Casey LehmanSwedish school lunch. Doesn’t look THAT great.
When you were growing up and you ate your school lunch of disgusting gristle-filled burgers and rubbery pizza and creamed chipped beef, did you ever think that one day there might be a school somewhere where the lunches were too good? Well, such is the case in the magical socialist paradise of Sweden. (You didn’t think it was going to be in the U.S., did you? Ha. School lunches were bad when we were young, and now that there are 46 kids to one classroom reading 14-year-old textbooks, we can only imagine what’s happened to LUNCH.) Annica Eriksson, the head cook at a school in central Sweden, has received an order from the municipality to decrease the quality of her cooking.
Apparently, Eriksson’s crime was that she made too many delicious varieties of vegetables and she also made homemade bread. She said that she did so because the kids had such a wide range of tastes and she was trying to accommodate them. (The innocence is almost heartbreaking, no?) Anyway, this generosity of culinary spirit did not work for officials, who felt that it was not fair to the kids at the other schools that the food at this school was so good. And so they sent out a decree that all the food in the school lunch programs everywhere was to suck equally and thus the homemade bread was replaced with store-bought and so on.
It’s a sad story. We’re looking forward to the romantic comedy version, where Jamie Oliver jets over to Sweden and he and Ms. Eriksson start their own school. An oregano plant she’s been trying to cultivate under dark Scandinavian skies suddenly blossoms when the two share their first kiss. The students throw dried rosemary at the wedding.
