Until a couple of weeks ago, I was comfortable with what I was packing in my children’s school lunches.

My five year old would return with nothing but her ice pack and pleas for more food, telling me she was staving all day, on the brink of passing out, despite having taken more than what she would normally eat during a three day binge at home.

My eight year old would typically come home with half of whatever type of sandwich she brought to school, most or all of the vegetables in the container and some of the fruit. An afternoon reminder I was doing my best to keep things healthy but that she was probably taking more food than she was able to s-l-o-w-l-y get through in a day.

Then something changed. It seems the grade three class has devised a sophisticated food bartering system and parents are completely in the dark.

I call it Food: on-the-down-low. A virtual microcosm of a broader system of exchange but rather than using gold bullion or cash to assign value to things, in this scenario, each food item has a unique currency.

On any given school day, a representative from Canada’s Food Guide could have paid a surprise visit to Hanna’s classroom (it could happen), opened her lunch bag and found it to be in accordance with their campaign to eat a variety of foods from all of the food groups. I was even careful to completely avoid the “extras” category as I thought summer sausage was really on the fence, not really a meat but more of a meat alternative.

I caught Hanna coming out of the front hall closet with two Werthers candies in her hand. Candies purchased by her father at Costco, used for bribing our kids to drive with him on long trips instead of predictable mommy with her bag of apples and Bonnie Rait’s Something To Talk About.

Me: What are you doing with those candies?

Hanna: I’m trading Alexa for her granola bar. I owe her one candy for yesterday and one for today because I want to keep it going.

Here I was thinking my child was eating a rainbow and I couldn’t have been more colour blind.

Me: Are you trading anything else?

A question I never should have asked.

Hanna: Well, I always trade my cheese for Rachel’s Honey Nut Cheerios and my fruit for Tara’s chips.

So my kid who I thought was eating a rainbow is really just eating the chocolate coins in the treasure chest at the bottom of the rainbow and I had no idea.

Some signs your school might be on the food-down-low:

1. Asking for multiples of the same food. When your child who never ate her cheese starts asking for two portions. No longer are they part of a child’s necessary calcium intake, they are now trading tools that hold value in the below age ten food exchange industry.
2. When your child who used to return with the same uneaten food is now suddenly coming home with an empty smoked salmon container, there’s something fishy.
3. No lunchroom helper to oversee that the transactions are fair—healthy food for sugary treats requiring Ritalin.
4. When your child returns home with Honey Nut Cheerios stuck to her braces and is unable to sit on a kitchen chair without rocking ferociously and randomly screaming, “FUN DIP!”
5. If every visit to Costco, your child asks you to point out the Werthers aisle.

I think I read somewhere about a guy trading a red paper clip for a house boat. This food exchange shouldn’t come as a huge surprise.