The author, John Marek, is a writer and CEO of the Anson Economic Development Partnership.
There is a trend on the internet where people post videos of food “hacks” for popular restaurants. Some show ways you can get more for your money by ordering things in a particular way. Ordering a drink with no ice or “light ice,” for instance, will earn you 10 to 30 percent more soda. Many offer suggestions for “off-menu” items. For example, one controversial TikTok video shows a Waffle House order that consists of a cheesesteak sandwich, except substituting a waffle for the bread. It’s controversial because several Waffle Houses have refused to make it and have posted signs indicating customers should stick to the menu.
I thought of this the other night as I stood in line at my old high school cafeteria. I was in my hometown for a family event and thought it would be fun to take in a basketball game at my alma mater. Back in the day, the athletic boosters sold concessions for these games from a small nook right outside the gym, but that is now the “Athletic Hall of Fame.” Now they sell them from the adjacent cafeteria, which has changed very little, physically, in the past 40 years.
In the ’70s, we had two choices from the cafeteria menu; the entree of the day and the Redskin Special. The daily selection was a rotating inventory ranging in quality from inedible (fish sandwich) to okay (spaghetti) to pretty good (pizza). The Redskin Special – we were and are the Redskins; I don’t apologize for it – was a hamburger with fries and the day’s vegetable. I use the word hamburger loosely. I’m not sure what that brown patty between the buns really was, but I’m reasonably certain that little, if any, beef was involved.
The near-universal hack for this sad burger was to put fries on top and drench it in ketchup. I estimate that 75 percent of the Redskin Specials sold were consumed this way. That’s not to say we didn’t try other concoctions. I’m sure that at some point baked beans, cole slaw, carrot sticks and maybe even corn found their way between those buns.
I said there were two choices, but there was kind of a third, too. We could purchase milk, chips and snack cakes from a table tucked in the corner. These were intended to supplement the regular lunch, a special treat as it were, but in my senior year, I took to a predominantly chips and Twinkies diet for depressingly practical reasons.
Between my junior and senior years, the administration made minor changes to how classes were scheduled. For the first three years of my high school experience, orchestra (you knew I played violin, right?) was scheduled for fourth period, lunch, which meant I had always eaten with my closest friends. For the 1979-80 school year, however, orchestra moved to first period. This was not without its advantages, as we could hang out before the bell in the practice rooms, but there was one downside and a pretty major one from my perspective; I was no longer guaranteed to have someone to sit with at lunch.
My circle was small. I considered only three people good friends, and maybe another half dozen I would have called friendly acquaintances. As luck would have it, none of them was in my lunch. Adding to my dilemma, the school had replaced the long rows of 8-foot tables, where it might have been possible to discreetly find an empty seat without encroaching on anyone’s turf, with smaller round and square tables that forced division into groups of six or eight.
That first day, walking around holding my green cafeteria tray while desperately searching for a familiar face was one of the low points of my life. Eventually, I found a table half occupied by some underclassmen whom I didn’t know from Adam but who seemed harmless. I ate my food as quickly as possible and retreated to the outdoor commons, where I could stand alone against a wall.
I performed some version of that dance every school day for the next four months, sometimes not eating or just having a bag of chips and snack cake outside. It didn’t seem weird or out of place to be munching from a bag of chips standing up.
With the change of semester, everyone’s class schedule reset, and although none of my real buddies were in that lunch either, a couple of guys from the far end of my spectrum of friendly acquaintances were, so at least I had a group I could hang out with. But I never went back to the standard lunches. I was 6’3″, 135 pounds and had the metabolism of a jackrabbit on speed. I could have eaten a box of Twinkies every day, washed it down with a gallon of ice cream, and wouldn’t have gained a pound.
The good ol’ days, indeed.