Grade School Lunch - Status Symbols Start Early
>> 12 August 2007
Growing up and going to grade school, how many of us brought our lunches from home? And how many of us were jealous of those kids that always had Kudos Bars as the sort of 'dessert' portion of their lunch? You know, those bars that were disguised as semi-healthy granola bars, but were really the M&M / Mars Corp. pre-cursor "gateway" candy bar to future chocolate addiction? Hopefully some of you are nodding your head in agreement right now, or else this entry will be completely worthless.
(Funny anecdote. The day after an 8th grade basketball game we were sitting at practice, and our coach said "Kudos to Chris for grabbing 14 rebounds yesterday." Chris couldn't make practice for some reason, so the next day my buddy Alex and I saw him and Alex said "Dude, Chris. Coach Sotka said he was going to give you a kudos bar for grabbing 14 boards in the game yesterday!")
My parenthetical stories aside, did you ever notice how Kudos bars just kept getting smaller and smaller each year? They started out the size of a candy bar, but they kept getting shorter until they became equivalent to a Fun Size candy bar. How pathetic is that of Mars? I guess I shouldn't blame the company...that extra 2 or 3 inches of artificial, synthetic chocolate that they pump out by the ton must be costly.
While I'm talking about grade school lunches... I remember being jealous of the kids that had, in addition to the Kudos Bar, the Lunchables and Squeeze-its. The cool kids always seemed to have them. I guess what you brought for lunch served as the status symbols in grade school. But I guess in retrospect I'm okay with my parents having avoided paying extra money for a shrinking pseudo-candy bar, 6 oz of flavored sugar water, and processed meat and cheese with enough cholesterol to clog my little 10-year old arteries just so that I could fit in.
Hmmm. Empty calories and no sense of real fulfillment. I guess the status symbols of childhood really aren't so different from those of adulthood.
7 ideas preached:
i know exactly what you're talkin about brotha. those damn spoiled kids. Reminds me of that Seinfeld episode about the Pony.
ohh, and about them kudos bars. they shrunk alright, but for some deceptive reason the package size stayed the same.
Now wait a minute. I had a pony, but I didn't have the cool lunches. We made our own lunches too. Peanut butter sandwiches, a piece of fruit, and usually some sort of cracker. Not exactly a lunch to covet.
That's funny. I just bought Kudos (for the first time) to but in my 33-year old husband's lunch.
Josh actually got the trickle down effect. Lunches got progressively less healthy since he was the youngest. I also seem to remember him wanting bento boxes with sushi to bring for lunch, just so he could gross the other kids out. This is funny now, since there's a whole group who's crazy over bento now.
But, the one valuable commodity I got was..... homemade dried apples. Kids would trade me anything for those.
Just to prove her point about people being serious NUTS about the whole bento thing, Jen sent me this website: http://bentolunch.blogspot.com/
There is something about shaped food that is just scary. You know what else has shrunken (quit being dirty), those stupid Granny cookies or whatever they were called.
And I always felt left out as a kid. Most kids bought school lunch or had lunchables and I had the nasty pbh with the honey soaked through the bread I made myself. I ate so many of those things growing up that I went from 12 well into my 20s never eating another one. Now they aren't so bad.
I loved your post. I felt the exact same way in school... For me it was the same way with fruit roll ups and fruit by the foot. Whenever I could convince my Mom to buy those, I sat proud at the lunch table the next day. :)
hilarious. why did the kudos bar get smaller and smaller? (i just thought I was getting bigger.) :)
as for the lunches...i was the odd kid out when i brought left over curry in a tupperware. but i loved my curry. :)
you are all high class...sushi in your obento? sasuga daltons.
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