Equality! Fraternity! Macaroni!

Socialism in the Lunchroom

School lunchtime. Anyone remember that? At a signal, scores of previously normal children spill out of classrooms into the hallway and fuse instantly into a mob of full-blown egos — a veritable lightning bolt — to storm the lunchroom. The spectacle amazes adult witnesses, who don’t understand the engines of metabolism and growth at work in those little tyrants. Adults just don’t get that hungry.

The cafeteria is a place of liberation, a leveler where the categorization, judgment, and hierarchies of the classroom fall away and relations realign on a primitive, egalitarian basis, every creature a mini manic gossiper greedy for news. The disguise of shy, obedient, reticent pupils blown, they roam and strut, sprint and cavort in a startling display of superhero personas. They meet friends from other classes, seek out secret allies, renew blood pacts, tap neighborhood pals to share incredible news that, anywhere else, might strain credulity: what they did, saw, and said that very morning. Within these cavernous, tomato-and-onion-scented spaces, myths are manufactured and secrets shared without limit, guile, or fear of contradiction. A children’s lunchroom ignites uninhibited socializing an adult, alone, would barely survive.

But what’s this? As the children queue to get their lunch, one girl is coaxed out of the line and told to wait outside until lunchtime is over. The child is dumbfounded. She’ll miss her lunch, she points out. She’s not to get any, she is informed. But she’s hungry, she explains. That has no bearing on the matter, she is told as she is sternly turned out.

She spends lunchtime huddled on a stoop within earshot of the lunchtime chatter to ponder alone — and hungry — what she did wrong to be punished this way. Her belief that all her schoolmates know, but no one told her, intensifies her sense of isolation and shame.

After recess as the other children return to their desks, she asks her teacher why she didn’t get lunch. The teacher says she cannot discuss the matter and tells her to ask her parents. The girl asks if she will get lunch the next day. The teacher abruptly reprimands her. “Lunches do not fall within the subject matter of this classroom. You don’t want to make the other children feel uncomfortable, do you?” The girl shrinks back. Oh, no, she didn’t want to do that. 

Her parents admitted she had been denied lunch for the very reason others would consider grounds for giving her the meal: they couldn’t afford it.

The afternoon was long and miserable. The hunger, barely noticed during her hour of exclusion, pinched now. It wrecked her ability to concentrate and robbed her of any desire to learn. She grew restless. The teacher didn’t care about her. The teacher said she couldn’t have lunch. Her friends didn’t care about her. They had eaten lunch without her. They weren’t her friends. She no longer had friends. She hadn’t gotten any lunch. She was garbage. Why should she learn anything? She wouldn’t.

That evening, after she implored them to explain, her parents admitted she had been denied lunch for the very reason others would consider grounds for giving her the meal: they couldn’t afford it. They lived close to the poverty line and could not always spare the few dollars required to top up her lunch account. Nor could they spare the time and money to give her breakfast or dinner. Regular meals were not served at home. Nothing was regular about home. That school lunch was the only square meal she got. 

Being worthy was no abstraction that attached to individuals like a smell, but something quite substantial. It determined whether Janine was worth feeding, and she was not.

The school, an institution to teach society’s future leaders and workers arithmetic and geography, is, as importantly, a child’s introduction to society. It provides the child’s first lessons in socialization outside the private sphere of the family. The lessons are both structured and unstructured. Many unstructured lessons — some infamous — take place at lunchtime within the motley community that inhabits the cafeteria. Excluding a child’s access to lunch wrecks that community, impressing on everyone another lesson entirely. 

For example: The children quickly found out that Janine was excluded from lunch because her parents had no money. Having no money meant she got no lunch. It meant she could not go into the cafeteria with them, either. That taught them something big. Some of them were allowed into the cafeteria, and some of them were not. Being allowed in meant they were worthy. Being worthy was no abstraction that attached to individuals like a smell, but something quite substantial. It determined whether Janine was worth feeding, and she was not. It determined whether Janine was allowed into the cafeteria, and she was not. Janine was not worthy because her parents had no money. Nothing the children were taught in the classroom about America and freedom and opportunity and industry would change what they now knew: Having your lunch money determined your worth. It was a funny lesson.

Governors of many states have scorned Federal support for school lunch programs. “I don’t believe in welfare,” Gov. Jim Pillen (R-NE) declared, rejecting money for the Summer EBT program.1 Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-IA), too, rejected the program with the puzzling remark that feeding children was not a long-term solution.2 But if it worked in the short term, one wanted to inquire, would that not suffice?

In rejecting support for school lunches, short-sighted executives demonstrate their appreciation of money over community. Perhaps this is an important lesson to teach the children of a capitalistic society, except it’s not that much money. State governments don’t pay for the meals, merely a portion of the program’s administrative costs. To qualify for $18 million of Federal money for the Summer EBT program, Gov. Pillen’s Nebraska had to commit to a mere $300K to cover its share of the administration.3 The program was slated to provide summer meals for 175,000 Nebraskan school children who would otherwise go without.

But the point may not be the money, or the meals, or even hungry children. The priority in the minds of those abstemious governors may be to shape a society that does not include everyone. A renowned Persian philosopher once said: “If men were equal, they would all perish.”4 Apparently, some of us must be shut out to ensure the rest feel worthy. Those designated as worthy may not notice as keenly the misery of the prevailing circumstances and, instead, scramble to maintain the privilege the reigning powers condescended to award them at the expense of the so-called unworthy, thereby preserving the most substantial abstraction of all: the status quo.


  1. The Summer Electronic Benefits Transfer for Children provides pre-loaded EBT cards to low-income families, whose children are eligible for free and reduced-price lunches at school. Those families receive $40 per eligible child for each of three summer months. The cards can be used to buy groceries, similar to how SNAP benefits are used. The governor later relented under political pressure and accepted the money and the program. https://apnews.com/article/ebt-children-food-assistance-nebraska-63dd35c09547bae0480cee9955b1501b ↩︎
  2. She clarified: “An EBT card does nothing to promote nutrition at a time when childhood obesity has become an epidemic.” She couldn’t have been further off the mark. Studies find that healthy school lunches help reduce child obesity. https://schoolnutrition.org/about-school-meals/school-meal-statistics/ ↩︎
  3. https://apnews.com/article/nebraska-summer-ebt-food-program-children-789f2d04bd195086d2e41d0d43b8111c ↩︎
  4. Nasir al-Din al-Tusi (1201-1274), Nasirean Ethics. ↩︎

4 thoughts on “Equality! Fraternity! Macaroni!

  1. Excellent review of the subject — one which I am sure a wide audience should read.
    I particularly enjoyed the laugh line about not being a long term solution !
    That line clarifies a lot about the underlying attitudes involved : )

    • The stinginess of some of our governors when it comes to school lunches for poor children is something that has infuriated me. When you compare the amount of money it takes to feed the children, especially when you consider what it costs per child per lunch, to the $800 billion and more the government gives to the Pentagon annually (>$800 billion this year; it keeps going up) for who knows what — as we have come to learn, the Pentagon has never been audited — then it’s difficult for me to understand what the values and the priorities of our government are. So thank you for reading. This is something that has been weighing on my mind for quite some time. I’m glad it resonated with you.

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