I can vividly remember biking home for lunch into howling southerlies with hail stinging my ungloved hands. The return trip was wind-assisted so a tad easier but just as cold.
But increasingly at my all-boys secondary school, we also started taking our own lunch to school (a Vegemite sandwich and an apple?) or bought something from the school tuck shop.
A typical order from big seniors sounded like this: “Two meat pies, a caramel thickshake and six banana bikes, please”. (For the uninitiated, banana bikes were chewy, yellow, artificially flavoured, individually wrapped items of confectionery.)
Why they were called bikes beats me but it was possibly because they were made from faded bicycle seat leather. Why the adjective banana was added is just as puzzling but, in their defence, they were indeed a shade of yellow.
It’s true to say that nobody would ever mess with a member of the first fifteen who had just eaten the previously described, energy-laden order. The result might have been a knee in the groin or a banana bike inserted into a nostril. Or another orifice of the attacker’s choosing.
Your typical rugby player might have had that selection daily and would scoff at today’s kids who complain about 13 days in a row of pasta bake.
When I taught at a secondary school in London in the 1970s, I was quite surprised to see the school had a huge dining room where children, after standing in a queue at the servery, would sit at tables and eat the offerings from plates using actual cutlery.
While the food choice wasn’t great (think baked beans, deep-fried fish fingers and the like) it wasn’t horrid and the pupils ate it.
But in New Zealand our new, improved system has been a debacle with countless chronicled failures. “Burnt and inedible” was one such complaint. One of those negatives might be tolerable and here one would, I feel, be rooting for burnt. But both!
Plastic packaging melting into the contents is also a biggie.
“Two hours’ late” was another. I suppose they could have taken them home, warmed them up again and had them for dinner. But to fill the lunch gap, schools would need to send out for pizza.
And flying in back-up meals from Tasmania was laughable. I trust they flew economy.
So my own view is that it is impossible to produce a worthwhile school lunch for $3. Setting that budget was surely David Seymour cutting his own throat.
If it helps Mr Seymour and our school kids, I can make a counter offer with a guarantee that it will be free of “woke” foods. No tabouleh, no baba ganoush.
But I’m afraid the bad news is that I couldn’t offer any reasonable lunch for under $10. For that amount I could provide one mince ‘n’ cheese pie – two would be excessive except for first fifteen members – a caramel or chocolate thickshake and four banana bikes.
If the $3 is definitely set in concrete, I’m afraid all I could offer is two plain biscuits, a fresh plum and a lolly.
Once a week, to vary the menu, a slice of fairy bread could replace the two plain biscuits.
