WHAT IS THIS?

It has been all over the media lately, the nutritional kick to get kids to eat healthier. That is what they are trying, and all ready there is fall-out!

The school under the master plan of Michele O’Bama, the little Irish lass in the White House who has taken up the gauntlet to let the kids look, well gaunt.

'WHERE'S THE BEEF?"

It seems smaller portions and less fat are the buzzwords as the kids try to study, do their gym classes and smoke pot on an empty stomach! Some estimates are that the school lunches are 1/3 less in volume than last year, and of that 1/3 more garbage is being collected from the lunch trash cans.

So one kid to supplement his lunch had to brown bag it, bringing a ham and cheese sandwich, cookies and chips, and you have to wonder how he could possible have room for a beer or two in his brown bag?

When I was in elementary school in East Patchogue, NY, Mrs. Rose my first 4^th grade teacher before she traded me to Mrs. James classroom for a ream of paper and a valium to be named later, took us for lunch in the cafeteria. This was my first day at school after moving from Brooklyn where I could go home everyday for lunch. I got on a line and saw all this plastic food and took a brown plastic tray, a fork and moved along the food line. They were serving ravioli that day and I though: “Wow! Ravioli! That’s a treat!” I was used to Mom’s ravioli that was a treat and then I bit into the ravioli the school was giving away and it was awful! It tasted like it came from a can, a garbage can!

WELL NOURISHED A NEVER HAD A PLAY DATE!

They didn’t think twice about serving us hamburgers and potato chips with maybe limp carrots and applesauce. It was a 1950’s version of a nutritional diet for children. I am still alive, because I brown bagged it everyday. Lunch was a quarter and Mom was too cheap to give me the quarter. After the church incident a year before, (an unfortunate occurrence that had to do with some money for the collection plate and donuts, with yours truly) she was afraid any money I got my hands on would be re-invested into something to eat that I liked.

MOM KNEW WHAT SHE WAS DOING!

The media never concerned itself with children’s nutrition so long as the kids were quiet and out of the way in the 1950’s. The only thing you heard about was a Polio shot that would hurt.

Today all the kids for the most part are over-weight, suffering from inertia, and hand death grip from holding their I-phones with a dazed looks in their eyes from the screen they stare into all day.

When we were kids, we went outside and played, talked to our friends and some of us didn’t even have a TV in the house, or maybe even a telephone. It was a few years before we got a TV in Brooklyn, and NEVER had a phone!

I’m still trying to get over the concept of a “Play date.”