The Nobody's Business Diner

By Meredith Brody

How does this menu sound to you: tomato basil soup, market pasta salad, salad du jour, organic spinach salad, Philly cheesesteaks, roasted local veggie melts, organic baked French fries, steamed organic broccoli, organic pears? Or this one: zucchini bread, French dip au jus, roasted veggie melts, steamed broccoli, cinnamon orange slices?

It looks to me like one from a new Bay Area café, attractive to locavores both vegetarian and carnivorous. Good idea!

But it turns out to be the menu for lunch from Malia and Sasha Obama's new Washington, D.C. school, Sidwell Friends.

This menu was not only posted but breathlessly read out loud on MSNBC, while the crawl below was about the assault on Gaza -- something I learned because the MSNBC clip was played (with no comment) on Jon Stewart's Daily Show as its closing "Moment of Zen" on Tuesday, January 6.

Well, I thought, that's intrusive, but I'd heard and read a number of times that the tabloid coverage of their school attendance would end after Monday, their first day. And a 24-hour news channel has a lot of time to fill.

But then I realized that this was Tuesday's menu. And my gorge rose. Who needs to know what a 10-year-old and an 7-year-old are eating for lunch? (Apparently the entire country).

I'm much more interested in what these guys, average age 67.9, had for lunch today at what Dick Cheney called a meal "just for the big dogs."

But so far MSNBC and the Web haven't seen fit to report on it.