I wish they would have taught me more about how to eat healthy when I was in school. I would be the picture of health now, the second coming of Jack Lalaine pulling rowboats full of cheerleaders across Lake Superior. If I had eaten healthier growing up, I also might be a couple of inches taller, maybe even a foot. Back when I was in school nutrition was limited to a poster on the gym wall depicting all the food groups. Up in one corner was a fat little Italian chef guy pointing to a bowl of vanilla ice cream with chocolate syrup. He was under milk, which was an entire food group in 1964. I know because I had to draw the chart for health class and had the hardest time getting the chef’s nose right.
Nutrition should have been a mandatory course in school, as the art of making a paper airplane should have been. When I was teaching, one of my principals did survey our faculty, asking us how our school could have a better curriculum, and I wrote about making airplanes out of nutritional leftovers… sort of, you know, a recycling slash nutrition slash aeronautics class, all in one. I thought it could fit into the STEM Initiative, or the Take-Your-Favorite-Vegetable-to-School-Day Initiative. Unfortunately, instead of being a source for inspiration, my suggestion became the focus of my next performance review, which did not go well, culminating in a long discussion about how I should take my job more seriously and the like, so I just sat quietly, chewing on an organic spit wad, looking out the window, wishing I could be one of those jet contrails up in the sky that sort of fade away into the sky.
Still, when I used to ask my students what their diets consisted of, what they told me made my blood sugar go up to around three hundred. In my questioning, I found that most kids ate nothing whatsoever for breakfast (the most important meal of the day), and even less at lunch, then gorged themselves in front of their computers playing Mortal Combat at night with mountains of junk food.
“Did you get anything to eat this morning for breakfast?” I asked one pale student as the school day began.
“Yes, I had a coke and some chips,” he answered quickly.
“That sounds like a snack you get on a plane. Were you on an airplane?” I asked, confused.
“No,” he answered, “I was at home and that’s all that is there.”
“Well, where do you live?” I asked, trying not to sound impertinent. “At a theme park?”
“Yes, we do live there, and we like it very much,” and that was the end of that conversation.
Of course, prevailing wisdom states that we are what we eat, and in the case of young students, I think it is very true. Most of them, sadly, looked pretty much like the very potato chip bag they hold, – torn at the edges, crinkled and slightly oily, you know, full of mostly air and not a lot of content.
I had one student who was a holy terror in the classroom from what I’m now sure was wholesale dietary mismanagement. He was the human manifestation of the very potato chip bag I’m talking about. From the moment Rasputin stepped forth into my classroom he engaged in wanton incivility and created an atmosphere of emotional vandalism. He talked all period, never did a lick of work that I remember, and spent a good bit of time in the hallway waiting to go to the office, being escorted towards the office or for his parents to come pick him up in the office. I wish I could think of something good to say about him, and maybe I will in a couple of years, but I am convinced he was a product of some very amoral and egregious food choices, particularly in the general category of junk food.
I saw his character play out as I drove to school every day, waiting on the corner for the bus with a bag of Cheetos in one hand and a coke in the other. It occurred to me that if he ate a better breakfast, maybe wolf down an avocado and beet salad while he was waiting, that his entire countenance would change by the time he reached my classroom and that things might turn around for him. Personally, I would have started him off with some kale and arugula soup sprinkled with shredded pitaya nibs, perhaps hand him a Nutella wheatgrass protein wrap with Camel Humus, and top it off with a Acacia-pinecone cucumber squeeze parfait for dessert. I could see his metabolism evening out, his mind clearing, and stepping on that bus like the Man of Steel, able to leap short teachers like myself in a single bound. Eventually he would also become one with the universe, meet God, get married and have three lovely children, in that order, and settle down near an outdoor mall. What a beautiful picture this is becoming I thought, as I drove by, all because of a couple gulps of a carrot and hearts of palm smoothie.
Sadly, every day as I passed him there on the corner, he tried to make a gesture we can’t talk about here, while trying to eat Cheetos and wash down a Coke. It was just too many objects to juggle of course, and he couldn’t seem to decide after he saw my car approaching, whether he should hold onto his precious junk food or wave at me as I passed with his… well… finger food, in a manner of speaking. I could see as I approached a kind of horrible tension creep across his face as he agonized over what to do. It was a terrible position to have to be in, to be torn between his two loves, one of junk food and the other defiance, and wishing all along he had an extra hand to get it all done at the same time. Truthfully, he had brought it on himself by buying those Cheetos and the Coke to begin with. A decision had to be made soon as he had only seconds before my car whizzed by.
Looking back, it was a good life lesson for him, that is, to make some better choices about his eating habits. I am convinced that if he had been eating a plant-based burrito with saguaro cactus sauce, he would have been calmer, not so hyped up and inclined to use his finger for the wrong purposes. His outlook on the world would have been more agreeable, more in line with international standards, more ethnically well-rounded. He would have had one hand free, and, not feeling the pressure to juggle so much, his finger would have followed suit and laid low as I passed by. These are the kinds of decisions our young people are faced with nowadays and it’s a lot of pressure on them. Choices have to be made. While good nutrition will inform them the rest of their lives, defiance is terribly difficult to pass up, and kids are under horrific pressure to try to include both in their daily activities.
Given the pressure he was under, I said a little organic prayer for him, nothing extra, just a clean, spring-fed prayer with as few ingredients as possible – a wholesome, plant-based prayer with no additives and no coupons. My prayer was that a small purple carrot would fall from the sky and bean him on the head, and those by the way, would be black beans over kidney, the high fiber type of course, the kind that’ll go right through you, promote good gut health and build a healthy immune system, probably grown by migrant workers in a fair trade union and fertilized by manure from cows who were sung to sleep at night with the New York Symphony Orchestra’s version of Brahms’s Lullaby… (fading)