Feed Me Thrice, Shame On Me

I can't stop talking about it. I am obsessed. I have lunch duty this week, so I don't have time to heat up any food from home, and I am at the mercy of the lunch ladies. They haven't had much mercy on me.

Monday, the menu was 'hamburgers, fries, pudding'. I thought maybe we were having the special BBQ hamburger, which is fluffier than the regular everyday burger (that is offered, um, every day), probably due to some type of filler. But no. It was just regular hamburgers, which is like a cruel trick, since what it really meant was we are not having lunch today, just the usual choices of hamburger, pizza, salad, or NOTHING. So I took the rectangular pizza because I have an aversion to the regular hamburgers ever since that year the long-gone coach got one that had mold on the meat part of the burger, and the cooks offered him another one, saying, "I thought we took out all the moldy ones in that bag." I used to partake of the salad, but after the last two incidents in which the salad tried to fight its way out of my small intestine within an hour of eating, I figured that maybe they weren't rinsing their greens and perhaps another E. coli event was in the works.

Tuesday, we were promised 'chicken nuggets, pork and beans, jello'. It was the ol' bait & switch again. What we really had were chicken rings, which are not so delicious as the nuggets, due to a funky aftertaste. To make matters worse, as I went through the line, there was a tray laid up on top of the foil covering a big vat of green beans. I asked innocently enough, "Is that my tray?" Because they put more on a teacher's tray, which is why we pay more than the kids. Those kids that pay, I mean. The first lunch lady who usually announces "TEACHER" when she passes it over said, "No." The second lunch lady said, "Oh...The Vegetator has your tray. Vegetator! That is Mrs. Hillbilly Mom's tray. Give that one to her." OK. Um, I really did not want the tray that the Vegetator just had in his hands, but what else could I do besides go hungry. The Vegetator looked at it, looked at the one they wanted to give him, and said, "I really don't see a difference." Neither did I. We both had told them to hold the beans. There were the same amounts of chicken rings and green beans on the tray. Like, about a 1/4 inch deep section of green beans, which had not been on the menu, but which are pretty good. The Vegetator took his carton of milk off the tray and handed it to me. The tray, not the milk, since I don't get the milk ever since we had some soured milk that was still a day before the expiration. I proceeded to snare myself a clear plastic sour-cream-in-a-restaurant-container sized portion of Jello. They were only half-full. Did I mention that this week? I think I did. This was the first time all year we've had pork and beans, but just like when they used to serve it years ago, Mr. S declared, "You'd think they could warm the beans." Because they are served right out of the can, just like the chocolate pudding that we had two spoonfuls of on Monday. They also threw in two tater tris, though Mr. S had three, what with getting a real teacher's tray, piled high with green beany goodness, not just a recycled Vegetator tray.

Today, I'd like to inform the parents that the vegetable served to your children was CORN CHIPS. That's the section they were place in, and that was all we got, except for the 14 mini corn dogs and the square of chocolate cake. I needed 14 mini corn dogs like a hole in the head. They were not the bite-sized round mini corn dogs, but the toddler big-toe-sized mini corn dogs. They were as soggy as the chicken rings, and did not go well with mustard OR ketchup. Oh. Maybe that was the vegetable: ketchup. The cake was passable, if you could mush the icing into the cake crumbs to get them to your mouth. I left 9 corn dogs to chase each other around the trash can.

Two more days. Tomorrow is supposed to be vegetable soup and grilled cheese. I hope the sandwiches are rock-hard and so greasy that they slip out of my hand like money in HH's palm. That's when they taste best.

I don't even want to know what this fare is doing to my arteries. I picture my left ventricle squeezing out a single drop of blood akin to the garbage Indian tear.