Waffles for Lunch

Everyone has some sort of anecdote about school lunches. For public school kids, that anecdote usually has to do with how disgusting the lunch was. I don’t remember the gross food the lunch ladies served us, but I do remember the unusual food. Though my elementary school had a mix of low income and upper middle class students, lunchtime was where what you ate determined your cool factor. The lucky ones had parents who packed them a nice lunch that contained gems like gushers or swiss rolls in their nylon bags. Sometimes when their parents were on a health kick, there would be orange juice and multi-grain bread tucked away. For those of us who had to get “hot lunch,” stood in lines, waiting for grumpy lunch ladies with mustaches to serve us food.
There is one meal that stands out in my mind from elementary school: waffles. They were served once a week and were obviously prepackaged and delivered frozen. But somehow when the lunch ladies reheated them in industrial ovens, they always came out rock hard. This didn’t stop us from eating them though. What elementary school kid would turn down breakfast for lunch? There were two ways of eating the rock hard waffles. The plastic knives were too flimsey to cut them, so some of us would spear them on a fork and eat them ‘on a stick’ style. The other option was to wait for one teacher, the oldest at the school, to make the rounds with his steak knife and cut students’ waffles into bite sized pieces.
Waffles certainly wouldn’t be served at school for lunch now. The local, healthy, organic food movement has reached the public school system, but I still look back at the memory of those waffles with nostalgia. A simpler time, when the food was reheated and the lunch ladies were middle-aged women with loud, hoarse voices.