They're some of the saddest words I've heard in a long time.
“We won't be frying anymore,” said Delois Coleman, food services director for the Yazoo County School District, in a recent school board meeting.
Just like that!
No more frying, she said very confidently, perhaps even expecting an “Atta' girl!” since she was obediently following federal guidelines. I think a preacher was in the audience, so she may have been hoping for an “Amen, Sister!” too.
Something about federal money and Uncle Sam's dislike for fried foods, she said. If they kept cooking like God intended for folks to cook, there would be no more free student breakfasts and lunches.
Those of us living in the 50s, 60s and 70s were blessed in so many ways that later generations haven't been: God and country, weddings with one man and one woman, pullin' oneself up by “his” bootstraps as opposed to pullin' oneself up by “their” bootstrap, milk in glass bottles, “his” instead of “his/her” or “their,” and slow dancing.
Deep fat frying with lard was the way to cook, heapin' the food on your plate and eatin' it all was a virtue; vegetables took second, third, even fourth place to fried apple pies, heavy cream and gravy; and Elvis was coming onto the scene.
Had someone complained about fried foods, no tellin' what woulda' happened to him (as opposed to “them”). Everlasting resting places in Florida's Everglades have covered many an individual who dared to mess with our lard and heavy foods diets.
Used to be that school cafeteria ladies – no men in the kitchens or delivery rooms back then – actually cooked from scratch.
What I would give for just one more lunch in Yazoo City High School's cafeteria in the late 60s and early 70s when the ladies cooked up big batches of hamburger steaks, fried chicken the way it was meant to be fried, hand-peeled mashed potatoes with bottomless portions of brown gravy, homemade biscuits with plenty of government aka commodity butter, homemade honey buns, homemade cheese rolls, sweet tea to beat anybody's sweet tea, and many other blessings enjoyed by faculty and students.
Those were the days when students appreciated good cooking. If cafeteria workers had dished up pizza and raw vegetables for lunch back then as they do these days, there would have been an uprising...a really serious uprising.
To add insult to injury, Coleman reported that Lance snack crackers, better known as Nabs, was on the federal government's hit list. Said the crackers have too much salt, which the Salt Haters have determined causes all manner of maladies, including arthritis, gout, psoriasis, toenail fungus, ring around the collar, laziness, poverty, doom, gloom and despair.
She said “unhealthy snacks” must be removed from all teachers' vending machines and replaced by “Smart Snacks,” which is nothing more than a play on words to make people think they're choosing a snack that will coordinate perfectly with their Smart Phones.
The dumbin' down continues!
Smart Snacks in place of Nabs is further punishment for teachers, evoking memories of castor oil mothers used to give their children when they developed stomach aches, earaches, headaches and whenever harsh discipline was in order.
Believe it! All these dietary requirements from Big Brother are leading to no good.
All they want to do is to get all our students to the point where they can wear skinny jeans and look just as malnourished as the “beautiful people” they see on TV. They want a world where being a few ounces overweight is as unfathomable as installing an ashtray on a five-year-old's tricycle and teaching him to smoke unfiltered cigarettes.
Crazy! Bizarre! Un-American! At least to those of us who aren't yet beholden to Uncle Sam except for our monthly Social Security benefits, our Medicare coverage, our supplemental health insurance, our prescription drug discount plans, our tax refunds, etcetera, so forth and so on.
No sir! Nobody's gonna' be selling my deep fat frier and replacing the Nabs in my vending machine.
