# The week is printed for a parent; the star is not

> A school dinner menu is issued to inform a parent. The star drawn above Friday is aimed at nobody but the child holding the pencil.

August 19, 2026 · https://justog.club/stories/school-dinner-week-menu

Five columns, two rows. A main and a pudding for every day of the school week, ruled off in
navy. FISH and ICE CREAM sit in red on Friday, the only colour the printer used.

Above Friday, in a different hand entirely, somebody has drawn a star. It isn't part of the menu.

## Why does a whole week fit in ten boxes?

Because the menu is written for somebody who won't be in the room.

A parent reading this sheet needs to know what their child is eating without asking them, so the
week gets compressed into a grid they can scan at a glance: main, pudding, day, done. That
compression is the whole point of a document like this — nobody sits down to read it, they glance
at it on a fridge and move on.

## Why is Friday marked twice?

Because two different people are marking it, for two different reasons.

The red on FISH and ICE CREAM is the kitchen's own emphasis, printed at the same time as everything
else — the day the week's pattern breaks, worth a second look from whoever's cooking it. The star
above it is added later, by hand, by somebody who has no interest in the kitchen's reasons at all.
One mark is institutional. The other is personal. They just happen to land on the same day, the
same layering a [takeaway menu ringed in biro](/stories/takeaway-menu-numbers) carries —
printed for everyone, marked by one household.

## What makes one of these worth printing?

The gap between what the grid says and what got added to it.

A clean, unmarked week is just a schedule — accurate, useful, and completely uninteresting to look
at twice. The star is what turns it into something that happened to one particular child rather
than any child on that circuit. It doesn't need to be legible as anything more than a star; the
fact that a five-year-old thought Friday deserved one is the entire content.

## Can I put a real school's menu on it?

Not their name or their design, though the format itself belongs to nobody.

A five-day grid with a main and a pudding is a convention used by every catering kitchen in the
country — nobody owns that shape any more than they own a calendar. A specific school's branding,
its badge or its actual weekly menu is a different matter, theirs to licence if putting a real one
on a shirt is the point. An invented week, with invented dishes, sidesteps that and still reads as
exactly true to anyone who's eaten one.

## Does this work for something other than a school dinner?

Anywhere a week gets handed to a child in a grid and handed back with a mark on it.

A nursery's menu, a summer camp's mess-hall board, a hospital ward's food chart for a long stay —
all issued the same way, to inform somebody who isn't there, and all capable of picking up the same
kind of unplanned addition. The [freezer label with nothing on it but a question
mark](/stories/freezer-leftovers-labels) is the same principle worked from the other end: a
document nobody designed to be moving, doing it anyway.

## Isn't a canteen menu too mundane a thing to print?

That's the case for it, not against it.

Nobody frames a school dinner menu. It gets pinned up, glanced at, replaced the next term, and
thrown away — which is exactly the category of object that vanishes without anyone deciding to
keep one. The [timing chart taped over an oven](/stories/oven-timing-chart) survives for the
same reason a menu doesn't: somebody happened to still have it.

## Does it print well?

Yes — a ruled grid is a strong, legible shape at almost any size.

Keep the rules dark and even, and reserve the red for the two words the kitchen picked out; a
single hit of colour against the grid reads clearly from across a room. The star should look drawn,
not typeset — uneven, a bit too big, sitting slightly off its line, the way anything actually made
by a child does.

## How do I get one made?

Describe the week at [JustOG](/) — the days, the dishes, and where the mark goes. Pick a direction,
drag the crop frame, see it composited on the real garment, and it's made to order and shipped.

Designs other people have published are in the [shop](/shop).

The grid was printed for a parent. The star was drawn for nobody in particular, which is why it's
the only part worth keeping.