School lunch: stucco schlop in a soap impression. Grisly and allusive. A drab description by an alien to fellow extraterrestrials. An ugly parody of the so-called American diet. The four food groups can go screw themselves and your children.
Let’s not dance around the dead body, even if we want to wear our purdy pink glasses. School lunch has never been by any account of anyone ever great and dare I say, never will be. It’s state-mandated and funded, which is to say, barely functioning. That may be a generalization, maybe even brattish, but there is something concerning about the systematic scales in which the daily feeding of our country’s youth shares the same priority listing as the filling of eternal potholes or ever-lax retrieval of ubiquitous garbage, blackened and burning.
The food is more often than not befuddlingly bad. Your jaw chomps, the food beats and bounces with the CLANG of the factory in which it was processed. Sticking in your gut, the beast recongeals. Sprouting hair and legs, operating on malice and destiny alone, it creep-crawls and slip-slops through your gory insides before acid-dropping into your stomach, melting into a stagnant bog. The sensation similar to a subtle high is not one of literal hallucination or any type of better living through chemistry; no, it is that army of sleazy spider-blotter-bastards churning in your stomach, pretending to release nutrients where they only pass off pressboard-substitution or sawdust-filler. It’s your brain berating your body trying to figure out what you just crammed down your throat at eleven-thirty-five in the morning.
The staff should not be blamed in any regard. That should be clear. They’re a troop of sweethearts who do as they’re paid to. The uncomfy fixins is that there really is no one to blame. I can take my shots at anyone: the principal, the president, the state board, the nameless faceless money grubbers or suited snakes, the universal them against us. All of that may be true, but it’s also you, it’s also me. It’s the students who’ve been beaten into submission into accepting the slop that we shovel in stomach-fulls, without any care in the world. Why are we so passive?
There’s not even any trays…
Why are there no trays? I’m aware that it is a first-world problem, but isn’t there a message in that? Never mind the whole individually-packaged-thing for its environmental drawbacks— straws are bad for turtles but they can choke on those plastic lids a thousand eternities over in hell if it means a cheaper production–but purely from a practical standpoint, it’s much easier to carry food on a tray. At the very least take the food out of those little black boxes that hold the steam in and moisten everything to an uncomfortable dampness.
Lunch seems to lack almost everything that we normally associate with food. It doesn’t feel healthy-not that you’ll ever actually know as if you visit the websites for Goldstar Foods and Jordanos Foods (the main suppliers for LVUSD) it’s mind numbingly difficult if not impossible to find the ingredient lists. It also doesn’t taste like anything. It smells like itself and itself only. Everything you can obtain in the cafeteria has an alien sense about it. It’s not shocking the number of students that rush away from campus everyday to local fast food dispensers. The King, Clown, or Colonel offer some remedy to the school palette. Sure it’s overpriced and probably full of just as many toxins, ingraining you further into the corporate rat race to feed you poison to then feed you the drugs you need to balance them out, but at least it makes you feel alive! At least it’s better than separated milk and hard rubber chicken.
No one cares. And those that do care enough to notice, not enough to improve it. The freeze of banality. No quarter, coast, neighborhood, decade, colored-tie administration, no matter; it’s an embalmed embarrassment wherever you look. Cross-national hot garbage. Like a Paris Hilton centerfold. From sea to shining sea, from the nineteen twenties to the twenty-twenties…juvenile America: Divided by just about everything, united by disgusted-ingestion of industrial grade meats and balsa-wood breads.
Get back in line. Things will continue to go on the same and that’s fine. I’m not trying to change the world, I’m trying to point to the dead elephant in the room; chasing a real reaction. A back-alley ingrate chewing his nails and lips off of obnoxious pseudo-philosophical observation, pulling a sawed-off shotgun between your eyes. The hammers smash, the shells drop out, the powder burns up and when the kite string pops hopefully there is a lingering sense of aggression. A lust for legitimate acknowledgement. Positive passivity can shove it! Too automatically accepting, too begrudgingly forgiving, too teetersome on the edge of extreme self loathing at the dime-drop-determination of one’s lack of real purpose or meaning or stance on anything at all. Extreme self disgust rivaled only by the feeling immediately following eating the school lunch.
Get back in line. Like with anything else. Just accept and smile. Move along. Make no fuss. On your feet or on your knees…BITE IT YOU SCUM!
