Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwiches? Nevermore!

I attended four educational institutions when I lived in Dallas—Edwin J. Kiest, Victor H. Hexter, Robert T. Hill and Bryan Adams. That’s two elementary schools, one junior high school and one high school. I am not here to talk about the pedagogical talents of the teachers, which principals administered the hardest licks or the interplay of boy and girl students. No, this pertains to the rather mundane topic of school lunchrooms.

Thinking back to those years, late 1958 to early 1971, most of us were in roughly the same socioeconomic group. We were middle class, albeit some upper and some lower. If a certain number of our parents were professionals who earned good salaries, others worked at less prestigious jobs and scraped by. Most were right smack-dab in the middle of the middle class, and nothing wrong with that. My family consisted of one breadwinner (father, an office worker at Ford Motor Company on East Grand Avenue), a stay-at-home mom and four male children. Neither parent had a college degree. An accurate characterization of the Pennington family is that we were struggling middle class. Back yard swimming pools, exotic vacations and sumptuous meals at Dallas’ best restaurants? No. Economizing was a way of life in our homes at 9880 Marlin and 9853 Champa. Sometimes the main course at our dinner table was macaroni and cheese. Although it scarcely tickled our taste buds, it was “filling.”

I would postulate that well over half of the students at Kiest, Hexter, Hill and BA had insecurities of one kind or another. This was mine. I knew the family’s financial resources were not great, and so we had to stretch a dollar. One way was for the four DISD students to pack our lunches. On nearly every school day, Richard and his brothers would carry a pack lunch, opening it on one of the tables in the cafeteria around noon.

Sure, I was envious of the kids whose parents provided them with lunch money. They would boldly stride up, hand over the requisite sum to a white-clad female school employee sitting beside a cash register and then go through the line making their culinary choices.

It was institutional food, OK? Not too many years later, I would eat the offerings of Jester Dormitory at UT, and they were certainly adequate. But remember, this was the mentality of a somewhat apprehensive boy who loathed being among those who brought their lunches from home. My better-off schoolmates would eat their hot, fresh and tasty meals while I was stuck with what my mother had put inside that miserable paper sack. There were invariably two white-bread sandwiches and a bag of potato chips. The first was baloney slathered with either mayonnaise or mustard, and the second was peanut butter & jelly.

In my youth, I lacked wisdom and awareness. My horizons were so narrow, I only knew that I was not among the “rich” kids whose parents could afford to pay for a school lunch five days a week.  As Linda Ronstadt used to sing, poor, poor, pitiful me!  Our economic strictures were such that my brothers and I were told to carefully fold up that paper bag and bring it home, since it could be used again—and again. (Actually, we sometimes got a buck or so to buy and eat the cafeteria food, and what a delight that was.) How many students who brought their lunch from home vis-à-vis those who purchased it in the cafeteria felt stigmatized? I know I did.

The worst thing was the peanut butter & jelly sandwiches. I did not like them at all and would have preferred TWO baloney sandwiches, rather than the customary one and one. As such a request would have been selfish, I never made it. Privately, however, I grumbled about the PBJ’s. (This is shameful, I realize. Just 31 miles north of Seoul is the Demilitarized Zone, on the other side of which live some people who would consider a single peanut butter & jelly sandwich haute cuisine. An entire family could make a meal out of one, and they would consume it ravenously.)

Wikipedia has a page devoted to the humble PBJ. A 2002 survey determined that the average American eats 1,500 of them between first grade and high school graduation. They usually contain 403 kilocalories, 18 grams of fat, 58 grams of carbohydrates and 12 grams of protein; if it is not as optimal as a spinach salad with a glass of organic carrot juice on the side the American Heart Association nevertheless does not disapprove. April 2, if you can believe it, is Peanut Butter & Jelly Sandwich Day in the USA.

Gangnam Night Market is a no-frills buffet restaurant just across the street from my office. The ladies there rotate the menu daily, and sometimes it includes PBJ’s. When I see them, I recall my schoolboy days and grimace. I would rather walk 10 miles barefoot through the snow than eat another one of those.