Wanted: Someone to Write "All The APS Lunch Lady's Men"

I don't have time this morning to get into the "slush fund" aspects, but I'd love to have an minute/hour/week to follow the money trail that exists between the food/drink APS kids thrown into their mouth and the District/vendors that gobble it all up.

I raise this point after reading today's Journal story about Feudal Prince Marty and his dictate that City offices switch to "healthy" food/drink from the usual doughnuts and margaritas sold in its vending machines.

Hidden within a story centering on some vision-impaired folks who think they may be out of a job because city employees don't like rice cakes is a yummy statistical morsel:

Albuquerque Public Schools recently switched to healthier drinks in its vending machines. A Pepsi official said last year that sales were about 70 percent lower than they were in the peak of 2002.

And that 70 percent drop is just the very small, icy frosting of the giant news iceberg that is food & drink sales at APS and public schools in general. If your humble blogger was anything but a listless, lazy loafer perhaps this post would be a detailed look at the sordid world of pizza, Pepsi and porkbarrel. There might be a 25-part series devoted to the topic, with break outs on the relationship between school "snack bars" and principal discretionary spending. Stuff like that...with charts, graphs and twenty seven eight-by-ten color glossy photographs with circles and arrows and a paragraph on the back of each one.

But instead, your lazy blogger will just point out that his school has a student vending machine outside the cafeteria. It is loaded to the gills with unsold Nutragrain granola bars. It sits largely unused mere feet away from our "snack bar" where literally hundreds of oil-glistening pizza slices are sold every day. Even closer is a little area where the dance team is selling untold ice cream sandwiches for a tremendous markup.

And only a few feet further away is the "Teacher's Lounge". Inside this little used sanctum is a heavily used vending machine filled with Skittles, Milky Way bars, and those little powdered doughnuts sitting in a powdery row inside tantalizing clear plastic packaging.

Occasionally, a teacher will reward a student by saying "Hey Johnny, would you like something from the teacher's vending machine?" Johnny's eyes invariably light up like a 5-year old staring at his birthday cake.

Have a good weekend, everybody.