Something to Think About

The most interesting thing about the fast food controversy these days is that children don’t eat it.

Take forty kids out for fast food, set a few ground rules for the restaurant and watch them. What adults will notice is a genuine food fight. It’s subtle, it’s ongoing, it’s filled with emotion, but the idea at the end is: I’m not eating that stuff.

“Forty ‘kiddy meals’ please.” Go the distance. Buy every child the best child thing on the menu with a take along toy that ends up in his folder at the end of the day. Choose a place with the crawl around playground as well as a reward for eating – stuff, and it’s still a battle.

“Children, here are the rules: you must finish your little hamburger and fries, and drink your drink. Then you can play on the playground.” This is the third time the rules have been stated. An adult could eat the hamburger in a child’s fast food dinner in two or three bites, so the reasoning is sound.

Charlemagne is the first to balk. He drops a shoe and for twenty minutes fusses trying to put it on, taking out the laces, bothering the child across from him and the one next to him until he says, “Mrs. Clonmacnoise, my lunch is cold.”

Casey is bolder; he simply takes the cheeseburger and drops it on the floor. He’s five. He’s never dropped anything on the floor before, and probably won’t again. He eats half the fries and downs the drink. “I’m done; can I play?”

How do Geneva and Olympia manage not to eat? It’s easy; they cry. Weeping quietly and incessantly for ten minutes, they rub their eyes profusely until someone notices. They are doing the female balk. “I don’t like hamburgers or fries,” they weep. When Mrs. Clonmacnoise shrugs, they follow up bright eyed, “Can I play now?”

Some children will roll the food into tiny bits and disperse it among the crowd. Some will fire it across the restaurant when no one is looking. Some will hide it in their clothes. And the boldest of the bold will just take the whole thing completely uneaten and dispose it in the giant garbage bins that stand by the dozen for the purpose.

At the end of twenty minutes, the homemade equivalent of what would be eaten in fewer than five minutes at school is still fifty five percent on the table and another twenty percent on the floor. Children in tears over nothing and only six or eight of forty original children are allowed to play on the playground because they followed the initial directive – eat your lunch.

Looking around at other tables, Mrs. Clonmacnoise realizes what is amiss. Children with parents are not expected to eat. Original packages not even opened are still on the tables and children are nowhere to be seen. Parents sit reading or visiting with friends while children run off to worship at the idol of play.

Eating across America has become the secondary benefit of the restaurant. Now it suddenly makes sense considering how children have few manners and little respect for food.

One would think the abundance of food would lead us to thinking intelligently about nutrition and food choices. Instead, we have turned food into an unrespectable thing that gets zero tolerance in the hands of a child.

What was once something we prayed over has become nutritionally unsound and in the eyes of children, disposable. Its value? A pass card to the playground.

So what are we teaching here? That nothing is what it seems, that the very basics of life – food - is unimportant, that family socialization is unimportant, that the bigger hype of something public, something circus, “the thing” to climb on is the center of our emotional stage.