OK, I admit it.
I have searched and searched and I cannot find a religion angle in this New York Times story.
But still. …
I am from the Bible Belt and there are things that are sacred down there that do not have obvious theological content. As Garrison Keillor would note, there is nothing intrinsically sacramental about a well-made tuna casserole at the weekly church potluck, but anyone who has ever lived in the Lutheran Belt knows that the theological content is there nevertheless. The same thing is tree in fellowship halls in places like Texas and Georgia.
So, can you spot the scandal, the rank heresy, in the following piece of Andrew Martin’s story? I have made it rather obvious:
As students return to school this week, some are finding unusual entries on the list of class rules: fewer fried foods, smaller servings and no cupcakes.
School districts across the country have been taking steps to make food in schools healthier because of new federal guidelines and awareness that a growing number of children are overweight.
In California, deep fryers have been banned, so chicken nuggets and fries are now baked. Sweet tea is off the menu in one Alabama school. In New Jersey, 20-ounce sports drinks have been cut back to 12 ounces.
Lord have mercy!
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Comments (15) |
September 5, 2007, at 11:05 am
No sweet tea?????
Say it aint so!!!!!
September 5, 2007, at 11:07 am
Yankee bureaucrats have banned sweet tea from Alabama schools?! What’s next, instant grits! Lord have mercy, indeed.
September 5, 2007, at 11:53 am
Terry,
If there’s a “ghost” in the article, it may be lower down than what you pulled for your post:
Seems to me that cupcakes in this context are bordering on sacramental value. So a great question is whether or not one type of food can eventually serve the same purpose as the original. Think of how many churches use unfermented grape juice rather than wine for Eucharist. Will Quaker rice cakes ever evoke the same warm feelings that we get from the Pillsbury Doughboy?
As for sweet tea, I was cured from that back in the eighth grade when a cousin and I poured two cups of sugar into a single glass of tea. YUCK! (But have you ever had the iced tea at the Blue Mesa Grill in Addison, Texas? Now that’s tea to be passionate about!)
September 5, 2007, at 12:23 pm
Whhen I was a boy groing up in my little pentecostal church in south florida we would come out of the church every sunday for “dinner on the grounds”. The grounds were the parking lot. But in south florida, at least during that time, most parking lots were lawns scattered with oak and magnolia trees. Sweet tea was always served. The difference is that some women made it with sugar, while others made it with cane syrup. Each group was secretly loathed the other but always said, stuff like, “Imogene, I declere that is the best tea I’ve ever tasted! I am just going to have to try making it with sugar someday”.
September 5, 2007, at 12:27 pm
This might be a heretical suggestion (I am from California; we’re a little strange out there) but can’t you make the tea with sweetener instead? I’m trying to wean myself off of Pepsi (talk about love affair) and replacing it with iced tea with Splenda.
September 5, 2007, at 2:06 pm
The other day I stumbled upon http://www.spiritbreak.com/Videos/FeaturedVideo/tabid/64/ItemID/270/View/Details/Default.aspx which is a short video about a guy finding the sacred in ironing shirts. The guy is from the South, would you believe? His comments are Buddhist-oriented, but I found them more generally applicable.
September 5, 2007, at 2:23 pm
We just moved to a new school district - where homemade treats for birthdays are banned - talk about the demise of all that is good and true…
as for my tea, I take it sweet - no splenda allowed - but with lemon too. My southern born children make it a bit too sweet for me.
September 5, 2007, at 3:12 pm
Sweet tea actually has a lot fewer calories in it than most folks imagine. Sugar is not actually all that high calorie. Pop, on the other hand….
Meanwhile, artificial sweeteners raise insulin levels without giving the insulin anything to work with. Let’s guess what’s more harmful, shall we?
What they should do is give kids more recess and gym time, so they get a chance to run off the calories. But noooooo.
September 5, 2007, at 3:36 pm
Sugar is not actually all that high calorie. Pop, on the other hand…
The calories in soda pop are sugar. Look at the nutrition label on a can of Coke: 27g of carbs, 0 protein, 0 fat, and 27g of sugars. Coke and sweet tea are both basically water, sugar, and tiny quantities of things that add a lot of flavor.
I agree though, exercise is really a lot more important than eating habits. (Though whether gym class actually makes kids love exercise or hate it is a matter of debate…)
September 5, 2007, at 5:07 pm
Rank heresy!
Camassia, soda is usually sweetened with corn syrup, whereas we make sweet tea with table sugar. Chemically speaking they’re both sucrose. But the colloquial meaning of “sugar” usually is that powdery white stuff made from sugarcane, not the sticky syrupy stuff made from corn. So homemade sweet tea does have fewer calories than Coke. Sweet tea that you buy in a store, though, is probably made from corn syrup and is just as unhealthy as any other soda.
September 5, 2007, at 5:11 pm
Correction— corn syrup is glucose and fructose. Table sugar is sucrose. Technically, all three are sugars— but colloquially, “sugar” tends to mean sucrose, and drinks sweetened with sucrose aren’t as high-calorie as those sweetened with glucose and fructose.
So (real, homemade) sweet tea is not as high-calorie as pop.
September 5, 2007, at 5:29 pm
Got milk?
September 5, 2007, at 6:49 pm
I grew up Lutheran in the South, where we gathered for worship and a cultural collision every Sunday, since the church was full of yankees. At church dinners we had sweet tea, unsweet tea for a couple of diabetics, and semi-sweet tea for the un-culturated recent arrivals from up north. Our pastor once likened the sugar in tea to the leavening that leaveneth the whole lump, which, since leaven is a Biblical symbol for sin, created a few grumbles among the flock. You could tell when a family had truly made a home among us when the parents began drinking sweet tea at full strength. That was a genuine sign of true Christian fellowship.
September 6, 2007, at 9:07 am
Obviously, most everyone caught the “sweet tea” ghost in the story. I guess they’ve also eliminated fried twinkies (all covered by the phrase “fewer fried foods, smaller servings and no cupcakes” but I guess that’s a more recent Southern phenom anyway).
“In California, deep fryers have been banned, so chicken nuggets and fries are now baked” should have read “half-baked.”
David - Texas Transplant in Southern California
September 6, 2007, at 9:28 am
It is sacrilege, indeed. There might be a way around this, though. Historically, sweet tea in the South began as green tea*. Green tea is very politically correct, and provides anti-oxidents. They could put it back on as a health measure. After all, these are the same people that count ketchup as a serving vegetables (wish I were kidding about that, but no).
* http://whatscookingamerica.net/History/IcedTeaHistory.htm
(I grew up in TX where this is definitely a religious issue. Unfortunately, we never got to have it at school, but our mom’s could sneak it in our Thermos. Maybe it’s a good time to be in lunchbox and Thermos sales.)