It’s finally lunch time, and you rush to the commons to satisfy your hunger and prepare your body for your afternoon classes. By the time you reach your table, you’ve run into a brick wall: the scent of spaghetti. You say to yourself, “Well, it’s either the slimy spaghetti or an Uncrustable that looks like a bruise.” Because a hot lunch sounds more appealing than another PB&J, and you’re feeling a bit like Garfield today, you get in that line.
Once you’ve reached your table, you look down and see that what the school calls spaghetti looks more like a flavorless bowl of watery wires. The noodles taste bland, and the less said about the sauce, the better. This bowl of coiled-up noodles will not do, but getting a salad would mean a stale, cold, flavorless breadstick.
Junior Conner Twyman says, ”One time I even got a hot dog bun and was not pleased...the bread isn’t the best.”
Does this sound a lot like your lunch experience? To most high schoolers, it does. Every day, we as students are faced with the challenge of deciding on the best, most fulfilling lunch choice. Now, the description above is clearly an exaggeration, but it holds some truth. When we don’t like a food, not because we never like it, but because a particular quality of the food is unappealing, our attitudes suffer.
During lunch, food frustration is all too often directed towards those serving it. However, the slimy spaghetti and rock-hard breadsticks are not necessarily the lunch staff’s fault because they must provide a lunch for the whole school. So whose is it?
The culprit lies in the meager amount of money the school is allowed to spend on lunch per student. According to the most recent U.S. News report, 52% of Bowling Green High School’s population qualified for free and reduced lunch in the 2015-2016 school year. This means that the school receives an additional amount of money in the lunch budget to provide a free lunch to all students. Since lunch is free to us, the school receives little money from students to pay for lunch, meaning the food choices are the best we can get. So we must settle for the best we as a school can afford, even if that means eating some slimy spaghetti every once in a while.
Once you’ve reached your table, you look down and see that what the school calls spaghetti looks more like a flavorless bowl of watery wires. The noodles taste bland, and the less said about the sauce, the better. This bowl of coiled-up noodles will not do, but getting a salad would mean a stale, cold, flavorless breadstick.
Junior Conner Twyman says, ”One time I even got a hot dog bun and was not pleased...the bread isn’t the best.”
Does this sound a lot like your lunch experience? To most high schoolers, it does. Every day, we as students are faced with the challenge of deciding on the best, most fulfilling lunch choice. Now, the description above is clearly an exaggeration, but it holds some truth. When we don’t like a food, not because we never like it, but because a particular quality of the food is unappealing, our attitudes suffer.
During lunch, food frustration is all too often directed towards those serving it. However, the slimy spaghetti and rock-hard breadsticks are not necessarily the lunch staff’s fault because they must provide a lunch for the whole school. So whose is it?
The culprit lies in the meager amount of money the school is allowed to spend on lunch per student. According to the most recent U.S. News report, 52% of Bowling Green High School’s population qualified for free and reduced lunch in the 2015-2016 school year. This means that the school receives an additional amount of money in the lunch budget to provide a free lunch to all students. Since lunch is free to us, the school receives little money from students to pay for lunch, meaning the food choices are the best we can get. So we must settle for the best we as a school can afford, even if that means eating some slimy spaghetti every once in a while.
By Ethan Rutter