there’s lots to unpack there. BUT, lunch was “included” in tuition and everyone had to eat it. It was much like a college cafeteria that offered many options (salad bar, hot lunch, peanut butter and jelly - does that date me that peanuts used to be allowed in schools?). I loved it because that was one place where there was no comparing.
As a vegetarian family though I have been confused by OUSD’s labeling which often shows the veggie sign next to a dish that literally has chicken in the title. What about students who have legitimate allergies? Yes, we have the privilege to be vegetarian but until schools have inclusive offerings I’m not sure we will get everyone eating school lunch as wonderful as that sounds to this privileged white I-care-about-what-my-kids-eat parent.
I’m looking forward to our follow up conversation where you can gently and eloquently challenge my thinking. 😉
Oh! And I love those mini-recycling bins! We had one!!! But it was too hard to roll it out because we had to bend over so far to reach the handle. So we got a big one.
This is fantastic. Also...my son is now happily eating the school lunch every day and it is a huge resource (to all of us). I asked him why and he said 'well it is free'....which I have been turning over in my mind b/c he always 'could' have bought lunch, but didn't, and now this year, it seems to be that it is just what 'everyone' is doing. I have been trying to understand more about that shift and thinking about what a uncomfortable divide it was prior. Thank you for this.
wow! i know for a fact you have a thoughtful and grateful son, but coming at it from a parental labor standpoint it's like "but my TIME isn't free??!!!"
Haha, soooo true about the mystique of school lunch in my childhood in Cambridge. For me, I think it was the beginnings of a fetish I have for packages -- I loved unwrapping the tin foil, and the plastic-wrapped "cold pack" with its ubiquitous, never-ever-eaten cole slaw. I loved the sugary baked beans, and even the tasteless green beans. The sandwiches from home, by contrast, always seemed somehow both soggy and as dry as sandpaper. It's funny -- I never really thought, "what lunch would I **like** to have?"
Hi Sarah! Ben forwarded me this post, thank you so much for the call-out to my book! ❤️
I'm so glad you enjoyed it and that it's starting more conversations. I love all the insight you added, and that you seem to feel the same way about the subject of school lunch as I do. It's such a culturally rich subject, and loaded in so many of the ways you point out. When I asked George Foreman if he ever asked any of his friends for the leftover food they were throwing away he gave an emphatic no-- he prefered extreme hunger over risking other kids making fun of him. Free school lunch for everyone is the simplest most humane policy.
I interviewed hundreds for this book and the 70 stories included are all favorites of mine...but I especially love the lunch memories that come from older generations or different countries. Thanks for sharing it with your audience!
Hi Lucy! What an experience making this book must have been. I did love that one about the older couple I think from Taiwan reminiscing about all of the lunches in the big steamer. Amazing.
I'm commenting on this VERY late, but I'm seeing it after Sarah reminded me of the post in her letter this week. As an OUSD parent at a school with a small percentage of kids living below the poverty line, I stump the free school lunches as often as I can. Mainly for the exact equity issues and to give moms a break. I'm fully on board with whatever edible item anyone wants to make for my kids that takes something off my plate!
This is such a gorgeous, thoughtful essay! It is so interesting to me how moms (still mostly moms) of a certain socioeconomic class are driven to burnout by the tasks of upper middle class parenting, but still reject concrete things that would help, like public school lunch. I've seen this play out in social media spaces. No one would ever put it as clearly as you did--"good enough for other kids but not mine"--but that's what it is.
Kate maybe I'm getting too dark here, but I've been rereading this passage in Sheila Heti's Motherhood over and over where she talks about how women are "miserly with ourselves when it comes to space and time" and how motherhood "makes that impulse into a virtue." What is loving and caring for your children, joyfully nourishing them, and what is what she refers to as "self-abnegation"? I think about the incredible lunches I have heard described that mothers make for kids in Japan. If I romanticize it, it's the former, but I'm sure at least for some people, some of the time, it's self abnegation.
Yup. I rub up against it a lot, in different ways, on all sides.
I went to a private high school as a free riding faculty child. So there’s lots to unpack there. BUT, lunch was “included” in tuition and everyone had to eat it. It was much like a college cafeteria that offered many options (salad bar, hot lunch, peanut butter and jelly - does that date me that peanuts used to be allowed in schools?). I loved it because that was one place where there was no comparing.
As a vegetarian family though I have been confused by OUSD’s labeling which often shows the veggie sign next to a dish that literally has chicken in the title. What about students who have legitimate allergies? Yes, we have the privilege to be vegetarian but until schools have inclusive offerings I’m not sure we will get everyone eating school lunch as wonderful as that sounds to this privileged white I-care-about-what-my-kids-eat parent.
I’m looking forward to our follow up conversation where you can gently and eloquently challenge my thinking. 😉
Oh! And I love those mini-recycling bins! We had one!!! But it was too hard to roll it out because we had to bend over so far to reach the handle. So we got a big one.
Maybe I'm just lazier than you? 😂 The vegetarian thing is interesting, I had that confusion about the menus too!
This is fantastic. Also...my son is now happily eating the school lunch every day and it is a huge resource (to all of us). I asked him why and he said 'well it is free'....which I have been turning over in my mind b/c he always 'could' have bought lunch, but didn't, and now this year, it seems to be that it is just what 'everyone' is doing. I have been trying to understand more about that shift and thinking about what a uncomfortable divide it was prior. Thank you for this.
wow! i know for a fact you have a thoughtful and grateful son, but coming at it from a parental labor standpoint it's like "but my TIME isn't free??!!!"
Haha, soooo true about the mystique of school lunch in my childhood in Cambridge. For me, I think it was the beginnings of a fetish I have for packages -- I loved unwrapping the tin foil, and the plastic-wrapped "cold pack" with its ubiquitous, never-ever-eaten cole slaw. I loved the sugary baked beans, and even the tasteless green beans. The sandwiches from home, by contrast, always seemed somehow both soggy and as dry as sandpaper. It's funny -- I never really thought, "what lunch would I **like** to have?"
i dont think it's the fog of memory - that bread was sooooo dry :)
Hi Sarah! Ben forwarded me this post, thank you so much for the call-out to my book! ❤️
I'm so glad you enjoyed it and that it's starting more conversations. I love all the insight you added, and that you seem to feel the same way about the subject of school lunch as I do. It's such a culturally rich subject, and loaded in so many of the ways you point out. When I asked George Foreman if he ever asked any of his friends for the leftover food they were throwing away he gave an emphatic no-- he prefered extreme hunger over risking other kids making fun of him. Free school lunch for everyone is the simplest most humane policy.
I interviewed hundreds for this book and the 70 stories included are all favorites of mine...but I especially love the lunch memories that come from older generations or different countries. Thanks for sharing it with your audience!
Hi Lucy! What an experience making this book must have been. I did love that one about the older couple I think from Taiwan reminiscing about all of the lunches in the big steamer. Amazing.
I'm commenting on this VERY late, but I'm seeing it after Sarah reminded me of the post in her letter this week. As an OUSD parent at a school with a small percentage of kids living below the poverty line, I stump the free school lunches as often as I can. Mainly for the exact equity issues and to give moms a break. I'm fully on board with whatever edible item anyone wants to make for my kids that takes something off my plate!