food – My Life in Paragraphs

I remember the School Lunch chapter from the very first time I read this book. I didn’t get it. Maybe I still don’t. Lamott says school lunches are full of the same longings and dynamics and anxieties for everyone, even if the school setting is different.

Well, maybe it’s an East Coast/West Coast thing, but the experiences she writes about – what was acceptable (bologna, pb&J) mattered and you were ostracized for bringing smelly, wrong things (which often happened if your father made your sandwich)—those didn’t bring any sense of recognition for me. I remember basically zero about elementary school lunch period.