In continuing with my country school days, I thought we would have a fun with food post. At the school I went to, we actually had a kitchen/lunchroom and hot lunches. This was rare for small country schools. Also unusual were the rules to do with the lunches that were put into effect by the unerring wisdom of our P.T.A. The rule that led to various funny happenings was that all students were required to eat everything on their plate. EVERYTHING! It didn't matter if you hated it or were not hungry! Their reasoning was that we children would taste and learn to eat all kinds of foods.
This rule was enforced by our teacher. If you sat there and didn't eat it, you would still be sitting at the lunchroom table when it was time to go home. Hey, it wasn't my idea! As an example of what I saw, there were students who would tell the teacher, "I can’t eat this!" The teacher would then insist. Then the student would either sit there, sulk, and fall into the teacher’s disfavor, or try to eat it. Sometimes a student would try to eat the disliked food --- and then rush out the door and throw up their socks! Always entertaining!
There were various foods with which I had trouble. Some of them came from foods that were pushed by government programs. My really bad ones were chicken pot pie, chicken livers and black olives. We received several huge jars (probably 3 gallon each), of black olives. We had to eat so many per day. I hated black olives! Small chicken livers, once I bit into them, became the size of baseballs. They would make my gag reflex go into high gear. We also once had some southern recipe that, to me, the first bite tasted good, the second bite not so good, the third bite, well, I could hardly get down. I was pretty good at eventually getting foods down. If I couldn't, I waited until the lunchroom cleared out and then stuffed whatever I couldn't eat into my milk carton. It is amazing what you can learn from school.
Desserts at school were anything from applesauce, peaches, pears, cake, pie, and even cinnamon rolls. The cinnamon rolls may have been the best I have ever eaten. That is saying a lot! Trust me on this, I am a dessertaholic! I know good dessert! These were kind of normal cinnamon rolls with this brown sauce that looked like it had been poured over it. The sauce looked like it stacked up about one half inch thick on top then slowly oozed down the sides. Most of it stayed on top, and the sides. Very little of it, got on to the plate and you licked it off. It was just that good! I reminded my sisters about these cinnamon rolls and we all got hungry for them. It actually got us on a mission to find the recipe. We had no luck! But once, walking into the lunchroom, I saw an extra one on the cabinet, and asked for seconds on dessert and got it. Everyone was so jealous!
Now dessert was the one thing they didn’t force us to eat. We had some students that were moved in from another school that didn’t realize that. So we had some fun with that. All of us older, larger boys sat at the same table. We had raisin pie. There was one of the new eighth graders that hated raisin pie. In fact, he was breaking into a sweat just thinking about having to eat it. As you can imagine, we were all dying laughing at him. Finally, he stuffed that whole messy piece of pie in his front pocket and walked out of the lunchroom. We laughingly, informed him of the fact that the eat everything rule didn't apply, after he did such a good job of messing up his pants.
Probably one of the funniest food events I remember was during a Thanksgiving play. Two of us boys were dressed up as Indians. The story was that we showed up at some pilgrim’s house and were fed bread and given milk to drink. It all went pretty well in practice. However, when we actually performed the play in front of a large crowd of parents and children, there were some problems. The girl playing the pilgrim woman actually brought us real bread. It was cheap white bread that had been lying out all day. She didn't really bring us anything to drink. We just had empty glasses to act like we drank from them. We really needed something to drink! I put the bread into my mouth, I chewed, I choked, I like to have died. The other boy actually spit his out into his hand and put it in his pocket. As you can imagine, the audience was dying laughing. It wasn't supposed to have been a comedy, but it became one. Really, if I had been a real Indian, and she had been a real pilgrim and fed me that, I would have probably scalped her on the spot.
Well, I disliked the eat everything on your plate rule. However, I now like black olives. Maybe their plan worked. Nah!!
From the Hillbilly’s Corner!
I hated broccoli when I was a kid, but as I adult I really like it. Still won't eat liver though.
Were you made to "clean your plate" when you were a child? What foods were disgusting to you? Did you ever learn to like any of them later?
