Lunchlady Land

This blog was prompted by: Tonight on Channel 2, the I-Team goes into local georgia schools to investigate how healthy school lunches are for your children.

Damn, it took them this long to investigate?

I remember my first exposure to school lunches. I was in 1st grade at wilder elementary. Apparently no one told me about this crazy concept of buying/selling goods based on certain rates in the economy. chocolate milk cost 25 cents and i really wanted one badly. i get to the lady at the end of the row and she asks for my money. i begin to cry because mom had sent me in there with a brown bag lunch and no money for the milk. (crying over a quarter! ha!) so ms harkelroad bailed me out of that one and hooked me up with a loan. phew, i was saved.


here we see little Lupe pounding a carton of DairyPak white russian
i pretty much packed my own lunch all through elementary, middle, and high school. krogers subs. bag o pretzels. bag o cookies. fruit. maybe a veggie. ahh those were the days. around my 7th grade year, the public school system teamed up with the YUM corporation to bring school children more options.... pizza hut, taco bell, and KFC were all included on the traditional list of mystery meat, pineapple cup, instant potato, sloppy joe, mac and cheese, and corndogs. mmmm, corndogs.


what genius was behind this glorious invention: meat on a stick
Now you could have mom slip you 5 bucks and not have to worry about packing a lunch. all the healthy food you could dream of was readily available at all jefferson county schools. bean burrito. chicken enchilada. 10 wings w/hot, medium, or mild, personal pan pizza. cinnatwists. the options were endless and the food was outstanding!

When I left high school i figured lunchladys were a thing of the past. No longer would i have to wait in line to be fed a piece of lasagna with more filler than actual meat, side of drenched in goop corn, or fish sticks and retartar sauce. but even at emory, lunchladys filled cox and duc cafeterias with their crossed eyes and hairnets. there was even a guy named pasta john. by day, he was the friendliest lunchlady man to ever walk the streets. by night, he was a raving alcoholic who showed up to our frat party so wasted that he split his forehead on the concrete and we couldnt call the EMTs because he would subsequently be fired for coercing us to scream his name while he pounded a 40 of colt 45. Pasta John! Pasta John!


Even in the .gov, we have about 15 fully bloggable lunchladys in our cafeteria. they use big words like sugar and darling to address me. they make the meanest turkey/roast beef/salami sub i have ever feasted on in a cafeteria. they even addressed employee concerns and remodeled the entire cafeteria during my tenure here. (it only took 9 months, S.O.P. for this place)


what a great marketing effort by the lunchladies
as much as i would rather eat at the best restaurant on earth, one cannot ever replace the experience of lunchladys in society. they are our (big black) mothers when our mothers arent there. and now, a little eye candy for all you lunchlady lovers out there!