My Daughter’s Lunchbox is Full of Privilege
Snacks represent how good life is in developed countries (CHRONICLES OF A SALES DUMMY)
I finished spreading the organic, no sugar added, sea salt, sunflower butter. It is up to code for nuts-free learning environments. I added a wild berry jam, which is also organic and sweetened with pomegranate juice, white grape juice, and apple pectin. It also has a single tear from a labor hand. This excretion is organic; however, it’s Mexican, which makes its CO2 load troubling and environmentally unsustainable.
I cut the sandwich in triangles and, of course, no crust because who wants to upset a kid?
Then, I fill in the other space in my daughter’s bento box. I start with a Craize Sweet Corn roasted cracker. It’s a very thin cracker made with all organic products and used for scooping guacamole, caviar, and small fractional shares of silver or gold ETFs.
Then there is the non-GMO, organic popcorn with flavoring, which tastes like cheese but remains dairy-free. Then there are the lightly salted, baked green peas and, finally, a gluten-free, dairy-free pretzel flavored with nutritional yeast.
While wrapping the sandwich in a small paper towel, I realized my mom never put together a lunch box for me. So I absentmindedly said to my wife, “My mom never did this for me. I never took a lunch box to school.”
“Were you not expected to eat while you were at school?”
“Oh my god! I wasn’t expected to eat at school! WTF!”
Of course, the truth is more nuanced than that.
My school, el Liceo de Cervantes, was one of the last, if not last, schools in Barranquilla, Colombia, to break for lunch and come back for the afternoon session. So, I didn’t get snacks from 8–12. It’s only four hours. We were meant to sustain hunger for a few hours before returning home. They were different times.
I had a breakfast “tranca’o” as they like to call it in Colombia. “Trancar” translates to locking or blocking something. When it came to food, it just meant it was big enough for you not to be hungry for a while.
The breakfast typically included arepas, a circular, flat dough pan-fried and filled with butter and cheese once done, and scrambled eggs the way my mom liked to do them. She would burn the butter and then burn the eggs. They were sunny side hard as a rock because my mom had issues with the smell of runny eggs.
The first time I made eggs for my wife, she asked me why I did that to those poor eggs, and I responded, “That’s how my mom makes them.” Whenever I feel nostalgic and miss my mom, I cook eggs like her. I burn the butter and then burn the eggs, and I’m transported to my childhood in Barranquilla.
Most of my friends didn’t get snacks. They got an allowance so they could buy food at the school kiosk. The kiosk sat in front of the basketball court right before the paths that led to the soccer fields and the indoor soccer coliseum.
When the bell rang for recess, kids would run to form in line to buy sodas and savory baked goods like “Deditos de queso” and “empanadas,” — which are more doughy treats filled with salty cheese and, in some cases, guava paste.
I never got an allowance.
My mom was working at full steam to figure out how to make ends meet, but the end of my snack wasn’t being met. So, now and then, I would sneak into my mom’s purse and steal a few coins, hoping she wouldn’t notice.
Until one day, she did, and a friend of my family sat me down and talked to me about how hard my mom worked and how I should never steal from her. It was inappropriate because this guy wasn’t even related to me, but enough to do the trick. I never stole another single peso from her.
But I still had a problem. I had no money to buy “Merienda” or snacks.
Believe it or not, when you are a teenager, learning and using a lot of energy to play sports, you get hungry at “recreo” or recess.
I spent a lot of my recess being a “Gorrero.” Now, you do not want to be a “Gorrero,” — also known as “buitre” or vulture.
To be one, you have to eat other people’s food. You go from kid to kid whose parents have enough to give them allowances, and you eat a small percentage of their food. You set yourself close to the kiosk, and then you beg for food until these kids relented, and they always relented.
The power dynamic was interesting; who has more resilience and willpower: the little namby-pamby whose parents cared enough to give them allowances? Or did the kids who were always hungry come at 10 in the morning and have no option but to overcome their fear of rejection over and over?
When you are done collecting little morsels from everyone, you might’ve even had a bigger meal than those who buy directly from the kiosk.
My wife told me that it doesn’t matter who you are or what you have; in the US, everyone gets snacks at school. I know that’s the case for California. I hope this is the case everywhere in this country, but I can’t confirm.
However, that type of information is why newly arrived immigrants struggle to understand why people here don’t think their country is A-M-A-Z-I-N-G! That is a tiny example of all the social safety nets available here that will never be available in developing countries. Do you want to abuse the elderly? Be our guest. Want a good education? Show us the money, your money, because there are no student loans. You want treatment for that cancer? Forget about it; go home and die there. Your parents have no money for snacks? Starve! See if we care.
Sometimes, when I think of what my daughters get and compare it to my upbringing, I am tempted to say, “My life was rough.” The truth is that I had very little concept of it. Life just was.
Sure, we struggled. But we were still so fortunate to have what we had. We had a roof over our heads, we ate ‘tranca’o’ at home and never outside and we were clothed; sure my shoes soles were not often glued to the rest of the shoe and my socks usually had holes but I was clothed — mostly clothed. But many, many others in Colombia didn’t even have those things.
My biggest concern for a long time was that I couldn’t teach my daughters the gift of knowing how hard life can be in Colombia.
Now, my biggest concern is not that, so much as me forgetting how lucky I am to be here and becoming complacent, the way I see many kids of immigrants become.
Still, the challenge remains. My daughter has to eat in a code-compliant way, and her snacks have to be nut-free. I should start telling her stories of “When I was your age in Barranquilla” as I hand her the lunchbox.
Then maybe she will get a glimpse at how good she has it here.