School Lunch
When I was in first grade, you were only cool if you brought your lunch from home, in a plastic lunch box, preferably with a Garfield sticker on the outside. Kids who ate school lunch were generally looked down upon as supremely gross (for eating, without complaint, the “faux” hamburgers - “Don’t you know those are *soy* burgers” the mean girls would snidely remark to people like poor Laura, the tomboy of my class and one of 11 children whose only option in a household of that size was the reduced price school lunch ticket, as she nibbled at her greyish-looking burger with its soggy bun.) It was as though eating a fake hamburger - or school lunch in general - meant you were not only poor, but also stupid.
In many cases, if you were forced buy school lunch, whether out of economic necessity or because you forgot to bring your own, in order to save face with the popular kids you had to just throw the whole thing away. (Come to think of it, first grade was a lot like being in the fashion industry now. Don’t touch the passed h’ors doeuvres, never finish your entree or dessert…) Maybe you ate the french fries or fake mashed potatoes made from dried potato flakes and smothered with inedible brown gravy (the cool kids never get theirs with gravy), or maybe you drank the small box of milk, but never, ever, under any circumstances were you to touch the “chow mein” or the “meat loaf” or the “hoagie” or the “cheese melt.” Pizza, corn dogs with “catsup,” these were okay to eat, as they only came on special days and were not made by the lunch ladies in the cafeteria.
My best friend at the time, Melinda, was the queen of home lunch with her orange plastic lunch box and a sticker of Garfield eating lasagna. Her mother filled it with the kind of food that only a spoiled youngest child such as herself could command: Peanut butter and jelly on Wonder Bread with the crusts cut off, some kind of Hostess cake product like Twinkies, Ho-Ho’s, Ding-Dongs or Cupcakes, maybe a bag of Doritos Nacho Cheese chips and to drink, a Capri Sun. It’s the kind of lunch that screams “Unhealthy American,” devoid of any nutritional value whatsoever, what with all its processed food, full of sugar, and the kind of lunch that my parents vehemently opposed, much to my dismay. It’s also the lunch of least resistance, so when you’re a brat and your parents don’t want to hear you complain, it’s the food you shovel at your children.
When it became clear that in order to maintain my status as Melinda’s best friend, I needed to ditch the school lunch and the brown paper bags, and start carrying a Garfield lunch pail. I convinced my mother to take me to Albertsons, the local grocery store, to purchase one. I searched the shelves desperately to find the orange pail with Garfield, outlined in thick black lines. All I could come up with was a purple plastic box, with Garfield not outlined in black, but in blue…I wasn’t sure about this. I had a sense of what “knock-off” meant and this lunch box didn’t seem like the real deal. Would Melinda still like me if my Garfield was blue instead of black? I remember how I’d had the same issue when it came time to purchase my Trapper Keeper for the year - I wanted “Designer Edition” with its loud neon scribbled text and paint splatter graphics, but had to settle for the “regular” version with a picture of drops of water or somesuch (it was cheaper). It looked like I had no choice. If I wanted a Garfield lunch box, this was going to have to be it.
But it wasn’t the box so much as the contents that branded me as a food freak in Melinda’s eyes. Junk food didn’t exist in my house, at least as far as I knew at the time (my mother, with her sweet tooth, must have always had the same stashes that we discovered hidden behind dish towels years later, when we were tall enough to reach them). And Wonder Bread? Forget it. Whole wheat only, with nubby bits of whole grain, smothered with peanut butter but no jelly - only honey. I put my foot down at peanut butter and banana, which seemed the most vile combination but to my outdoorsy, camping oriented father, it was the perfect fuel for energy. I actually hated peanut butter and honey, too, so often times I requested cheese sandwiches instead, and my parents conceded. (Cheddar, not processed American, of course). However, crusts were left on the bread, and there was always some kind of fruit or vegetable in a plastic baggie, usually carrot sticks or apple slices. Chips were an absolute rarity, but if I did get them, they were Lay’s plain potato chips, never Doritos. And to drink? No juice box, no Capri Sun…I got diluted orange juice, in the thermos that came with the lunch box.
Now, of course, I’m thankful for this early education in wholesome food, but at the time it felt unfair and cruel in the cutthroat world of lunch room politics to give me this nerd lunch, with all its healthy and tasteless foods. I fantasized about snack foods that came in neat little individual packages, like the value “snack pack” of chips in every flavor, and the holy grail of all packages, the dual golden Twinkies with their perfectly smooth, elongated surface and just a hint of white cream filling squirting out from below. The concept of twin snack cakes was the genius to me of Hostess, because it gave you hope that perhaps your best friend might share one with you at lunch. (She never did. Bitch.)
I was dying for what I thought of as a “regular” lunch, which happened to perfectly mirror Melinda’s, and I especially wanted that forbidden white bread and those Ding-Dongs. But when I asked my mother for them, I didn’t get a simple “no” - it went further, deeper than that. The epicurean snobbery of my parents meant that you had to be shamed for even desiring that kind of bad food in the first place. “Oh, so you want white bread, huh? And I’ll bet you want the crusts cut off, too,” as if only commoners with no taste asked for such a thing. The implication: “How gauche.”
So now when I hear of high end restaurants or bakeries doing their own haute version of American “classics” like Twinkies, I can’t shake the image of my mother’s lip raised in disgust at the prospect. But here’s a version that I wished had existed when I was a kid:
These are the “Goldies” by Sarah Magid, a Brooklyn-based baker, and they’re sold for $6 a piece at Jan & Aya, a cute new shop in Greenpoint. She’s created a deluxe organic version of the infamous sponge cakes, reports Gothamist, with dark chocolate sponge cake filled with organic vanillla or espresso whipped buttercream and covered in dark chocolate ganache with a sprinkling of gold metallic powder.
To this day, I still have never actually eaten a Twinkie, and after seeing that this version exists, I don’t see how I ever could.
—Renata