I feel the need to tell you about my elementary school lunches.

Because I was talking to my friend today, about the evolution of vegan cheese, and alternative meat substances, because we were in Downward Dog, and all the blood was rushing to our heads.

This is a very West Los Angeles situation I’m describing.

We were inverted, and I was telling her that I was hungry all the time as a child not because there was no food in my house, just because I wanted to eat all of it all the time.

Unfortunately, we’d found out that I was allergic to milk and most permutations of milk, meaning cheese, creams, and all of the fun desserts.

So Mom, like a good post-70s, post-hippie woman, who had now become a world-beating, shoulder-pad-wearing, Hollywood-screenwriter-person, went to Erewhon.

But this was the Erewhon of the 1980s.

This was proto-Erewhon.

The ur-text of the aura-attuned grocery experience.

This was Erewhon before they’d figured out about oat milk, and chia seed pudding, and six-dollar-a-piece, square-inch nuggets, about fair-trade, ancient-Atlantean-sourced, mega-antioxidant, Mithril-infused, moon-activated, yoni-chakra-harmonizing, Space-Brother-endorsed, dairy-free chocolate.

1980s Erewhon had carob.

The decor of the room could be described as “brown.”

It smelled like celery and a book about celery.

And that guy named Dave who only wore white, and whom everybody called “Ohm Shanti,” who knew a lot about yams and ground the wheat-grass juice in the back.

Being healthy in the 1980s tasted like a lawn.

So my mom began to send me to school with dairy-free lunches, procured from Erewhon. My mom, whom I love very much, and who is a genius in many ways, lacks the chromosome for food preparation.

At one point she sent me to school with a peanut butter and honey sandwich.

Right now, you are saying, “Raya, that sounds magical and scrumptious. Why do you drag your sainted mother for such a delicacy?”

And to that I say, “Indeed, it sounds good, until I tell you that for some secret reason, she did not enclose the honey and peanut butter in bread, she used rice cakes.

Rice cakes were a thing you bought when your home contained irregular, polygonal lamps, in primary colors and also pink and teal, and clocks with black shiny faces without numbers on them. If you got black leather furniture, to be placed next to a block-glass wall, those came with a monthly delivery of rice cakes.

But rice cakes were difficult for children.

When one bites into a rice cake, one leaves a concave, sickle shape. The sickle shape increases in size until one’s baby-fat cheeks become sticky with honey and nut butter. Should one be blessed with a tumbleweed for hair, as one was, one will become something akin to a neck supporting a mass of brown cotton candy.

My hands became stuck. To everything.

Bees became a problem.

But that was not one of the dairy-free-related problems, that was just West Los Angeles, alternative lunch stylings.

The dairy-free products were their own chamber of the macabre.

There are so many snack foods with no connection to dairy, there really was no need to search out the cursed facsimiles of junk food: The vegan cheese puffs which shed powdered yeast and turmeric like a coat of termite refuse. The “chocolate bar,” a rippled coating of carob and bitter cacao over an interior of green mulch. I believe it was a condensed bale of hay, with coconut, pine needles, shredded lawn clippings, and angry raisins.

Another big hit was the super-vegan club sandwich. A pre-made, plastic-wrapped bomb of health. I think the vibe was supposed to be “abundance.” Early-80s vegan food was always much too generous, I suppose to make-up for what it traditionally lacked, but it comes across as an attempt at food machismo. Like, if it can’t be a cheeseburger, it’s gotta be PUMPED.

“This lentil and turmeric patty is gonna KICK YER LILLY ASS! Namaste.”

Anyway, the sandwich resembled a drowned corpse, which had washed up and cured in the sun, bloating and yellowing for several days, until its insides had begun to pop out in violent orange and aggro-kale green. There was thin-cut soy turkey, folded over on itself in floppy, mauve listlessness. Some sort of sesame sauce, a bulk of greenage, and the aforementioned lentil loaf, possibly tempeh, and that violent orange presence, which was an absurd core of shaved carrot.

What sanely compiled sandwich contains a neutron star of shaved carrot? Who thought this was missing from the recipe? These are rhetorical questions, but if anyone cares to answer them, I will hear them out, and throw up on them, retroactively.

I attempted the sandwich and could not get my mouth around the full girth of the obscenity. My teeth created a fault line and a natural disaster at the rounded corner, but somehow received very little food content. Mostly carrot. Upon my second bite, I tried harder to reach the mauve turkey suggestion, but only discovered sprouts. Bonus.

Sometimes, if I sat with the right people, and looked interested, my friends would share their spoils from the other side of town. There was a girl from Burbank who came to school with a Donald Duck peanut butter sandwich on Wonder Bread. For some reason she often was not hungry enough to finish her food, so she sometimes gave me half her sandwich.

I still remember the feeling of the bread smashing into a soft pad of empty carbohydrate, putty heaven. I knew it wasn’t food. I knew it was a fantasy of kneaded asbestos, painted buttery brown with corn syrup and petroleum. It was an imposter, and I loved it for exactly who it was. How easily it dissolved and plastered itself into a paste between my teeth. A balm over the multigrain fibers and seed shells, taking up residence between my innocent molars, vibrating with my breath, occasionally whistling the song of its people. It mattered not.

Eventually the 1990s happened, and I got my lunch from school, and whoever oversees non-dairy ice cream figured out about almonds and cashews. I assume it’s a government position: the Bureau of Really Intensely Neurotic Gourmet. The B.O.R.I.N.G. Department.

Anyway, I think that’s all I had to tell you.

Oh yeah, vegan cheese.

Next time.

————

Raya Yarbrough began her artistic life as a lone seven-year-old, on stage in a bar with her musician father, singing Duke Ellington to drunk people in the 1980s. These weekends spent singing in nightclubs on Hollywood Boulevard became the fertile essence of her adult inspiration to write.

Currently, she is completing a memoir, “I’ll Feed You When My Brain Stops Screaming,” about her first five years of parenting while being an artist. Outside of writing, Yarbrough may be most recognized by her evocative solo vocal in the main title theme of the TV series, Outlander.