I can almost smell those hamburgers cooking 65 years later.
Roy Miller operated what could be called a cafe adjacent to the campus of the then location of Petal High School.
His main menu was hamburgers and soft drinks. It may have been his only fare, as I don’t recall ever eating anything else there.
For 15 cents — probably not coincidentally the price of a meal in the school lunchroom — you could enjoy one of those hamburgers and a 12-ounce R.C. Cola.
Roy fired up his grill a few minutes before we got out of class for lunch, threw on some onions, and the aroma drifted over to the campus, drawing us like bees to honey.
He always had plenty of diners, myself included. The meals lacked healthy nutrition, except maybe for the large amount of ketchup which the late President Ronald Reagan considered a vegetable.
There wasn’t enough meat in the burgers to raise a person's cholesterol levels, even if we had known in those days that such an artery clogging malady existed.
Roy’s hamburgers consisted of a rounded piece of ground meat about the size of a golf ball which he would flatten out with a spatula, then scrape off a thin layer and fry it.
Loaded with condiments and washed down with a big soft drink, Roy’s hamburgers tasted a lot better than whatever they were serving in the lunchroom.
I thought of Roy Miller recently while reading an article about new rules on lunchroom fare going into effect next school year.
Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue, citing President Trump’s executive order to alleviate regulatory burdens, announced the new rules.
Schools will be permitted to serve low-fat, “flavored” milk, such as chocolate milk. Currently, schools are permitted to serve low-fat and non-fat unflavored milk, but only non-fat milk could be flavored. Also, lunchrooms won’t be required to further restrict sodium levels as planned for the 2018-2019 school year.
The new rules cancel some of the healthy eating habits pushed by the Obama Administration, primarily by the former president’s wife Michelle. Apparently Michelle's choice of cafeteria food is only a little less popular with the Trump Administration as Barack's policies on health care.
A lobbying group, the School Nutrition Association, earlier released recommendations to scale back federal nutrition standards Mrs. Obama championed and were set under her husband’s administration. The group is a national nonprofit professional organization representing over 57,000 members in the school food service industry.
The organization called for “practical flexibility under federal nutrition standards to prepare healthy, appealing meals,” specifically recommending that the Department of Agriculture allow saltier foods and cutting whole grain requirements in half.
The recently announced changes also chip away at the goals of the Smarter Lunchrooms Movement. The brainchild of scientists at Cornell University, the movement was launched during the Obama years with funding from the Department of Agriculture.
It promotes tactics like fruit before chips in cafeteria lines and other strategies to encourage children to make healthy choices.
School lunchroom — or cafeteria — food never has been universally popular with kids, many of whom are conditioned to eat what they get at home or at fast food places like McDonald’s.
It’s a reflection of affluence in this country that kids have to be persuaded to eat foods that are good for them; or in the case of adding fat content to chocolate milk and more sodium in the pizza offering less healthy food so they will like it.
In many parts of the world, children would eat just about anything placed in front of them, healthy or not.
Let’s hope the Trump Administration doesn’t go too far in reversing efforts to entice children and youths to eat better. This is especially important in Mississippi which is among the nation’s leaders in obesity and diabetes.
Too many of us, given the choice, would opt for a Roy Miller hamburger over fruit, vegetables and whole grains.
Charles Dunagin is a veteran journalist with the Enterprise-Journal in McComb.
