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Athwart

BY JAMES LILEKS

Puttin in the Ritz

I made my daughters lunch for
school, I occasionally included the Sacrificial Carrots, or some variant. You put in
a veggie to do your part as a good parent
who tried, knowing the bag will come back with two
warm carrots gnawed like a beaver who tests his teeth on
a steel light pole and quickly gives up.
Sometimes Id toss in an Uncrustable: a miracle wad
of prefab goo that went from frozen to pliable by lunchtime. The spongy white exterior was bread, although it
tasted like mashed-up hydrated Communion wafers; the
peanut butter provided protein; and the jelly provided
fruit, in the sense that an electron microscope could
detect two or three atoms of actual grape. The reason that
no one called it the Loaf o Kiddie Crack is that crack has
more vitamins. I used them only in emergencies, and felt
as if Id failed to keep my daughters corn-derived sucrose consumption below an acre a year.
Turns out I was father of the year. From the Canadian
Broadcasting Company website: A Manitoba mom is
steamed after she packed lunches for her children in daycare and was slapped with a $10 fine for not including
grains in the meal. Kristen Bartkiw said the Rossburn
area daycare supplemented her childrens meals with
Ritz crackers.
Ritz? How many kids slump over at 2 P.M., eyes glazed,
pencil sliding out of their boneless hand, because they
didnt have a Ritz for lunch? Will Child Protective
Services put the child in a house where everyone puts on
a feedbag at lunchtime and masticates a mouthload of
salt-dusted processed grain?
Its the fine that really makes it special, though. Its
necessary to give the dietary requirements some teeth; if
you dont penalize parents, they might choose their
lunches based on what they want their kids to eat. A stick
of celery and some lug nuts. Three sheets of paper, each
with pie written in a different language. One single
Ritz, which is downright provocative: Obviously they
know about the Ritz Rule, yet this is an insubstantial
portion. How do we prorate the fine?
Lets just cut to the chase: Parents have no right to
pack their kids lunches, because they might contribute
to the Obesity Epidemic, which leads to fat kids, which
leads to poor self-image because everyone should be
thin like the people in magazines, which contribute to
poor self-image because people compare themselves
with the pictures, whichhold on, somethings missing.
Well, never mind. Broccoli rocks! Smiling kids in a
stock photo in a brochure prove it.
The Uncrustable PB&J could be racist, of course.
Verenice Gutierrez, Portland, Ore., principal, says mentioning PB&J could constitute White Privilege. Or

HEN

White Bread Privilege, if you like. What about Somali

or Hispanic students, who might not eat sandwiches?
Gutierrez was quoted as saying by the local paper.
If a child offers a PB&J Uncrustable to a kid whose
culture is more pita-centric, this would have to be
marked down in the childs permanent record, which follows him for the rest of his life, even to his oral finals in
college. Well, youve given a splendid defense of the idea
that Shakespeare was married to the Earl of Oxford, but
it says here that you offered a peer a sandwich whose
cultural assumptions marginalized the childs identity.
Were very sorry.
There was a time when wed say, But of course thats
ridiculous. But of course its not. In England, where
sensitive school officials probably ban the films of Kevin
Bacon because the posters might be offensive to 16
perpetually outraged storefront imams, a teacher decided
to take kids to a religious workshop about Islam, as the
Telegraph put it. Dont want your kid to go? Here comes
the stigma: Headteacher Lynn Small wrote to parents
and said if kids did not attend a racial discrimination
note would be made on the pupils records and would
remain there for their school careers. On top of that, they
were also ordered to pay 5 towards the cost of the trip.
That should cover the Ritz snack for others.
Our grade school took a trip to the local sugar-beetprocessing plant, perhaps to demystify the source of the
nauseating fog that settled over town when the factory
was going full blast. All I remember is one kid heaving
up the Wheaties on the factory floor, and everyone else
being ushered out before 30 kids involuntarily relinquished their breakfasts. So its unlikely any kid who
goes to see tapestries and old Korans spotlit under glass
will come home and ask the folks to swap out the trip to
Euro Disney for a hajj to Mecca. But shouldnt a parent
have a right to decide?
Hahaha! Yes, I know. Well, besides the high-handed
insistence that the parents not curse their child with hereditary Thoughtcrime, theres another idiocy embedded in
the teachers decision: a belief system is not a race. But
obviously the cretins in Englandyou know, the ones
clinging bitterly to their lack of guns and absence of religionthink its a race, so the school must visit the sins
of the father on the tots.
In the modern world a parent has no more right
to object to a field trip than he has the right to send a
lunch that fails the states mandatory guidelines for
reconstituted-grain squares. Its almost as if cultures
with state-run medicine have a proprietary attitude
towards children. As if the doctor who hands the parents
the kid after its been delivered is doing them a favor. We
can take it from here, you know. No? Well, fine. Well
get them at college.

Mr. Lileks blogs at www.lileks.com.

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