Meal Ticket

 Someone once said, "There is no free lunch." This somewhat cynical viewpoint has been backed up by years of research and personal experience. I can attest to the reality of this world view based on my attempts to try and gather up a lunch from my school's cafeteria. As a teacher, I am expected to pay for the warmed over goop of various permutations served there. Never mind that the kids, who seemed to have been the target demographic for the saran-wrapped chicken and waffles, need only to line up and receive their food and a carton of milk. Where I work there are so many students on the free and reduced lunch list that it is much easier to simply check them off as they make their way through the queue. 

Which does not mean that they are always the grateful recipients of this meal. Quite the opposite. On any given day the trash and compost bins fill up quickly with the discards from those finicky palates. In a previous age, before the virus, we had a "share table" where kids could drip their less favorite offerings to be swooped upon by omnivores who will actually eat anything put in front of them. This was where a teacher might find themselves a morsel if not a meal in a pinch. 

Teachers are not included in the new free meal program. 

Which is fine with me, since I don't tend to eat until I get home at the end of the day anyway. It's just easier. I don't have to negotiate the price or the time to get some food to eat. There are places on the planet where teachers are asked to pay four dollars and fifty cents for their possibly lasagna. These are places in the firmament that ask for students to pay three dollars and fifty cents. Three eighty if you're a high schooler. But since California recently instituted "stigma free" school lunches, this won't be a problem. 

However, if you happen to have dealt with all the chutes and ladders of public education and found yourself a job at Twitter, you're going to be out of luck. Or you're going to have to bring your sack lunch from home, which we all know isn't free. Elon "Gated" Musk, the new da capo of Twitter, has announced with no small redundancy that there will be no more free lunches at his newly acquired place of business. In his cost-benefit analysis, staff lunches were costing four hundred dollars apiece. That number equates with the owner's view of an empty building and all that bouillabaisse sitting in a vat, untouched by employees who are not in the building. Not surprising is the contrasting view given by recently "departed" employees who suggest that the new guy was asking for eighty hour work weeks in addition to taking away the "free lunch" that was costing the company something along the lines of twenty to twenty-five dollars per meal.  

Somewhere in there is a discrepancy that only a teacher could probably discern. If your expectations for participation rises and the rewards, tangible or otherwise, decline there will be sad faces.

And empty chairs. 

Because everyone will be waiting to get home for their peanut butter and jelly sandwich.