Lunch Lady: Out of the Mouths of Babes

Once upon a time there was the most glorious mom. I never met her, actually, but I know she was glorious because of the lunches she packed for her seven-year-old son. They were breathtaking masterpieces of culinary mom-hood: the freshest of fillings on the softest of whole wheat breads cut into darling little crustless triangles; enchanting medleys of melon balls, strawberries and kiwi packed in charming containers with yogurt for dipping; plump, homemade oatmeal cookies with raisins and walnuts and cinnamon… that kid threw his lunch away almost every day. So I decided to visit a Grade 1 class and ask…

“Cookies, marshmallows, and all the candy in the world.
My lunch box would go all the way up to the ceiling and it would be full, full, full of candy!” JAMIE B., 6

“Chips, chocolate, cake and cookies:
everything that starts with ‘C’! And an Oreo sandwich on brown bread, so that would be healthy, right?” MARIAH W., 6

“1,000 hot dogs,
1,000 chips, 1,000 orange pops, 1,000 cakes, 1,000 ice creams. It’s gonna take me 5,000 years to eat all that!” JAYDEN W., 6

“Just, only, all I want is candy.
And some orange pop. But I might get a cavity so I should have a toothbrush and toothpaste in my lunch box. My mom wants me to brush all the time ‘cause I have eight adult teeth!” JESSICA L., 7

“A gigantic multicoloured candy cane!” EVAN A., 7

“Sushi!
And a bear claw, which is like a really big yummy cookie, and crackers and butterscotch!” ROSALYN K., 7


“Eight-million, nine-thousand,
five-hundred, two-thousand, one-million, eighty-nine, five-thousand, Oreo Cakesters!”
AUTUMN S., 7

“An invisible sandwich and banana juice!” MATTHEW B., 7

“A butterfly sandwich,
an apple, raspberries, a big jug of water because I’ll be thirsty after all the butterflies, chocolate chips, a million-thousandbillion-trillion carrots and all the candy in the world! And a coconut.” AMY M., 6

“506 pounds of pizza,
500 or 600 or 90 million birthday cakes and 10,000 ice creams and you can have that much ‘cause it’s a magic lunch box and you can have as much as you want of all the things you like!” ADAM C., 7

“I’d keep a big cow in my magic lunch
box and it would be brown because I like chocolate milk and then the milk would be really fresh! SEAN R., 6

The Grade 1 class and I had a lovely afternoon sitting on the carpet in a circle, giggling and imagining all the things we could have for our magic lunch. I’m sure the glorious mom who made those amazing lunches for her child would have fainted dead away in horror. But the lunchbox item that made everyone laugh the most was when the kids asked their teacher what she wanted in her lunchbox and the answer was: “chocolate mousse!”

“A chocolate moose? Eeeeeeew!” “You’d want to eat a moose?
You can‘t eat a moose!”

“You can so eat a moose!
I ate a real lamb once! My whole family did! And we ate a cow! And hot dogs are made from cows too!”

“You could eat the antlers first!”

“What do you mean, it’s like chocolate pudding? Eeeeew!
How can a moose be pudding?”

PC