Another July 4th has dawned. Always a tough day for me.
In public schools from the age of 6-17, in PS 177, Boody Jr. High and Lafayette High School, all in Brooklyn, New York, the same lunch was served every thursday. Franks, mashed potatoes, and sitting in a dollop of these potatoes, a pool of brown gravy smothered in sauerkraut.
It has left its mark. Each July 4th since then, when someone cries out the traditional “Have a dog,” I’m thrown back to a vision of those franks. Swimming in a brown gravy mix that has leaked from its dollop cone like molten slag from an erupted volcano. With strands of sauerkraut swirling in the ooze.
I do not know if this particular food horror was a commonplace elsewhere in America. And I’m sure visitors to this web site who may have been public school educated in other parts of the country have their own tales of culinary abuse practiced on kids too young to adequately defend themselves and perhaps, as was the case with me, so unsophisticated at the time of these feedings that I actually viewed this meal as edible. So maybe my angst here seems exaggerated.
Yet, it occurs to me there’s an issue of nationalism here that can’t be totally ignored. On July 4th a guy’s got a right to enjoy a heavily nitrated frank in a toasted but otherwise tasteless white flour bun smothered in cheap mustard and topped with kraut. O.K. I never learned much in those early years of education that made me a significantly better or smarter adult. But did they really have to take the dog out of my Fourth, too?