I hosted a patrol meeting the other night to cover some second and first class requirements prior to the next planned camping trip. I think it went well. We could have called it the “Bacon and Poo” meeting. The boys had fun, and may have even learned something. The scouts each got a blank copy of the food pyramid and I read the different categories (fruits and vegetable, dairy, etc.) to them and they filled in the blanks. I managed to keep them mostly focused by throwing dark chocolate covered raisons at them. We then went back and talked about where everything should have been. I didn’t make them erase, they just drew arrows. They all knew that, in the words of one scout, that the stuff at the top was “The good-bad like McDonalds.” I noticed that some of the boys were abbreviating instead of writing it out, and I asked them if they had written down enough that if the scoutmaster asked them to explain what they had written if they could. They assured me that they could.
After the ground work was done I told them, using the pyramid, write a menu for breakfast lunch and dinner. I’d say they fall into three groups. Ones that sort of pay attention to their food, ones that want familiar things, and ones that probably wouldn’t eat if you didn’t tell them too. They each took a turn explaining their meals to the group, and I learned something new.
Ants on a log. It’s a celery stick, filled with peanut butter, and topped with raisons.
I asked if anyone wanted to explain the importance of good nutrition. Someone immediate said, half under their breath “You need fiber so you can have Mr. Henke the Christmas Poo.”, which is one of the few South Park Cartoons I’ve seen. I then had the embarrassed “I didn’t think anyone heard that” scout explain why fiber is an important part of your diet to the rest of the patrol, and moved on before THAT got out of hand. All the lists had Bacon and Fruit so we talked about how to properly store, transport, and prepare them, and what could happen if you didn’t do it correctly.
Each of them had created a patrol menu that included three meals of which two needed cooking (no one wanted to cook lunch). One list included a good selection of foods from the pyramid so I got each of the boys to talk (all at once, but at least they were on topic) about why it was good to have a variety of foods. Then my 8 year old showed up with a whoopee cushion.
We then resumed after the whoopee cushion break with “How you going to cook that bacon?” Having this discussion shortly after summer camp was a bit of good luck. Their experiences cooking at camp were fresh enough in their minds that they flew through it in no time. They even did it correctly, and though I didn’t ask they talked about cleaning up afterwards too. I then moved from cleaning the pans to dealing with garbage, leftovers. I reminded them of leave no trace and that if we bring it in we have to bring it out. We talked about what is appropriate to put in the composting bucket, what can be used as fire starter for the next meal, and what should be thrown away. We talked about storage and handling which started as “you’ll got hungry if it goes bad”, to “we’d eat it anyway”, to, “if you do”… yep. We ended up on poo, again.
In the end scouts that showed up did several more advancement requirements, and more importantly no body got hurt, especially me!
