The Legacy of School Lunch: Plate Lunch, Local Identity, Nostalgia
The plasticity of school lunch as an icon in postwar Hawai‘i suggests both shared local identity based on the common experience of a public school education, as well as subdivisions of a place-based identity dependent on the particular school (and its lunch) of one’s childhood. Neighborhoods can be identified by their physical and socioeconomic location and also their shared school meals. These identities and memories interact synesthetically through the smells of the apple brown betty baking, the sounds of the cafeteria trays, the smell and taste of milk that came out of an individual-serving carton, the texture of the Spanish rice on one’s tongue, the smoothness of the concrete floor underfoot, the cool touch of the stainless steel counters, and the distinc- tive odor of sour milk that pervaded certain areas of the cafeteria.
School lunch is a common experience of locals of a certain age, as well as the way they ate it, which reflects local practice. One does not eat all of one thing at a time (nor, in general, is one supposed to skip anything, such as peas or cooked carrots). Instead, one samples the meat, starch, and vegetable together, each bite reconstituting the well-balanced cafeteria tray contents, saving dessert for last. One could interpret this style of eating as reflecting a local ethos of a “melting pot” or, more to the point, a “plate lunch.” Although this interpretation may sound overdetermined and trite, it follows what anthropologist Dafna Hirsch finds in her analysis of hummus in Israel: “[In] the Israeli manner of eating hummus (referred to in Hebrew as ‘wiping,’ distinct from Palestinian ‘dipping’), the entire bodily hexis involved in its consumption . . . manifest the main quali- ties that Israelis like to associate with ‘Israeliness’: informality . . . but also socia- bility.”19 In other words, the very manner of eating school lunch in Hawai‘i, as in eating hummus in Israel, may be interpreted as linked to identity.
Until child labor laws intervened in the 1970s, students in both public and some private schools were required to render one or two days’ service a year to the school lunch program, generally serving food or milk, punching or col- lecting lunch tickets, and performing other simple tasks. Even this becomes part of the remembered experience of school lunch—whether of one’s own labor (and legitimately missing class) or recognizing one’s friend on the other side of the counter serving. Lori H., who attended Lunalilo Elementary School
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on O‘ahu, recalled this practice without resentment—fondly, in fact. In a 2009 e-mail to the Honolulu Advertiser, she remembered that these students got free lunches and generally an extra dessert and thought that wearing black hair nets was hilarious. They enjoyed the chance to sneak their friends extra large serv- ings of the “really good stuff ” (such as, she said, mashed potatoes, considered “exotic” because then the dish was rarely served in island homes). Rochelle Uchibori said the long hours of “cafeteria duty” “gave me a better appreciation of and insight into the hard work it took to bring us those meals.”
“Nani,” who went to Manoa Valley Elementary in the 1950s, remarked dur- ing a phone call to food editor Wanda Adams, “They fed us so well. It was so much better than anything the schools are making now.” Another man, a McKinley High School graduate of Okinawan heritage, whose mother was a cook, jokes that he knew only three “Okinawan” dishes when he was a child: meatloaf, spaghetti, and mac and cheese. Years later, he asked his mother why she cooked that way, and she said that those dishes were the ones she learned to cook, first in service as a maid in a haole household and then in the school system working in the cafeteria. She emphatically added, “Plus, I wanted my children to be Americans.”
The legacy of school lunch of postwar Hawai‘i may be seen most clearly in the evolution of the plate lunch: a sectioned plate of rice, meat dish, and macaroni salad. The plate lunch has become an icon of local culture, notably in a touring exhibit (1997/1998), “From Bento to Mixed Plate,” curated by the Japanese American National Museum. Further iterations of the iconicity of the plate lunch can be found in food scholar Rachel Laudan’s The Food of Para- dise: Exploring Hawaii’s Culinary Heritage,20 Wanda Adams’s The Island Plate,21 and journalist Arnold Hiura’s Kau Kau: Cuisine and Culture in the Hawaiian Islands.22 Hiura’s documentation of the genesis of the plate lunch in postwar Hawai‘i includes historic sharing of plantation bento (lunch) among workers, pushcart peddlers serving hot lunches to dock workers, lunch stands and wag- ons selling plate lunches, drive-ins, and restaurants. He does not mention the role that school lunches had in creating the expectation of a hot meal in the middle of the day, shared with one’s peers while seated at a long table. Some people still call it the highlight of their day.