Do you remember eating lunch in the school lunchroom? When I was in elementary school we walked home for lunch. But later, when school was farther away, we ate in school cafeterias where hot lunches were cooked on site and scooped out of big trays onto our plates.
Not anymore. Little kids don’t walk home for lunch and most of their food now seems to come in a package. And I don’t think the packaging people have tested their packaging on kindergartners. That’s a problem because little kids only have about twenty minutes to eat lunch and they spend half of it trying to open milk cartons, or peel the plastic cover off of fruit cups. They can’t get straws into juice boxes without juice squirting out all over everyone. And, on top of the packaging issues, they can’t eat whole apples – which seem to be a staple of many school lunches. Why? The Tooth Fairy has their front teeth.
I was thinking about all of this when I heard someone complain that tons of school lunch food is being thrown away every day because, they said, the kids don’t like it and refuse to eat it. But often people are simply unable to operate in the way we envision. And we jump to the wrong conclusions.
Maybe we need to start looking at the packaging. As the Course reminds: “Remember how many times you thought you knew all the “facts” you needed for judgment, and how wrong you were! Would you know how many times you merely thought you were right, without ever realizing you were wrong?”
CE, M, 10, P4, L1,3.
So while I’d like to tell the packaging people a thing or two, maybe the best Course answer is to just help people open their milk cartons.