Copyright 1995 by Joel Furr (jfurr@furrs.org)

When I was a lad, I attended Blacksburg High School in Blacksburg, Virginia. This high school drew from the kids of people who worked at and taught at Virginia Tech, the professional population in town, and the Neanderthals who lived out in the county. I exaggerate somewhat when I refer to the kids in the county as kids of Neanderthals, but not by much in some cases, as Montgomery County was heavily rural and Appalachian in nature once you got outside the town limits and it seemed almost a point of pride with some kids to be well-nigh illiterate. It was not a strange sight to see people walking down the hall carrying application materials from Harvard and Amherst and the University of Chicago passing other people carrying their second child down to the Cosmetology classroom.  There were two extremely dissimilar populations in the school and they hardly ever mixed except in physical education class (9th and 10th grades only, thankfully) ... and in the cafeteria.

The Blacksburg High School cafeteria was a shining tribute to the point of view that anything could be made edible if you boiled it long enough. I know that high school cafeterias have to comply with certain standards, but those standards are, apparently, quite low.

Here's a sample menu for a sample week:

You'll notice some items actually required explanations...

• The hamburgers were patties of pre-formed brown material, presumably containing some form of animal material but heavily stretched with fillers and stuff to create something almost entirely, but not quite, unlike meat. They had lines across them to indicate grilling -- but the lines were painted on beforehand. We noticed that they came right off if you licked 'em, leaving no marks or indentations underneath. They had essentially no taste and a rubbery, puck-like texture; to choke them down, one generally had to apply a quart of mustard beforehand to make them seem sort of like food.

• The fried chicken came, as far as we could tell, from chickens which had been starved most of their lives and then killed by being force-fed lard. It did not seem possible that you could have a chicken wing or drumstick with no meat but so much fat. I presume there's some sort of "industrial" grade for chicken and that's what we were eating.

• And that submarine sandwich... that was probably the nastiest of them all. Imagine the greyest, most aged, most flavorless lunchmeat you can imagine. Imagine the most flavorless, vegetable-oil-tasting bright-yellow surplus government cheese you can possibly imagine. Put them both on a stale roll, add shreds of brownish-green lettuce, and a shred of a tomato slice. Add mayonnaise to make it all stick together. Mmmmmmm!

Thank Heaven for the fact that they installed a salad bar during my junior year of high school -- if you came down into the cafeteria and found most of your friends eating mounds of lettuce with bacon bits and Chinese noodles here and there underneath a blanket of Ranch dressing, you knew the outlook in the main cafeteria line was particularly bleak that day.

I was a growing boy when I was in high school; I was still going through pants at a fairly rapid pace and eventually topped out at 6'2". I was hungry all the time. I'd get up in the morning, have a glass of juice and a Pop-Tart in the limited time between my achieving consciousness and having to get in the car to make it to school. I'd sit around all morning wishing I'd had more to eat for breakfast and looking forward to lunch. At lunchtime, my fantasies of eating real food would be dashed and I'd pick at whatever was served, eating the more edible portions of the food on my tray and inevitably dumping my tray in the garbage can at the return window with my over-cooked vegetables and my impervious colored gelatin uneaten. (For that matter, I don't think anyone ever ate their over- cooked vegetables. Especially not the over-cooked chopped greens. I certainly saw enough people carrying back trays with the entire portion of vegetables uneaten.) I'd then sit around hungry all afternoon, get home, and start eating cheese, feeling vaguely guilty because I knew dinner would be coming up in a couple of hours but so hungry that I couldn't help myself.

I hated that cafeteria, and I'm not out of things to bitch about, either. During my junior year, we ran so low on chairs in the cafeteria that a sizeable percentage of the students had to eat while sitting on the tables or standing.

You're probably thinking "Huh?  Where had all the cafeteria chairs gone?"   People had taken chairs off down the halls for one reason or another, to sit in before school or to stand on to change a light bulb or hang a poster, and many of these chairs had then vanished from the ken of man. People saw a chair or two here or there off in the far-flung wings of the school, but no one knew where the 100 or so other missing chairs had gotten to.  One wondered if the maintenance department was selling chairs to passersby out back at the loading dock.

It was hellishly annoying getting to the cafeteria, even if you were one of the first people there, knowing that even if you put your books down IN a chair at a table to mark it as "mine," when you got out of the lunch line, your books would be dumped on the floor and your chair would be gone. There were fistfights over chairs being taken; people would be about to sit down and someone else would grab their chair and run away.

My friends and I came up with a solution that, in its ridiculousness, forced the school to address the problem. I don't know why it took us bringing bicycle locks to the cafeteria to lock our chairs to the tables before we went up to get our food to get the administration to realize that possibly there were too few chairs, but that's what it took. There had been kids sitting on the tables for months, eating their lunches, but nothing got done. Less than a week after people started running up to the empty, unoccupied chairs at our table, grabbing hold, starting away, and getting yanked back by the bicycle locks, we suddenly had a bunch more chairs in the cafeteria.

Before this could happen, though, we actually had to say "no, we won't stop" to teachers who came over and told us to stop locking our chairs to the tables. "If we stop locking our chairs to the tables, we won't have chairs to sit in, and if we do lock our chairs to the tables, we will have chairs to sit in. Why should we stop? It's not like we're leaving the locks there after lunch." We were on the verge of getting suspended or given detention by the school for the simple "crime" of keeping other people from running off with our chairs while we were in the lunch line.

Sigh.

I suppose they were afraid people would get hurt sprinting through the cafeteria in snatch-and-run chair-stealing raids, getting braked to an abrupt halt and getting whiplash.

So there I was in my senior year of high school, skinny, tall, perpetually hungry, extremely cranky about a school system that wanted us all to be happy little drones and which would give students in-school suspension if you showed the least bit of individuality, and damn sick of the whole rat race. Lunch, the low point of the day, was already getting lower and lower as the days went by -- there were only so many heaps of lettuce drenched in ranch dressing you could eat before you wanted to jump up and scream "I NEED SOME REAL FOOD," eyes blood-shot and teeth bared.

Then came Sweet Potato Day.

I was walking through the lunch line, receiving my tray of goo, and just about ready to round the corner and pay my $0.80 and leave when I noticed a big aluminum pan, one of those big industrial cafeteria pans six inches deep and three feet on each side, sitting at the end of the counter, containing slabs of some brown substance on white crust. There was a little sign attached:

"FREE"

I hadn't seen much of anything for free at Blacksburg High School, least of all free food, and I regarded the pan with due suspicion. No one else was going near the stuff and I was prepared to do so myself when my stomach rumbled, reminding me that the slabs of brown matter, whatever they were, would have to be pretty damn awful before they'd be less tasty or nutritious than that day's lunch.

Hesitantly, I reached out and picked up a slice. It appeared to be pie, cut into rectangular pieces as though the pie had been baked in a cake pan. I couldn't tell if it was pumpkin pie or what, but it smelled of molasses and nutmeg and things that I would have thought the cafeteria staff would never have even heard of, much less known how to use, so it was valuable for the sheer novelty alone. I placed it on my tray, paid for my lunch, and went to take a seat.

No one else at my table had taken any of the pie. With some justification -- free cafeteria food is like free toxic waste. "Thanks, but no thanks."

When I had finished my lunch, I gingerly picked up the pie, whatever it was, and began to nibble... hesitantly at first, then with increasing gusto. This stuff was pretty good! It wasn't quite pumpkin pie -- it tasted different, somehow -- but otherwise, it was something virtually unheard of in the annals of the Blacksburg High School cafeteria: tasty, filling food.

I finished my slab in short order, licking my fingers and wondering if there was any more pie left... and only then realizing that the entire table had been watching me in horror, eyes like saucers. I expect they were waiting nervously for the mutations to begin and big tentacles to sprout from my back or whatever other nasty side-effects the pie was going to have on me. "No, guys, it's really good! You should try some!"

I never convinced any of them to try some. Even when the pans of pie had been appearing day after day for weeks, I was almost the only person who bounced merrily out of the food line to our table with a tray piled high with slabs of free pie. They didn't trust the concept of free cafeteria food to begin with -- why would a high school cafeteria GIVE away food, especially dessert? -- and trusted it even less after I went up to find out what the stuff was and came back reporting that it was sweet potato pie.

"Sweet potato pie?" The only sweet potatoes most of them were familiar with were the over-boiled, syrup-drenched orange mush called "yams" that we got once every two weeks in place of the over-boiled green vegetables. Pie made from sweet potatoes was not something they wanted any truck with.

I finally asked about the pie, after some weeks of happy pie consumption -- not having wanted to look a gift horse in the mouth, I'd carefully avoided asking too many questions about my mysterious but greatly appreciated bounty. It turns out that someone had donated an enormous number of sweet potatoes -- truckloads of sweet potatoes -- to the school system. I gather this guy kept donating sweet potatoes, because we kept getting pie for months. Either that, or they'd simply pureed the entire truckload the first day and stored it in big vats, wheeling out a new vat to mix up some more pie each time I'd finished off the last batch.

I think, in the end, even the cafeteria workers regarded me with a mixture of awe and fear. I could put away an enormous amount of pie and did so on a regular basis. Most days I had two pieces, but on days when I was feeling especially hungry, I'd go back for a third. Happy and filled with pie, I would then head off to my afternoon classes.

I actually had kind of a rude shock when I arrived the next fall at the University of Georgia. Not only did the dining halls offer much greater variety (if nothing else, you could always get hamburgers or hot dogs or make a sandwich) of hot foods, and not only could you keep going back for more if you were still hungry, but the food was edible. We made fun of the dining halls and occasionally staggered out the door, reeling with indigestion, but in general, the whole concept of not being starved by institutional dining workers was so intriguing it took me months to get used to the concept.

And even then, I sometimes found myself staring around confusedly when I'd filled my tray and was heading down the counter to pay. It was some considerable time before I realized what was missing: that big honkin' pan of pie.

Many people, if you ask them what their fondest memory of high school is, will cite a particular date with their girlfriend or boyfriend, the prom, getting laid for the first time on the 13th green at the Blacksburg Municipal Golf Course, or even a particularly decadent beer bash. I expect I'm the only person who, when asked what his favorite memory of high school is, simply leans back, pats his belly, and says "pie."

If you liked this, you may like the North Carolina Sweetpotato Home Page.

Through Time and Space with Joel Furr