It is snack time, at some schools called ‘locker break’ but a key part of the kids’ day.  Some schools give kids a morning break and lunch hour, others lunch and an afternoon break. Some give both.  The kids who are here all day, and most are, come with a backpack and in it are the books and papers they need but also the lunch kit, the thermos, the little plastic sealed containers for snacks.

I like glancing at these snacks as I supervise for they are so varied.  Some kids bring instant soup to heat up in the microwave, or washed grapes, carrot sticks, pieces of broccoli. Some bring yogurt dishes  beside ice packs and some settle in to a whole dish of spaghetti. There are pepperoni sticks, crackers, dips, and of course juice boxes, cheese threads, granola and fruit bars. The little kids often come up to me asking me to ‘open’ their banana,  ‘start’ the unpeeling of the orange, cut the apple, open the juice box, ‘undo’ the tight lid from the container.

Lunch has even more range. In some of our well funded schools there is a cafeteria, offering not just soup or sandwiches but  pasta, chili, stew, hot dogs, hamburgers, Caesar salad, submarine sandwiches, pizza, chicken nuggets.  You can  get white milk or chocolate milk, muffins, cookies and super large iced donuts.  Some students still bring and do not  buy lunch, a few still do go home for a meal, but those who stay nowadays are the majority.  They sit along hallway tables, in gymnasiums lined with fold up tables, or sometimes, in the high schools not at tables at all but right on the floor. Some schools have kids eat right in the classroom and a lunchroom supervisor comes in so the teacher gets some down time. Secondary school students often duck out to a nearby store to get foods the school will not sell them – pop, candy, French fries. At Western or other schools near a shopping area, the students jam nearby cafes for  take-out tacos, hot burgers.

Kids in poverty also bring lunch but it is more modest.  If a school finds a child did not bring anything to eat, the teacher may have crackers or snack to provide.  There are breakfast programs at several schools for those who arrive early and are hungry and a few schools pass out orange slices and bagels to everyone at snack time.

Touring the room to see the lunch or snacks is like an international buffet. I can see the care of some parents as kids bring in their rice crackers, their sushi, honey cakes, leftovers from great dinners the night before.  This idea of ‘breaking bread’ with someone, a bonding experience, is happening even here, and it’s sweet to watch.  It’s no restaurant but the schools try to make it pleasant. Some rooms have laminated placemats for their kindergarteners who sit in groups at their round tables and there is a whole routine even with singing, as the kids clean up their area, throw out their garbage and recycle their juice tins.

There are a few teachers in the city who have been teaching kindergarten a long time and every year they train their new charges to do the same miracle.  You say “Clean up time” and each rushes to an assigned task, a busy troupe of energy as some even grab a broom and sweep, others wipe tables, some line up juice tins for recycling. It is living poetry to just watch them and they take such pride in their work.  They are five years old.

We are so lucky in 2012.  This is a wealthy country and grocery stores are nearby, with healthy food from around the world.  Not many people have gardens any more it seems, but fresh fruit and vegetables are easy to get any time of the year.  I know there is poverty in some sections of the city and it breaks my heart but schools make sure everyone in elementary has food to eat.

One time all city schools were taking part in a holiday food bank drive.  Everybody was to bring food for the poor. At the schools in wealthy suburbs, in came a huge array of pastas, canned ham, bagged candies, canned vegetables, even thoughtful touches like shaving cream and food for the pets.  In  other districts kids trooped in too with their gifts, plastic packs of rice noodles and tin after tin of pork and beans.  They too were being thoughtful to ‘the poor’ and it struck me as they piled up their generosity that they were the poor but nobody told them that, yet.

Early settlers also sent their kids to school with lunches.  They brought what little they had, probably giving their best to the child.  One family during the Depression sent their son to school every day with a bright red apple, rare in those times, and costly. He never ate it. He brought it again every day, so proud he was of it, till it went bad.

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There were two hurdles to bringing a big healthy lunch to pioneer schools.. One was the practical consideration of keeping warm food warm or cold food cold, getting it there clean in an era without plastic bags or Tupperware. But the other was even more challenging- poverty.  Pioneers had only basic food around, had to can vegetables and fruit to have any over the winter. The natives in the area had learned to smoke and season meat in order to even keep it safe to eat.  But still settlers figured out a way not just to have enough to eat but to celebrate good times with special food.  How exactly did they do that?

The  farms often had cows and some kids’ chores each day early in the morning were to milk a cow. Some then just brought  fresh milk to school in a metal can. The food sources of the prairie were wild animals- deer, bison, rabbits – and domesticated animals- cattle, pigs, chickens.  However once the animals were slaughtered, though every useable part was used, it was not easy to transport those parts to the school and few school lunches had any meat.

The household might together with friends slaughter an animal and divide up the parts. Tongue and sweetbreads were used as well as more common meat cuts today and the lard was used for cooking.  A side of beef was worth a lot of money. If you had to buy beef in 1883 it cost twenty cents a pound, bacon was 35 cents a pound, while potatoes were $6 a bushel.  Those numbers may sound small but pay for a teacher was about $40 a month.

Some foods were considered luxuries  – sugar cost 50 cents a pound.  Store-bought candy was a real treat and rural people often made a home made version to substitute. People figured out a way to spin sugar, and to make candy floss. They boiled syrup and pulled home made taffy.

In a cold climate with few ways to store food, summer produce was highly valued. The berries and apples were precious and berry picking was a summer joy for kids.  Families would set out to pick berries, make a picnic lunch, gather bucket after bucket and sit down to fresh berries and cream at the end of the day. Homemakers squeezed the berries for their juice, served them fresh with cream,  baked them in puddings, biscuits, pies, conserved them in jams.  In 1909 one typical prairie woman stored 300 quarts of berries.

Pioneers planted crops and then stored the carrots, turnips, potatoes and cabbages in underground or hill- based root cellars.  Some school yards even had a small garden, and a root cellar.  But as the winter passed and spring came, what was left in the storage bins was often little. To use some of your store for a celebration was quite a gift.

Parents often drank tea and coffee but those were not always plentiful either.  In 1904 tea came in three pound cans for a dollar. It was not till 1909 that teabags were invented and it took a while for them to be seen out west.  If there was no tea around, some people boiled leaves of evergreen sprouts and called it “Hudson’s Bay tea”: If coffee was not available people might mix bran, egg and molasses in hot water.   

The local store had special items of course. Cheese came in big round wheel shapes, wrapped in cheesecloth.  Cookies, candy and dried fruit were all sold in bulk.  The farm settlers had plenty of eggs and butter while the city settlers had plenty of flour, sugar and dry goods so exchanges were set up.  Country pioneers packed eggs in bran or wheat so they would not jostle.

We now know the importance of vitamins in fruits and vegetables but this land does not grow fruit year round.  In the 1930s when crops failed, Albertans got boxcars of apples in trainloads from down east.  When they wanted a sweet fruit pie and had no fruit, some settlers made a vinegar pie of sugar, butter and vinegar in a pastry shell. 

The school did not provide food but it did provide water. Sometimes in a rural school the teacher would put a big pot on the pot belly stove and would throw in some potatoes and carrots to simmer while she taught. Then at noon, there was soup for whoever wanted it.

Whatever the students did eat, the teacher had to still supervise them and maintain order.  There was to be no throwing of food and people were to sit quietly while eating.

The most common container for the child’s lunch was a pail. Paper was rare, even for paper bags and of course there were no thermoses or plastic. Some kids did bring their lunch wrapped in newspaper though.

When people shopped they saved the containers and those turned up again at the school, former containers for lard, or milk or syrup.Settlers knew how to fold a canvas bag up to create water-tight folds so a horse could drink water out of the bag but when none of those routes was enough, some schools arranged for fresh water to be brought twice daily.

Water was probably the most common drink at school which is why school trustees worked so hard to make sure kids got it. There were adult beverages that might transport well but kids were not allowed them.  Apple cider if fermented might make them drowsy. Many of the earliest settlers were familiar with alcohol.

In 1899 there was even a recipe for moonshine or ‘firewater’ to give to natives in exchange for fur pelts. The recipe included ginger, alcohol, molasses, water, and chewing tobacco. A quart of this was deemed worth one buffalo hide.  At one rural school the class was discussing moonshine.  A teenage boy who was often drowsy in class asked the teacher if she had ever tasted any. She said no. He said he could get her some and she started to realize what he had been bringing in his pail that made him drowsy.

In the fall, snacks might be dried apple slices cooked a long time over a slow fire. Outdoors  kids  might chew idly  on wheat..  In their pails they may have brought beans or sandwiches, sometimes fruit. .  If they had overflow from some special events they might bring gingerbread, biscuits or muffins.

The sandwich might be cornbread and syrup or maybe bread with lard on it or a bit of sugar. Boiled eggs, hardtack and jerky might be included and on rare occasions, cooked bacon.  In season, there might be berries or raw carrots.

The special occasion foods were ones cooked with extra care.  For the school picnic people brought out their home made ice cream churns.  Out came the cinnamon rolls, donuts, ginger and molasses cookies. Out came the fruit pies.

Even in times of scarcity there were ways to improvise.  If you did not have baking powder for bread, you concocted a mixture of yeast and eggs or baking soda and wood ash.  Pioneers in 1859 found those also would make bread rise.  If you had no yeast you might grate up a potato and add boiled water and hops.

Bread making took a day and the grain used was not today’s finely processed white flour but whole wheat or barley, grainy. Sourdough was started from a batch of an earlier mix and pie dough was saved in powder form and just blended with water when needed.

The baking was heavy and there was no big push to keep it calorie-light. These were laboring people who worked off a lot of energy over the course of a day and could eat a lot and not show it.  The concern about food was not always quality but simply quantity.

To eat a lot was to have “a hollow leg”   If the bread were extra heavy the saying was it could be used to pave a road.  Hot biscuits were nicknamed paper weights, pancakes were flapjacks, dumplings were dough gods.

If you did not have syrup for pancakes you used honey or molasses. If you did not have fruit or eggs you could still make a very nice pie using molasses, bread crumbs, cinnamon and butter.

Some foods were just plain exotic, like peanuts, marshmallows or chocolate.  Even strawberries in winter were rare and if the CPR train delivered prunes or dried apples, some people joked they were “CPR strawberries”.

At home the milk from the cow was spread out in long enamel tins so the cream could rise and that cream, very rich, was considered a particular delight. You could eat it fresh with berries or use it to make rich pies. Shaken in a jar a long time it would make droplets of butter.  Farm wives put cream into a hollow wooden container and with a long pallet and lots of arm muscle churned it to make butter. Kids learned to take their turn at the churning.

Meanwhile, in the city business people were able to eat out, sometimes in style. A lunch at the 6th floor of the Bay downtown in 1912 cost about 50 cents. In 1913 Calgary had 79 ‘eating houses’ or restaurants.

In 1915 it was harder to get some products and there were fears that local hotels in Calgary might hoard the butter and sugar for their own patrons. As a result laws were passed restricting the serving of those foods at hotels.  In 1918 soup kitchens were set up in five Calgary schools when it became evident that some families of soldiers were struggling.

In the 1930s when the depression hit, it was even harder to provide enough food for the kids.  In 1931 a  Calgary survey of 41 households found that 33 of them had a head of the household who was now unemployed.  A free milk program was set up for kids in poverty and some schools offered free cream soup, bread and milk at lunch.

By 1933 you could buy soup in a tin but it cost 8 cents, bread was now six cents a loaf and you could buy Coke but a bottle cost five cents. 

When the second world war broke out there was food rationing. By 1943 you had to get ration cards for cocoa, sugar, coffee, tea and there were limits on how much butter, meat, fruit or vegetables you would purchase. Some people saved up coupons if they were going to have a special meal or would trade some types of coupons for others they needed more.

At the end of the school year though, and for holiday concerts, people brought their cooking, shared what they had, sang, laughed, feasted.  Food was precious. At the June fair kids were sometimes given seeds for summer planting.  Box socials were events for young couples to meet, where the girl prepared a meal for two in a decorated box and men bid for the pleasure of  eating it with her.  Sitting around the campfire was a common celebration at night and roasting marshmallows with coconut on them, a special treat.