Good nutrition flies out the window when fiscal loss comes truckin’ in the door. : Goodby, Mister Cauliflower

It seemed only yesterday that the Los Angeles school board, in a ceremonial effort to save our children from pimples and rotten teeth, outlawed the sale of junk food in the district’s 49 high school cafeterias.

Soft drinks were the symbol of evil for the successful good-nutrition campaign, since it is well known that teen-agers, when they can’t get beer, turn to carbonated colas as their primary source of liquid.

As a result, the board took special delight in singling out Pepsi as the hemlock of the Junk Food Jeneration and made much of its forced exit from the high school campuses.

Marching songs and folk tunes were heard throughout the San Fernando Valley as macrobiotic vegetarians and pro-roughage rowdies joined in cheering the school board’s decision to toss naughty Mr. Twinkie right out the old cafeteria door and let Mr. Cauliflower come smilin’ in.

It was an era equal in emotional impact only to V-J Day and to the come-from-behind World Series victory of the Brooklyn Dodgers over the New York Yankees in 1955.

But, as the song says, that was yesterday, and yesterday’s gone.

The board learned two valuable lessons over the period of time junk food was officially cibus odia in the school cafeterias of Los Angeles.

Number one, students will not eat where they can’t buy double-dog meat burgers and soft drinks smoking with chemical compounds and, number two, lunchtime concessions that cater to students cannot survive if the students won’t eat there.

The cafeterias, as a result, have lost about a million dollars a year in the past two years while places like Taco Bell, In-N-Out Burger, Shakey’s and other midday gourmet houses have made a fortune.

Well, boys and girls, it occurred to even the slowest among the school board members that the way to lure kids back into the old cafeteria would be to allow the modified re-encroachment of junk food.

Good nutrition flies out the window, you see, when fiscal loss comes truckin’ in the door.

So with a minimum of debate, the school board voted Monday to allow carbonated drinks back on the high school campuses, with a finger-shaking admonition, however, that they must be sugar and caffeine free. Whatever other chemicals they might contain are not detrimental, one presumes, to a healthy skin and a plaque-free mouth.

I hung around the Taft High School campus yesterday, near a pizza place called Numero Uno, to determine what the students themselves thought of the reintroduction of Pepsi to the cafeterias.

It took a while to find someone able to communicate in at least simple declarative sentences, but when I did, it was well worth the wait. The student who impressed me most, a boy named Jason, was even able to discuss the subject in abstract terms requiring a less primitive form of verbal imagery, for which I was grateful.

Jason felt that it wasn’t fair to deprive a student of his or her basic right to eat whatever he wanted at lunchtime, but when I pointed out that the teen-age consumption of Chicken McNuggets was not a guarantee found in the Constitution, he said, well, it ought to be.

We were joined by a girl named Megan with a nice tan and empty blue eyes who said Jeezwotsthebigdealoverwotweeat? , which, loosely translated, asks why so much is being made over student comestibles since us-guys are going to eat what we want to eat anyhow. I happen to be fluent in teen-age and other obscure dialects of the English language.

Megan was eating what appeared to be a handkerchief smothered with color-boosted catsup at the time, but when I asked her what it was she was unable to say, except that she had purchased it at Numero Uno. Well, it was a tough question.

“Doesn’t it bother you,” I asked, “to eat something you can’t define?”

“I’m doin’ OK,” she said with a provocative thrust of her hip, a primeval gesture meant to indicate it didn’t really matter what she ate as long as her body continued to attract the opposite sex, a theory rooted in the basic concepts that created Southern California.

I for one don’t really care what teen-agers eat, how they dress or where they buy their Bud Light, and a school district willing to pass out condoms like birthday balloons probably ought not to spend too much time on it either.

The real lesson here for the kids is not, as nutritionists like to say, that we are what we eat but that cash, not cauliflower, makes the world go ‘round.

Sooner or later, I’ll wager, the school board is going to decide that making money is far more important than keeping students healthy, and the cafeterias are going to start looking like Junk Food Heaven.

No more tuna surprises or mystery meat loafs, folks, but if you can dig color-boosted catsup on a pale tan handkerchief, then, as Megan might say, Wotsthebigdealoverwotthelittleratseat?

My thoughts exactly.