"I had too much to eat as a child" is a first world problem if ever I've heard of one.

I've started reading a blog owned by an anonymous school teacher who has made it her mission to eat and document school lunch for an entire school year. I didn't eat school lunches on a very regular basis, but I do remember getting the menu every month and on the days when they were serving something I liked, my mom would give me $1.50 or whatever it was to buy lunch. My mom was not known for her creativity when it came to school lunches so the opportunity to eat something other than a jam and butter sandwich, a granola bar and a Capri Sun was welcome.

(Mom, I'm sure you'd argue that packing three lunches every day was expensive and a pain in the ass, but that's what you get for having Andrew instead of just leaving well enough alone.)

I don't remember which menus were the crowd pleasers -- maybe bean burritos (possibly because that meant my friend Bree, a vegetarian, would also be buying school lunch that day?), spaghetti (which had a distinct flavor I can remember to this day) and hamburgers (which were of a quality I'd probably never eat as an adult)? I DEFINITELY remember that my brothers and I loved pronto puff day though.

The pronto puff was kinda like a bagel dog, but the bread was less dense and bagely and it seemed to have mustard mixed into the dough. I remember it being difficult to swallow and that it would sit like a rock in my stomach for the rest of the day, but boy howdy, it was a favorite.

That blog got me to thinking that I'd love to try a pronto puff as an adult just to see if the magic was still there so I got to Googling and OH MY!

WHAT IS THIS??

A PRONTO PUP???

Were we falsely remembering the pronto PUFF?

Whew, no. Wikipedia tells me that a pronto PUP was very corndoggy, except with a flour crust instead of flour.

I am 99% sure pronto PUFFS did not have a stick, but if I'm wrong, I'm sure my brother or another SJUSD student from the early 80's will correct me.

I'm sad to say though that pronto puffs are missing from the www.

SOMEBODY PROVE ME WRONG!!

In other Elizabeth-Remembers-School-Lunches news:

1. People think I'm insane because I love green bell pepper dipped in peanut butter, but more days than not we'd get little white paper cups filled with grainy peanut butter with a carrot stick, celery stick and bell pepper stick stuck in there. It's DELICIOUS you guys, I swear!

2. I had this grand fantasy of getting to junior high and going through a line and having a cafeteria lady slop the meal-of-the-day on my plate, putting it on my tray and moving down the line, paying the cashier and then sitting at a table with my friends.

You know, the way it works in movies.

Except I don't think it worked like that in real life. We had a cafeteria but ANYONE who was ANYONE brought their lunches or bought stuff from the snack bar (nachos, It's-Its and Mr Pibb, HOLLA!) and then we sat on the ground outside to eat. I was too afraid to investigate the cafeteria situation was petrified of not knowing how the system worked and ending up looking stupid.

Sigh.

6th grade insecurities kept me from fulfilling a dream.

Except that, as it turns out, that's kinda how corporate cafeterias work, so I was able to experience the magic...just 20 years later. For the record, it's not all it's cracked up to be.

[Sidebar: The only times I ever went in the cafeteria in junior high were for assemblies or dances and I have NO IDEA WHY, but I SWEAR TO YOU, Carrot Top came to my school and did his schtick.

For 11-13 year olds.

He was BIG TIME.]

3. My mom stepped up the lunch supplies around that time so I'd frequently have a bottle of water, a turkey sandwich on a croissant and some macaroni salad from the local market. I'd say "It's really no wonder why I was so fat...a croissant every day???" except when I look back at pictures from that era, I wasn't really THAT fat...just chubby and insecure (though there were kids who called me fat, for sure), so I wonder what it would have been like if I *hadn't* followed that croissant sandwich up with an Its-It from the snack bar on a regular basis?

3a. Speaking of It's-Its, I feel bad for you non-Californians who don't know the magic.

4. I don't remember much about high school lunches, but I do remember that I'd sometimes get a take out lunch from the snack bar and then eat it on the lawn with my friends. Not the SENIOR lawn or surrounding areas where the cool kids sat, but the front lawn, which was an entirely different social scene.

I remember those lunches having A LOT of food for $1.50. Mostly I was interested in the tater tots, the cookie and the chocolate milk and sometimes I'd eat the cheeseburger, but NEVER the apple.

I think about the calorie count for all the food in that little brown box and I CAN NOT BELIEVE I ate that with any regularity, but that school lunch blogger pointed out that ONE of the TWO peanut butter "sandwich" things had over 300 calories, so I guess times haven't really changed all that much.

In Conclusion

I'm not all up in arms about what the crap quality school lunches are doing to kids, but I guess I really should be. Poor families RELY on them to feed their children, they're teaching really bad eating habits (processed foods, YAY!), contributing to the obesity epidemic, etc.

I'm not fat because of what my parents fed me. I'm fat because of the money in my pocket and the reality that it went almost entirely to snacks with a Madonna CD thrown in every now and then.