Somebody owes me eight birthday parties

Reading, Writing, ‘Rithmetic and carefully labeled, prepackaged food-like snack substances placed in hermetically sealed containers.

Welcome to American elementary classes in the 21st century.

If you’ve been away from school for a while, we shall attempt to get you caught up on the rules. Life never gets simpler, and food rules for school prove that old theorem.

Managing snack logistics appears to be a central element of modern education and, of course, this is because everybody is fatally allergic to something though we don’t understand why. It’s a mystery, sort of like algebra.

What we do comprehend is that some time ago public schools had to find away to control holiday social events so that these deadly substances could not be inserted into the food chain for children.

Some children are so burdened by allergies that they must sit at non-allergenic lunch tables with other similarly burdened colleagues. The odd ones – those with no identifiable allergies to anything – sit together somewhere else. School segregation now has leaped past racial divides and evolved into who cannot eat peanuts and gluten versus those who get bloated by cheese.

Schools have taken big, positive strides so that cafeteria diets are no longer deadly or awful.  But “allergenic social activity snacks” seem to have snuck up on everyone.

Some schools have banned “outside” snacks for obligatory birthday parties and holiday celebrations. For example, the Christmas parties where no one is allowed to refer to Christmas. Now this process of judging academically approved snacks will be tightly controlled by the teacher in charge of official party curriculum.

Fair enough. But isn’t this a growing societal conflict that could be solved more simply with, say, apples? Once you wash off the pesticides and stray bird poop, they’re pretty darn healthy.

But perhaps we are leaping too quickly ahead by yearning for older, simpler answers. Maybe we need a more direct debate: Who cares if my kid’s totally-processed obesity-driven sugar and fat snack is healthier than your kid’s snack because yours is made in a peanut butter plant?

Maybe we should be asking why schools are in the snack management business at all. What do snacks have to do with a good education? This seems to be another unexpected problem we haven’t yet figured out.

And some of us apparently missed eight years of school–approved and organized birthday parties. Whom do we see about THAT?