Feature Article September 4, 2002
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A gardener's guide to preparing and disposing of school lunchesby Jack GreenthumbThere are many things for a parent to think about with the onset of the school year. Parents wonder if their child is wasting their time in school. Maybe the kids would they be better off helping with the harvesting and canning that parents promise themselves they are going to do each year, but never get around to.There are indeed weighty issues to be addressed, such as the questions about the new curriculum, student testing, teacher testing, bullying, and more.
It's sad to say, but most parents can't be bothered dealing with such matters. They have a more immediate concern. Come the first day of school, there needs to be a lunch box; and it must have a lunch in it.Many parents spent Labour Day looking for last years lunch box, finding last year's lunch box, emptying last year's lunch box into the compost heap, sterilizing last year's lunch box, etc. Or else - and this is worse - they entered the minefield of the Kingston malls to find a new lunch box.
Once the lunch box is found, the year-long pain begins. Day after day, a lunch must be prepared by 7:30 in the morning; and not only a lunch, but a lunch that has some chance of being eaten.However, this entire effort is futile. The universal conclusion that I have reached through a scientific survey of numerous parents (at least three or four) is that kids never eat their lunch anyway. Each day, the carefully prepared sandwich, the home-made (or store bought) cookies, the selected in- season piece of fruit, and the juice box, return home as one soggy, smelly lump that is stuck to the soft plastic travesty of a lunch box - or worse, is caught in the folds of the new designer back pack. There is never any evidence that any eating has occurred, except for the one bite that is inevitably taken from the now soft and unpalatable piece of fruit.
There is a solution to this problem, and it is one which the schools can use in their educational program. Instead of lunch time, there should be compost time. All the kids should troop up to a central location, where they can empty their juice box, remove their sandwich from its wrapper, dropping all compostable materials into the school heap, placing plastic in the plastic bin, cans in the tin bin, etc. Lunch will be over; school can resume; and the kids can eat when they get home, just like they always do. For those many parents who decide it is a waste of time and money to prepare a lunch that is designed exclusively for recycling, they can just say no to school lunches entirely. Problem solved.