Eating For Beginners

There’s been a lot of chatter (okay, Tweeting) lately on Twitter about school lunches in the US and around the world thanks to a few different blogs that have posted pictures of them (why does everyone use those horrible divided trays??). Go to this one, which is purely recreational and checks out lunches from Japan to India to France and a bunch of places in between, and I defy you to not scroll down through the entire series of photos in order to satisfy your curiosity. At this one you can learn about the horror that is pizza flavored stuffed beef mini bites alongside a lot of really interesting and useful information about school lunch policy and legislation in the US. (Big thanks to Jill Richardson at La Vida Locavore for both of these. I don’t know her, but I love her blog).

School lunch is, of course, of special interest to me because of The Cheese-Hater who is, if not an unhealthy eater, definitely an eccentric one. He went to school for the first time when we arrived in Berlin last summer, and I confess, I was thrilled to learn that lunch would provided for even the two and three year-olds at his kindergarten (preschool here). The very idea of not having to negotiate that meal with him five times a week, to not even have to think about what to pack for him, made me jump for joy. I’m all for outsourcing. And then, when he started, it got even better.

School lunch here, it turns out, does not involve trays or choices of any kind. There is a menu for each day, which is never chicken nuggets or pizza or french fries, and it’s served to the kids in their classrooms. You eat or you don’t. (I have nothing against the above-noted foods on occasion, but I don’t think they belong in school as a daily offering.) Even more amazing, this meal, which may be fish with lemon sauce, goulash (not a Cheese-Hater favorite), or schnitzel, all with sides of rice or potatoes and vegetables, is served on china plates with real silverware (stainless steelware, but you get my point), paper napkins and water glasses included. The teachers set the table each day, then serve the food, and when the children are all done eating, they’re called up two by two to scrape their plates into the leftovers bucket and clear their places. And then they all brush their teeth.

I love the preschool The Cheese Hater will be going to next year in New York, but I already know I’m going to have to pack his lunch for him every night. Still, I’m wondering if I can start some kind of grass roots post-lunch tooth brushing campaign without seeming like the biggest pain in the ass ever.

Yeah, I don’t think so either.

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