Okay, another quick update to assure everyone that I'm alive and will soon be posting regularly again. For now, I just got on for a quick moan about school lunches.

As I sit and eat my cabbage, carrot, corn, and hot dog soup (in fish stock), I have to wonder about what makes truly good cafeteria food. American lunches did have many of the major food groups necessary for children - starch, fat, oil, sugar, and burnt crispy bits, to name a few. To be fair, there usually was a healthy option in most lunches, but honestly, I think maybe 1 out of 25 students actually selected to pick up a fruit cup or salad, and of those, about 90% threw it away without eating it. It was almost impossible to get a really healthy lunch that tasted decent. In America, I saw so much junk food that I was convinced that no nation in the world could have a worse school lunch program. I was wrong.

I guess I shouldn't complain because I'm fairly certain that most of the lunches I eat here are healthy. Or, at least, what I can identify in the lunches is probably healthy. Maybe. I know the school lunches are usually planned so that they can utilize fresh ingredients. But it kind of sucks, because it has given me a chance to figure out exactly which vegetables I hate to eat boiled and then cooled (most of them). What makes "fresh ingredients" worse is that they really love seasonal stuff. And, unfortunately for me, it's mushroom season now. It's not that I have anything against fungal lunches, per se, but after a solid 2 weeks of them, my stomach and I are ready for a change. Or a gas-x. Mushroom are gross. I can only liken the fungal culinary experience to eating a rubber chew toy for dogs. In my humble opinion, no food should squeak when you eat it unless it is alive and actively trying to escape. And while quite a few mushrooms have managed to fall off my chopsticks, I wouldn't call that an attempt to escape. Or, at least, I wouldn't call it an active one because that would involve biting and scratching. And if I ever met a biting, scratching mushroom, I think I'd just leave it alone.

I really hate mushroom and cabbage season. I suppose everything has a season, and we must endure through the gross, squeaky, tasteless seasons. I guess I just have to keep hoping and waiting for chocolate cake season.