Jim Carnett: Don’t knock mashed potatoes and Fritos

One of my 8-year-old granddaughters — I have two — and I recently discussed the merits of school cafeteria food.

“I’m not a big fan, Opa,” she quipped, sounding very grown up. “I prefer to bring a sandwich to school, along with some cheese, carrot and celery sticks, raisins and maybe an apple or banana.”

Yeah, but that’s not always a satisfactory solution for her mother — my daughter, Jade. Sometimes, spending a buck for a cafeteria lunch saves Jade 15 minutes of preparation time the night before, or the morning of, school.

And getting 15 minutes of your life back is worth a tattered greenback.

My granddaughter listed for me some typical cafeteria entrees: pizza, fries, chicken nuggets, hot dogs, tacos and, for dessert, Jell-O or a sweetened fruit cup.

“Yum,” as my sainted mother used to say in her regional Kansas/Oklahoma dialect. “That sounds larruping good!” (Pronounced “larrapun’,” the word means delicious or excellent –- which, as I now consider it, makes “larruping good” redundant.)

I vividly recall my public school fare.

I was a member of Costa Mesa High School’s first graduating class, in 1962. My favorite lunch meal my freshman year, 1958-59, was a double order of mashed potatoes and gravy … with Fritos. I remember it fondly to this day. Anything but a gluey gut-bomb, the potatoes were a mellow, fluffy mash with delicious brown gravy.

I was far from the only kid in school with a penchant for mashed taters. Many of my classmates daily consumed the starchy confection with gusto.

Occasionally, I’d bring a sack lunch from home. But that was a rarity.

My freshman year at Mesa we used to eat lunch at the snack bar under the dome in the quad. I don’t believe we had a cafeteria yet. It must have materialized my sophomore or junior years.

My father, for dessert at dinnertime, used to consume a jar of Gerber’s baby fruit. I kid you not. It became an eccentric practice of the entire family.

Nothing like lapping up a jar of pureed plums, or apricots and pears, or peaches, or apple-blueberry tartlet with an oatmeal cookie. Mmm. It wasn’t quite as good as one of mom’s cobblers, but it was close.

One day, during my freshman year at Mesa, Mom absent-mindedly dropped a Gerber’s fruit jar into my lunch sack, along with a spoon. During lunch period I made the huge mistake of pulling the jar from my bag and opening it in mid-conversation with a group of friends.

“Look at that!” screeched one of my buddies, who looked like he’d just spotted Bigfoot. “Carnett is eating … baby food!”

Everyone started howling, and dozens of kids ran to our table to gawk at the gastronomic freak.

I was mortified. I panicked and shoved the jar back into my brown paper sack, and the sack flew immediately into the nearest trash can.

Mom, what were you thinking? No family but ours eats baby food for dessert! It’s idiosyncratic Carnett family behavior, like blowing our noses on toilet paper or eating Spam on Tuesdays.

I never repeated the mistake. It did no good to try to explain myself: “My dad has a taste for baby fruit.” Better to pretend it never happened.

The mashed potatoes and Fritos my freshman year were not eaten separately. Everything was swirled together, producing a wonderfully smooth, but crunchy, concoction. The whole was infinitely better than the individual parts.

For dessert? A drumstick bar.

I munched corn nuts clandestinely from a cellophane bag — purchased for a dime at the snack bar — during my fifth-period business law class. The class, taught by Mr. Luskin, immediately followed lunch. Consuming cornets in class, according to campus regulations, was strictly verboten.

But Mr. Luskin never caught on to my game.

Years later, he became Dr. Bernard J. Luskin, president of Orange Coast College, and my boss.

I never crunched a single corn nut at his weekly cabinet meetings.

JIM CARNETT, who lives in Costa Mesa, worked for Orange Coast College for 37 years.