A School Lunch Assult on Existential Exuberance

I’m serving up a big plate tonight, a German peasant plate of bratwurst, kraut and potato pan cakes, and of all that is wrong with a school lunch.

It seems that all Detroit kids are to get the free school hot lunch, breakfast too and some sort of late afternoon snack. The brown bag lunch isn’t optional as best as I can tell. It’s a program under the “Healthy-hunger Free Kids Act.” The idea is to relieve poor kids from the stigma of taking free lunches by having all kids take the school hot lunch. Now here’s the thing. This pilot program applies to schools and school districts where 40% of the kids qualify for a free lunch, where no one knows who is getting a free lunch or who is paying, and where with 40% of the kids qualifying it wouldn’t seem the free lunch thing would be much of a stigma.

The other thing is school hot lunches are always institutional, maybe better than G.I. rations – meals ready to eat, but still dismal. And within there lies a frontal assault on existential exuberance.

My hearty meal of apple bratwurst, potato pan cakes, apple sauce and kraut tempered with apple juice, caraway and bacon didn’t cost more than a buck. And if you are a Milwaukee sort of German guy, it’s oh so good. It’s a meal of heritage dancing with joy.

That dancing with joy, that’s existential exuberance. We sing. We dance. We engage in sports, make love, cook and eat. In all of these things we celebrate and embrace our physical existence. In these things our souls express the existential joy of being – the simple joy of being a physical creature.  Just look at the spontaneous exuberant dance by two brothers celebrating existence. (View Here)

Now to be sure we are intellectual beings, spiritual beings and social beings also. But before that we are physical and sensual. So we dance and sing and cook.

My meal is a meal the schools can’t serve up. It’s a meal of my joy and is not for everyone nor should it be. Nevertheless, I have the right to be the lord of my menu, be it breakfast, lunch or dinner. A brown bag lunch – a sandwich, some fruit and a sweet – can be a beautiful thing.

I recall having lunch with friends in high school where there was a casual ongoing competition over who was eating best that day. I recall the sliced lobster tail, dabbed with mayonnaise and stuffed into a nice hunk of French bread and the complaints of my table mates.

“Look at that. That’s not fair. Paulus has lobster.”

Detroit schools empowered by a federal pilot program saying that a lobster sandwich can’t be.

The Detroit lunch program isn’t about children’s hunger and stigma of poverty, it is about urban childhood obesity walking hand in hand with malnourishment. It’s a federal dietary program. In short the Feds are saying we will see to it that you eat “right.” At the same time it’s an unintentional soft assault on culinary heritage and existential exuberance. So one day should we all dutifully line up for our “meals ready to eat?” Should we no longer be trusted to cook for and feed ourselves and our families?

If that be so, my days of potato pan cakes heaped with hot homemade apple sauce are numbered. Our government can never imagine such a thing.