The Dark Side of the Vachon Cake - The Passion Flakie

I don't want to give you the impression that Vachon cakes were all good news.

I have no idea how widespread this was, or if it was only ever something that happened in Newfoundland Junior High Schools. However, when I was growing up, it was a very foolish thing to show up in school if people knew it was your birthday that day. The ever-present threat was that someone was going to 'Flakie' you -- in other words, smoosh the [questionably] popular Flakie cake into your face. If they were at all cruel, they'd separate the cake into two halves, so they could surprise you with creamy flaky goodness, and then get you with the second half once you'd recovered and wiped the gunk from your eyes.

There was very little point in trying to resist this rite of passage. If someone had gotten it into their head to Flakie you, you were going to get Flakied. If you tried to run, someone would catch you and hold your arms behind your back while justice was served. At least in our school, the teachers had realized that there was no way to stop birthday Flakie-ings from happening. The most that they could enforce was a limit of one Flakie per birthday.

And honestly, that stuff was awful! In theory, the flaky pastry was tolerable, but I spent a lot of time trying to figure out what was inside it. Some kind of creme filling, which I guess was the same stuff as in the rest of the Vachon cakes, but to me it always tasted chemically and artificial. There was white stuff in there, and there was pink stuff in there. Subsequent research tells me that the pink was apple/raspberry flavoured, but you could have fooled me. Being hit with a Flakie was not only embarrassing, it was disgusting. I think that I only ever knew three people who actually ate the things, without doing so ironically. (And that's just a guess -- I couldn't tell you who those three people were, but there couldn't have been more than that...)

And then in 2000, a protester hit the Canadian Prime Minister in the face with a pie. I guess he'd been Flakied once too often as a kid. Do you see why we should have cracked down on this sooner?

The Glory of the Vachon Cake Part 1 - The Jos Louis

Back in the day, school lunches were pretty simple. In those days, no one was allergic to anything. Or, if they were, their parents told them not to trade their lunches for something they were allergic to. As far as I ever knew, no foods were banned from the school because of someone else's allergies. So most school lunches consisted of peanut butter sandwiches. There may have been other sandwich fillings on the go, but for at least the first nine years of school, I had a peanut butter sandwich for lunch for at least four out of five days. You could count on it. Most other people had the exact same sandwich. Only difference might be whether they had crusts and/or jam with theirs.

The variety came with the lunch additions. You looked to compare juice boxes. If you were lucky, you got a fancy-pants milkshake drink box. If you were really lucky, you got one of those candy bar milkshakes in a little plastic bottle. (Yogurt drinks are something for another discussion). You also had some kind of a recess snack. Various fruit snacks, fruit roll-ups and the like, or granola bars, which may or may not have ben covered in chocolate.

The real glory, though, was what you got for dessert. And the Vachon Cakes were among the best of the best. As a note for Americans and other aliens: Vachon Cakes are more or less equivalent to Twinkies or Ding Dongs or whatever those other disgusting-but-oh-so-tasty treats are. You know what I'm talking about: individually wrapped cakes with a lot of sugar and sticky sweet cream. Or perhaps it was creme.

The jewel of the Vachon crown was the Jos. Louis. At one point in university, a friend commented on how he hadn't had a Jos. Louis in years, and just the memory of it compelled me to go out and buy a box of them right then and there. Jos. Louis was two round chocoalte cakes, with creamy sweet white filling sandwiched between. Then the whole business was coated in chocolate. Very good eats.

The approved way to eat your Jos. Louis was thus: carefully work at splitting the two cake layers apart, as if you were splitting an Oreo. This took plenty more skill and patience, because unlike a hard cookie, the cake was likely to split and tear, leaving half the upper cake still stuck to your cream. In an ideal world, the two would come neatly apart, and you got to lick the cream off the bottom. If you had any sense, you'd eat the top half next. There's more chocolate on the bottom, and for some reason it tasted different. Eating the top half was a bit of an anti-climax after the bottom. I'm really not sure why.

From time to time, my parents would branch out and get us the other, very similar Vachon Cake: the May West. So far as I can tell, and as far as Wikipedia and the Vachon homepage can tell me, they were exactly the same, except that a May West has white cake instead of the chocolate cake of a Jos. Louis. I'm not sure, though. I think there was a different flavour to the filling, but I'd be hard put to tell you exactly how it tasted different. Does anyone else remember them?

And here's one last thing that I've noticed about the Jos. Louis. When I was nearing the end of my school days, they came out with a thing called the '1/2 Jos. Louis', which was half the size, but still covered in chocolate (not to be confused with the 1/2 (or Lune) Moon. Interestingly enough, today you can buy a box of six Jos. Louis for $3.39, or a box of 10 1/2 Jos. Louis for exactly the same $3.39! So you get much more snack for your buck buying the real thing, but if you go the 1/2 size, you get more of them, and you get to be a cheapskate while packing your kid's lunch. Why not make him share his juice box with his little brother while you're at it?!

An Outbreak of Cooties: Why are peanuts and scents banned in schools but not lousy students?

When we were kids, we used to worry about getting 'cooties' from the girls in our class, and they were probably just as worried about getting them from us. You had to watch who you hang out with, or you could get them. What's worse, once you've got them, you can spread them.

But then somewhere along the line, cooties stopped being the elementary school equivalent of an STD or leprosy and started to become something even more sinister. Go on, say it with me, just for the tingle it sends over your scalp. Head lice.

I remember being screened for head lice in elementary school. I remember an outbreak or two. I remember boiling our combs and having to wash with the horrible medicated shampoo. The important thing was knowing who actually had head lice, so that the outbreak could be contained and eliminated.

Turns out they don't do that anymore. A woman in Newfoundland has decided to keep her daughter home from school rather than send her back to the school that's seen its third outbreak of head lice this year. She says that if health officials would reinstate school checks for lice, she's send her back tomorrow. The health officials argue that it's not effective to do mass screenings, and that they prefer to educate parents on how to identify and treat lice at home.

Pardon me while I rant. WTF is the world coming to? If I sent my kid to school with a peanut butter sandwich, I'd be treated like a terrorist. Don't you know that some children are allergic to peanuts, and even having them in the same province could kill them? If a teenager goes to school wearing too much AXE body spray, they can be suspended for violating no-scent rules. Yet if a kid comes to school infested with lice, spreading discomfort to classmates and inconvenience to their parents, what are we going to do as a society?

I'm not saying that we shouldn't be accommodating towards other people's sensitivities. Even so, there's a part of me that longs for the good old days when kids could have whatever damn sandwich they wanted, and teenagers had a choice between being laughed at for smelling like too much cheap cologne or being shunned for smelling like BO.

Come on! While peanut and fragrance allergies are a real thing, they do get blown out of proportion, and people get hysterical. Fact is, in the real world, some kids need to learn to respect other people's individual rights, and others need to learn to cope with their own sensitivities, or get into a big plastic bubble.

But if we're going to get so extreme about foods and scents, why not get similarly extreme about little critters running through your hair that spread like wildfire through a school? That's just disgusting.

[Now I've got to go scratch my head. Just thinking about it makes my scalp itch!]

Fire Prevention Week

The other day, we were walking past the fire station, and saw the big sign for Fire Prevention Week. Do you remember that?

I lost track of how many not-to-scale floor plans of our house I drew over the years. Each one showed how I'd get out of my room in case of a fire (out the door, like a normal person) an alternative route (jumping out the window in a panic, breaking both my legs).

But there was something else that bugged me even more. Every year, firemen would come to the school and announce a colouring contest. If you won, you got to be 'Fire Chief for a Day', and spend the morning touring the fire department, then take a firetruck to your school, to the envy of your friends.

I always wanted to win that. Not because I particularly wanted to see the fire department--I wanted to take the firetruck to school and turn the hoses on a few select people! I never did win, which was probably just as well. But this year I asked myself for the first time why no one at our school won. Were we that bad at colouring? Why didn't I ever hear of anyone at any school winning that contest?

I'll tell you why. That was all a big scam! No one ever won, which raises the question: what the hell were they doing with all those elementary school colouring pages?! I think they used them to start fires to train the rookie firemen.

When my daughter goes to school, she won't be allowed to enter any colouring contests. They just perpetuate an impossibly-high standard of colouring inside the lines, and lead to poor self-image in the colouring department, and turn you into a jaded, bitter adult. Whenever she wants to enter one, I'm just going to take her to the movies instead.