Cheesy mac with that?

LITTLE ROCK — “They’re starving back in China,

So finish what you’ve got.” -John Lennon, Nobody Told Me

THE LAST time we were in a school lunchroom, the waste was super-sized. Perfectly good food was going straight into the garbage cans. The kids didn’t even try the casserole,fresh apples went into the trash untouched, and one kid didn’t touch a thing on her plate. Even little cartons of milk were flung into the trash unopened.

Something ought to be done. But what? The folks at the health department-any health department-would probably go into conniptions at any suggestion that we regift that uneaten casserole from a child’s plate.

Lately, schools have been thinking about how to cut down on all that waste in lunchrooms.

Last year, the teachers at Butterfield Trail Elementary in Fayetteville, with the help of their students, measured the waste in the cafeteria each day and added it up from week to week. Showing the kids how much food was being tossed away might be a different kind of education. It’s worth a try.

Now comes Little Rock’s school district with another good idea about how to limit waste-as much as it can be limited. (We’re still talking about kids here.) The paper said the district had been giving students all five items on the menu every day, whether said students wanted all of them or not.

You remember how it was back in school.

You went through the line, and you got exactly what the other kids got. Maybe a substitute could be allowed here and there for religious or health reasons, but in the main every kid got the same scoop of potatoes, the same sliver of mystery meat, a roll, three tablespoons of beans and a side salad with one slice of tomato. Every. Kid. Every. Plate.

Now kids in some Little Rock schools can take what they want, and say no thanks to the rest. (At least one of their choices has to be a fruit or vegetable.)

It’s a step.

Until somebody invents a way to make all kids eat properly at every meal-oh glorious day!-there’s probably going to be a lot of waste, especially at schools. But that doesn’t mean nothing at all can be done about it, ever.

The feds estimate that each kid wastes 67 pounds of food a year-in school. Which means he’s throwing out that much only on weekdays and not including suppertime. Every little bit that the rest of us can do to reduce that, the better.

Just for the record, kids, the spinach isn’t going to hurt you.

Although if we had the choice, we’d probably pass on the mystery meat, too. (Adulthood has its privileges.) But that’s all the more reason to give the kids a choice, too.