When you were in school, what were the grossest things they served for you lunch?

  I have had never even heard of nor had I ever seen wax beans until I was about eight or nine or maybe ten years old when they started a Children’s Community Garden next door to a nearby elementary school. It wasn’t a school that we attended; ours was on the other side of town, but a large vacant lot was cleared out and plowed under to make space for about twenty* or thirty* of us to join this new program. The community garden was set up in a way that children planted seeds or bulbs of pre-started plants that were predetermined not only on which vegetables but also where and how we would place the rows in our garden plot so that each child had an identical garden space. Wax beans were one of the vegetables on the list. Everything that we harvested there we could take as much home as we could use, but the wax beans were the only things that we never ate.

Here’s what we planted.*

1 Sunflower in one corner of the plot
Tomato plants along one fence line 
Row of corn
Row of lettuce
Row of peas
Row of onions
Row of green beans 
Row of wax beans
Row of squash 
Cucumbers

*If memory serves me right after more than three decades.
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  When my children were in elementary school, it was common for parent volunteers to be in the lunchroom. One year, I was on the evening shift at my job, so I had time during school hours to help out, so I did it too. I was the adult line monitor who scanned the barcodes on the students’ lunch passes. The students who paid cash for their lunches formed a separate line to go to the cashier.
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  Hold on a second, that sounds like a sandwich!  I’ll be right there! *Randolph D books a flight to Buenos Aires.

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  Mama! Whenever you’re not looking, Livvie keeps kicking me under the table!
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  I can see how this one ends. She’s plotting something, I just know she is. Grrrrrrr.
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