By Nanci Hellmich
In January of 2010, an elementary school teacher decided to eat school lunch every day for a year and write about it anonymously as Mrs. Q. on her blog, Fed Up With Lunch.
She secretly photographed the meals, ate them and then described the taste and texture of heavily processed chicken nuggets, an unusual peanut butter and jelly sandwich that made her sick, mystery meats and reheated vegetables. She developed a following of thousands of people.
This week she is revealing her identity for the first time — Sarah Wu, 34, a speech pathologist in the Chicago public schools — and releasing her new book, Fed Up With Lunch (Chronicle Books). “With the blog, I really wanted a public record of these meals that I couldn’t believe were being served to kids,” she says. “I thought the book would reach a wider audience.”
It all started one day when Wu didn’t have time to pack her own lunch and bought a school lunch instead. It was a hot dog encased in soggy dough, six tater tots, a Jell-O cup and chocolate milk, she says. “I thought to myself, ‘I cannot believe this is the food the kids are eating.'”
She was working in a large elementary school where more than 90% of the kids qualified for free and reduced lunches. “Many of my students were coming from poverty,” says Wu, who has a 3-year-old son. “Their families were living paycheck to paycheck. Many of my students relied on school lunch for their best meal of the day.”
In all, she ate 162 school lunches in a year.
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