Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 28, 1993 TAG: 9303280026
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Ed Shamy
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Hamburgers, hot dogs, chili dogs and rib sandwiches ("like barbecue") invite wisecracks. Small saucers of coleslaw, stewed tomatoes and baked beans make for a tough choice ("pick two").
Not much about this weekday ritual has changed over the years. The matronly women, the dry burgers, the green trays. It's almost all as you remember it.
But thrust your hand deep into the milk cooler and you're in for a shock, as if perhaps you've reached into a dark refrigerator full of donated organs. Something's squishy down there!
Welcome to post-modern milk packaging, coming a week ago to a Roanoke County school near you.
Gone is the waxy little half-pint carton. For the same 30, the Ninja Air Jordan generation buys its milk in a bag.
It looks and feels like a breast implant, half a pint of milk squirted into a plastic sandwich bag. The thing gloshes and flumps on the tray like a fish on a riverbank.
It's a far cry from those trusty, four-cornered cartons - stable, sturdy symbols of a stabler, sturdier era. The bags, by contrast, are wobbly invertebrates. Left alone, bag o' milk has a quivering life all its own. Sometimes it gurgles left; or blobs right; or clooshes like an eggplant dropped from a treetop.
Roanoke County introduced the bags to its schools to reduce the volume and the weight of cafeteria garbage. The bags aren't being recycled, but neither were milk cartons. Once you drink your milk - or spill it onto your lap - you're left with an empty Baggie. A pile of bag o' milks supposedly uses less landfill space than a pile of milk cartons.
Bag o' milk experts and counselors offered instructions to students, teachers and cafeteria shepherds when the plastic udders were introduced.
The secret is in the proper thumb positioning, says Kristina McMillan, a sixth-grader.
Squish the gelatinous implant to force an air bubble into one corner and stab the taut plastic with the sharp tip of a straw. As students sit down to eat, they're all poking with their innocent syringes at engorged veins.
Forget to cap the straw's open end with your thumb and you end up like Bradley Crawford.
"It squirted all the way over to here!" confirmed Berkeley Dent, slapping his palm on the cafeteria table a yard or so from where Bradley re-enacted the incident.
Cafeteria aides, a savvy lot, can quickly assess damage to determine whether malicious or inexperienced pouchers have been at work. Bradley was acquitted. There's a spirit of amnesty in these first disorienting weeks.
Berkeley smuggled one of the implants out of the cafeteria to put it to the firecracker test after school, he said. It was a mess.
Brad Bishop laughed at the firecracker story, held the butt of a leftover hot dog head-high and let it drop. The frankfurter bounced off the table.
"Did you see that?" asks Brad, wide-eyed. "It bounced!"
In school cafeterias, where bouncing weiners are common stuff, milk implants are an invaluable addition to the arsenal.
by CNB