2010-04

It happens to the best of us. Speeding through the supermarket, we grab the staples of the “kid lunch”: string cheese, small bags of chips and cookies, single serving applesauces and puddings, Lunchables. Uncrustables. Maybe a package of brown lunch bags, plastic spoons and paper napkins. It’s easy. It’s convenient. And sadly it’s, oh, so typical. But not if one school in Austin has its way.

Walk into many a school cafeteria in this country, and you’ll see kids settling down to those hastily packed lunches. By the end of the meal, each child has a small handful of garbage: chip bags, plastic wrap, aluminum foil, juice pouches. Every year, one child can produce an amazing 67 pounds of lunchtime trash per year. This, according to wastefreelunches.org, an internet site run by a group of “green” California moms who are getting the word out about the trash generated by the nation’s schools. Over a 13-year school career, the mounds of garbage produced by a single person can reach more than 870 pounds! How many plastic baggies does it take to produce a pile of trash that heavy? It’s a mind-boggling amount of waste being dumped into our landfills on a daily basis. By some estimates, an average size elementary school can generate more than 18,000 pounds of lunch waste every year.

If I don’t do something drastic soon, I’m going to end-up like Lamont Sanford on Sanford and Son.

If you’re too young to know what I’m talking about, Sanford and Son was a sitcom in the 70s that focused on a junk dealer and his long-suffering son who loved him too much to bail on the old man’s business. So they lived, day in and day out, amongst piles of junk.

The only difference in my scenario is that it’s my son, not me, who’s the junk hoarder.

The kid has never encountered a piece of trash he’s willing to throw away. And by “trash” I’m being literal here: yesterday he howled when I went to toss an old fruit snack wrapper he’d been given at school because it had some cartoon character or another on it.

This issue of Parent:Wise marks our 6th birthday, and boy have we received a great present: for the fourth straight year, The Parenting Publications of America honored us with a slew of Gold Awards in its Design and Editorial Awards Competition (http://parentwiseaustin.com/Publication-Type/Awards).

In the editorial categories, we received six Gold Awards! The judges commended us for our Editor’s Note, News Notes, Cool or Crummy columns, investigative journalism, service journalism, and our My Life as a Parent columns (humorist Wendi Aarons strikes again — and yes, you can read another of her hilarious installments on page 38).

All right, I admit it.  I was that kid who kept a rubber-worm fishing lure as a pet, set traps for aliens forged from empty TicTac boxes, wrote sci-fi stories I tried to sell door to door for a quarter, and invited to my birthday parties one special friend … of my mother’s choosing.  About a week before, I’d find Mom quietly chirping into the phone with her Sunday-school rolodex flipped back on her lap.  I’m sure she was saying something like, “I just thought it’d be nice to get our two shy girls together sometime,” because my birthday attendee would always turn out to be “that kid” too – with a variation.  Maybe she had a collection of rainbow suspenders or a habit of laughing with her mouth closed.  Sheet cakes and streamers and That Kid who refused to take off the H.R. Puffinstuff costume – ah the memories.

If you grew up around Austin, you may remember Aquarena Springs, in nearby San Marcos, as a theme park whose array of visual delights included Ralph the swimming pig, a cable car ride, underwater clowns, and synchronized swimming shows performed by costumed mermaids. Visit the area today, however, and you’ll find an entirely different sort of place. Depending on whether your tastes run toward the more natural or the more visually entertaining, you’ll be either pleasantly surprised or faintly disappointed. For our family, the nature center offered a relaxing way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

Every winter it’s the same story. There I am, just sitting on the couch watching TV and wondering why Jay Mohr still has a career, when the doorbell rings. And on the other side of the door awaits….Evil.

“Hi, Mrs. Aarons!”

“Oh, crap. It’s you again.”

“How are you today?”

“I’m fine.”

“Great! I just wanted to know if you’d like to…”

“No. I don’t. Thank you. Good-bye.”