© 2004 Brian Hodges - Please do not remove the copyright from this essay

he cooks in our elementary school didn’t take well to criticism. They yelled and made us spend recess inside with our heads down whenever we complained about the burnt pizza, the hairs in our yogurt or the rubbery meat in our spaghetti sauce. By Christmas of fifth grade, my trouble-maker friends and I had already been forced to write them a formal apology. We drew happy pictures of ourselves eating cafeteria food under inscriptions like, “I’m sorry I said your meatloaf tasted like Play-doh… From now on I’ll just pick around the brown lettuce… My mom told me it was just a stomach flu.”

We choked down our spongy carrots and freezer-burned fishsticks without a word for awhile after that, but a constant sense of impending vomit can only be kept silent for so long. By May that year, the cooks and lunch monitors were finally just ignoring us, telling us to “Just go!” Which we begrudgingly did. It was spring and none of us wanted to risk any more recesses inside.

Everything came to a head the day our gang got to the cafeteria late. Our teacher had undoubtedly held us back to yell about something, and by the time we got to the cafeteria, everything was gone. Not the food of course. There was always enough economy-sized re-thawed, re-heated food-like products on hand to survive the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust. No, on this particular day, they had run out of silverware. There wasn’t a clean knife or spork to be found.

We felt perfectly justified in raising our concerns, but the lunch monitor cut us off, “Just go!” The cooks turned a reflexive deaf ear to us, “I don’t want to hear it boys!” And when that spatula slammed down on our tray, plopping the day’s nutrition into one of five pre-portioned slots, we knew they meant business.

On any other day, I think we would have continued pushing our point, even if it meant risking yet another recess inside. But the group of us, in a rare moment of psychic harmony, all decided to let it go when we saw what the cooks were serving: Sloppy Joes and blueberry cobbler. The latter was a relative term of course – pie filling and Cool Whip really – but it was certainly a meal that one would not want to eat with one’s hands… unless of course one was a smartass eleven-year-old with an axe to grind.

Oh the fun we had that day, devouring our government sanctioned Hot Lunch (again, a relative term) with bare hands and the ravenousness of starving children. We shoved Sloppy Joes into the general vicinity of our mouths. Some hit its mark. The rest slid down our faces. We closed our fists around handfuls of blueberries, squishing half of it into our mouths and letting the rest ooze down our forearms.

Did I mention that they had run out of napkins that day as well?

The lunch monitors yelled of course. But what else could we say through smiling mouthfuls of ground beef and fruit product as we wiped our hands on the fold-out tables? “They didn’t have silverware.” And then the most amazing thing happened. Not only didn’t they make us spend recess inside with our heads down, but the lunch monitor actually ran to get us the silverware we had been asking for.

We were baffled. Somehow, we had won. We had subverted the entire cafeteria system, and the teachers and cooks were powerless to stop us. We’d acted like bratty inconsiderate snots and gotten away with it! We should have been relishing our victory and making plans for new and exciting ways to raise hell. If only we had realized the truth.

Fortunately for all our future teachers – and okay, for us too – our parents had instilled in us a good healthy fear of adults as unshakeable bastions of authority. Had we pushed forward, the sixth grade academic and nutritional world would have been ours to manipulate and control. Instead, afraid retribution could be just over the horizon, we eased off on the cooks, giving them time to regroup.

By the time we came back to school that next year, the cooks were ready for us. Any further attempts at rebellion were dealt with quickly and harshly. We had no choice but to deal with another year’s worth of bad food… and recesses spent inside with our heads down.