RIVER CITY JOURNAL: OUT TO LUNCH, SCHOOLS AND THE RITES OF CHILI

This column ought to be about St. Patrick's Day. But it's not. The big topic these days isn't some legendary Christian activist who saved souls and banished snakes hundreds of years ago. The big topic is school lunches. Ask anybody. Ask Rush. If you don't have a position on federal funding for school lunches, you are an inept American.

That's the way America is. Polarized. You're either one of them or one of us. You're either right or you're wrong. Black is darker than it has ever been before. White is purer than driven snow. It's hard to tell sometimes which camp to claim. But when it comes to school lunches, facts are facts.

As a matter of fact, you're something of an expert on school lunches, having eaten your first one nearly half a century ago. School lunches in one-room Shady Nook School over on Greenwood Valley where 60 students in eight grades were taught -- that's right, taught -- by Ola Rayfield didn't come on cafeteria trays. They came out of grocery bags and old feed sacks and, if you were lucky, a genuine Roy Rogers lunch pail.

You were such a picky eater at that tender age. Your lunch was a pretty basic bologna-on-white-bread sandwich and some Oreo cookies with maybe a Thermos of milk. One of the lessons you learned at Shady Nook, and you learned it early, was the art of swapping. A bologna-on-store-bought-bread sandwich could fetch two biscuits with sausage and sorghum molasses. Oreo cookies were good for a good-sized helping of mashed-potato candy or a saltine sandwich with melted Hershey's cocoa.

(Folks, if you don't have a clue what these school-lunch foods are, you didn't grow up in the Ozarks, and you can't remember when Harry Truman was president. Never mind. Just read and learn. It will do you good.)

The prize, however, were the cinnamon rolls that Mrs. Atwood Brown sent to school with her children -- there were nearly a dozen of them. Children, that is. Mrs. Brown's cinnamon rolls are the standard by which all other cinnamon rolls must be judged. They were moist and full of butter and sugar and cinnamon. They were so good you would gladly trade the entire contents of your lunch box for just one of Mrs. Brown's cinnamon rolls.

When you started going to school in your favorite hometown, which only had one grade in a room at a time, you ate in the school lunchroom. You always had peanut butter with chili. You could put peanut butter on your crackers, or you could make a peanut-butter sandwich. Or you could just eat peanut butter off a spoon. Whatever, peanut butter and chili were like the McFadden twins: different, but always together.

Just a couple of years ago you went to a party in Topeka, Kan., where the main course was chili. You like chili. It was a party to watch KU whip the socks off some hapless basketball team. It would be a fun evening.

As you and your wife went to get your chili, you noticed a pan of something you couldn't immediately identify next to the crock of chili. You watched as the people in front of you took a bowl of chili and one of the things in the pan. When you got close enough, you could see the pan held scrumptious-looking cinnamon rolls. So you took one, thinking the rolls were dessert. But then you noticed people watching the game and eating chili and cinnamon rolls at the same time. When in Topeka, do as the Jayhawks do.

What a shock. These cinnamon rolls tasted exactly like the ones Mrs. Atwood Brown had sent to Shady Nook School with her children all those years ago. Tears came to your eyes. You scarfed down one of the good-sized rolls and then went back for another. And another. Susan, your hostess, noticed you were going crazy over the cinnamon rolls. You told her they tasted like the ones you had in the first grade. She sent half a pan home with you.

Come to find out, the rolls at the party were from Topeka High School's cafeteria. Guess what. Since at least the 1920s (you checked this out yourself) students in Topeka have been eating cinnamon rolls with chili. That's they only way they know to serve it. Crackers? No way.

Peanut butter or cinnamon rolls. Everyone has some food link to the past. Sometimes just the smell of a food will make you remember something you hadn't thought about for years and years.

As far as you're concerned, the federal government can take every dime of the school lunch money and spend it on something else. They still make bologna and white bread. You can still have peanut butter. The loss of the federal funding would be tough.

But not nearly so tough as not having peanut butter or cinnamon rolls to go with your chili.

~R. Joe Sullivan is the editor of the Southeast Missourian.