Absurd Intellectual

I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve eaten my share of Eggo waffles in the past — they’re easy, and when you pour syrup on them, they’re delicious. But it’s not the same as the home-made waffles of my childhood.

Despite that, if you had suggested to me half an hour ago that maybe I should pick up some Eggos for breakfast tomorrow, I probably would have thought, “Heck yes! Great idea!” and then we would have skipped off to the grocery store freezer department, singing “Leggo my Eggos” and giggling.

Not so much anymore. There are two good reasons to not buy Eggos these days, and you can find out more about both problems in this article.

1. There’s a shortage — so unless you really need an Eggo fix, you might be taking waffles away from someone who loves them more than you. From the article:

Kellogg Co. continues to have production issues at its largest waffle plant.

Contamination caused by September flooding at its smaller Atlanta plant has been resolved, Kellogg President and Chief Executive Officer David Mackay told analysts at the 2010 Consumer Analyst Group of New York conference Wednesday.

But unexpected problems from renovations to its Rossville, Tenn., plant, where half of all U.S. Eggos are made, will cause continued shortages of the popular waffle through early summer.

2. The workers who make Eggos were recently caught being gross. The FDA observed the practices while inspecting the plant after a listeria contamination. One employee, said an FDA letter, was seen “touching his nose” while working. Others splashed high pressure water over dirty machines while raw food sat exposed nearby.

Ugh, listeria. Anyone remember the Maple Leaf listeriosis hysteria?

Sigh, who would have thought that corporate, factory-produced cheap food might not be perfect.

My mom made me lunches to take to school in a bag. At the time, I thought they were awful. I mean, she would put milk in a canteen for me, then use the same canteen on other days for soup. I neither wanted milk-flavoured soup, nor soup-flavoured milk.

But at least I never had to eat cafeteria food (ok, sometimes I would buy a pizza pop from the cafeteria, and sometimes I would just buy chips and Coke from the convenience store across the street). The famed “mystery meat” and “sloppy joes” of lore just weren’t part of my experience. Partly, I suppose that’s because I went to relatively small schools in relatively small districts, where kids were encouraged to go home for lunch.

At any rate, it’s a pretty common experience for kids to have to eat famously bad cafeteria lunches. Now, a schoolteacher has vowed to eat those same school cafeteria lunches every day in 2010. It costs her $3 a day — but most of her students get it for free, or subsidized at 40 cents. Now, what could you cook for a few hundred people, with that kind of budget?

She calls the picture above “not a bad lunch.” I applaud her.

Check out her blog, called “Fed Up.”