School Lunches Exposed

Just saw this on the BBC website: NeverSeconds blogger Martha Payne school dinner photo ban lifted. This is the blog: NeverSeconds. In the blog, a nine-year old posted pictures of her rather dismal school cafeteria lunches, until the school told her to stop. Take a look at both the article and the blog, well worth it!

Image from BBC article.

Makes me wonder what way Belgian school cafeteria lunches have gone. When I was a kid I did not eat many lunches at school because I walked home to take lunch there. But on the odd times I did, I always liked it. Lunch was served family style, in big bowls that went around the table. There was always a soup, followed by a main course consisting of meat/fish-potato/pasta/rice-vegetable/salad. It was finished off with a dessert, like a fruit salad (from the can), a custard or an ice cream cone. The whole was washed down with a small glass of sparkling water or soda, a liter bottle serving about four.

When I went to teaching college (to be a PhysEd and Biology teacher) I took lunch at the neighboring high school. As you can imagine, with a curriculum that included several hours of rigorous physical activity each day, we were always hungry. We developed and nurtured excellent relationships with the kitchen personnel (the "lunch ladies") and they loved us if nothing else for our appetites. Maybe any food goes down when you're young and really hungry, but I recall that the food was always decent, nutritious and balanced, maybe not up to par with my mom's excellent cuisine but certainly good enough.

When I worked at Minneapolis Public Schools I saw the food they served. Not pretty. According to my boys, St. Paul Public Schools is not much better, especially the pizza, which is drenched with fat. I feel bad for the kids who have to eat the crap they offer nowadays and who get a gag order imposed on them when they speak up.

I'm not the only one!

Whenever I am asked to sing the Belgian national anthem (the "Brabançonne"), I have to admit that I don't know it. I can hum the tune, but that's it. My lack of education in this area is invariably met with disbelief, derision, even disgust. People think that I am unpatriotic at best, but more likely some anarchist freak at the edge of society. Americans seem to deem it heretic not to know one's national anthem. Not surprising given the efforts to make defacing the American flag a crime not covered by First-Amendment-Rights protection or belting out the Star Spangled Banner before every little league game.


It should come as no surprise that I was delighted when I saw the following post at the International Belgians group on LinkedIn:

Yesterday a group of 40 Belgians (flemish, francophones and germanophones) who for the most part didn't know each other got together at the local version of a Belgian "fritkot" in Montreal for the 21st of July. We had a blast, None of us knew the Brabançonne, so a lovely Canadian man sang it for us. So I 'd have to agree with Patrick, no linguistic problems around a good glass of beer, and some fries.

None of 40, I am not a freak after all! They had to recruit a Canadian (probably a professor in the Belgian Studies Department at Université de Montréal) to sing it for them. My reply to the post was that I had last sung the Brabançonne in 1972 or 3, but then in German, French and English. I don't even recall hearing it sung since then. No wonder I don't remember ...

Dave, a good friend, pointed out that there was at least one American was thinking along the same lines. Maybe he DID know the words to the US national anthem because he had been "cultivated, nurtured, indoctrinated from childhood on." Howard Zinn's essay, distributed in 2006 by the Progressive Media Project and republished by commondreams.org summarizes it more eloquently than I ever could. Please read http://www.commondreams.org/view/2010/07/02-11.

Belgians still ahead of Americans in Life Expectancy

The UN published its Human Development Report this week. It confirms that Belgians (21st overall in life expectancy) live longer than their US counterparts (26th), in spite of having a diet based on cigarettes, fried potatoes, beer and chocolate. Somehow, the bad effects of the first two must be overcome by the two others, plus perhaps the addition of Belgian endives and Brussels sprouts.

Human Development Index--Belgium (life expectancy in Table 1, column 2)

Human Development Index--United States