Meeting “at the corner” to walk the remaining quarter mile to school together. ca 1955.
I subscribe to Blue Frog Studio’s Streaming Service and as part of that every Sunday, I receive The Word with Wayne Cox. A couple of Sundays ago, he wrote about “Brown Baggin’ It,” his memories of school lunches in a Vancouver elementary school in the mid-1950s. Lately I have been thinking a lot about school lunches although my experiences were in a one-room country school in south central Manitoba.
First, a brief review of Wayne’s memories that inspired me to think more about school lunches of my youth. He recalled a spartan lunch of a sandwich and cookies that he rushed through so he could get outside and play, and a friend whose mother sent along the best chocolate chip cookies ever for him. The top sandwich for Wayne was peanut butter and jam, but he also recalled the kid who liked lettuce and mustard and one who ate mustard and mayonnaise sandwiches! Every sandwich used plain white bread. High school was a different scenario for Wayne. His high school had a cafeteria and hot food served up each day. Well, not for me. I never attended or taught in a school that had a cafeteria and that has always made me wonder what school boards were thinking when they built schools without proper eating facilities for the children that would spend long days there. But that’s another topic so back to remembering school lunches in my one-room country school of the 1950s.
We lived about two kilometres (one and one quarter miles) from our school, a distance we walked each day except in winter when we cut across the fields to shorten the distance to about one and one quarter kilometres (less than one mile). My school burned down when I was in grade two so for the beginning of grade three, we had a new school with a large basement, indoor toilets and a “kitchen.” The kitchen was a large room with cupboards, a sink, a water pail, and a hot plate! There was no refrigerator. So, if we had hot or cold beverages for lunch they would have been carried from home in a thermos. Once we had a hot plate in the kitchen, it was a new era because we also got a big oval “boiler” that heated several inches of water into which we placed jars of soup or beans or stew brought from home. This made a hot lunch possible on cold winter days.
More common year-round were lunch pail lunches that consisted of a sandwich, a sweet treat, and an apple or orange. In a rural farming community where eating aligned with what was growing on the farm, our sandwiches were seasonal. All the sandwiches used homemade white bread usually baked once or twice a week by our mothers. I was from a family of four children and that made for a lot of sandwiches every week that required a lot of bread. The one unforgettable sandwich that I both dreaded and loved in September was a tomato sandwich. White bread, and sliced tomato with a bit of butter and salt, carefully wrapped as all lunch items were in those days, in waxed paper! By lunch time the delicious ripe tomato would have soaked into the bread, so the first bite was gooey, soggy, and gummy but tasty! If I remember correctly, only the first few bites were gooey and as I continued to eat out toward the crust of the bread it was more like a sandwich should have been — tasty soft tomato between chewy bread.
What grew in the garden often determined what went into sandwiches. There was always lots of lettuce and we loved radish sandwiches, again with lots of butter and salt. Leftovers from Sunday dinner usually found their way into our lunches at the beginning of each week and so sandwiches were filled with sliced chicken, beef, pork or venison. Egg salad was loved. Sardines often filled the sandwiches as did Cheez whiz or sliced Velveeta cheese. Klik was a Canadian version of Spam that sliced nicely to fit between bread slices and was sometimes mixed with salad dressing and pickles or relish. 
Pickles were plentiful as most mothers canned a variety during the summer to last all winter. Other standbys were bologna or hot dogs, usually cooked and sliced. Peanut butter and honey (never jam) were left for winter days when there was nothing else to put in sandwiches. Peanut butter was always accompanied by honey because we kept bees and extracted our own honey, so honey was plentiful.
Lunch always included a cookie or two and either an orange or apple. Making some sweet treat for lunch was another task that fell to mothers. Many variations of oatmeal cookies were common and puffed wheat cake (or cookies) as they were sometimes called were common. When there was nothing freshly baked to put in our lunch, our mother got creative! She would cut cubes of bread, about five centimetres square that she would then cover with chocolate icing and sprinkle with chopped nuts or coconut, improvising a sweet cake to include in our lunches. I was envious of friends who got a banana in their lunch, but we never did. I can only conclude they were more expensive than either oranges or apples and there was no extravagance in our family!
As Wayne Cox recalled the sandwiches he and his friends ate he began to wonder if he had grown up in a financially deprived neighbourhood. As I recalled the things we ate in sandwiches, I began to feel like we were privileged although we were quite poor. As a rural farm family, we lived in a subsistence kind of economy. Almost everything we ate was either raised, grown, or preserved by us. Even salad dressing or mayonnaise as we know it today was made at home. As girls in the family, we were expected to make our own lunches and we were given choices, an experience that undoubtedly began to shape gender differences in relation to food.
The most amazing thing about the school lunches we ate in the small one-room school I attended until the end of grade seven is that we weren’t sick all the time. There was little concern for food safety back then. We didn’t have a refrigerator at school to store our lunches, and we only had refrigerators and electricity in our homes after 1952. Prior to that food was kept cool by storage in the basement or lowering down the large brick lined wells on the farm. The cool temperatures for storage would not have been sufficient to prevent bacteria growth in food. Drinking water was from an outside well or a dipper in a pail of well water kept inside the school kitchen. Certainly, if a cold, flu or other communicable disease such as measles or chicken pox affected one family in the school district, it usually spread to everyone. We didn’t travel outside our small communities often so that probably prevented disease spread and we were likely living in close harmony with the bacteria in our near environment. It’s great fun to think back on school lunches of our youth and wonder how did we do it? It was a simpler time and we survived!
