Ohio Students Win Lunch Box Derby

A cucumber with sliced beets for wheels proved best in the field and snagged the national Lunch Box Derby title for two Ohio schoolboys Monday.

This competition was staged not in a cafeteria but a congressional meeting room so elegant it distracted some competitors, who took snapshots of fancy sconces while others focused on balancing their vegetables.

Although the apple industry put up the cash, cucumbers were the vegetable of choice in this variant of the Cub Scout’s pinewood derby competition. Regional winners from five states and Great Britain vied for prizes offered by the Washington Apple Commission.

The two 11-year-old champions, Antony Colucci and Curtis Brown of Ashtabula, Ohio, uncorked a record 49-foot, 2-inch run for their skewered beet-and-cuke-mobile.

They used carrot slices to keep the beet wheels on tightly.

Other teams had shorter runs with vehicles made from cucumbers, butternut squash and celery, with orange, apple, onion and rutabaga wheels. xxxx