High school cafeteria food is notorious amongst high schoolers for being bad, but is it really bad?  I’m going to delve into the details and see if it is that bad. 

There are many problems when it comes to providing cafeteria food to hundreds of students.  The main one is the lack of access to healthy foods, cafeteria workers struggle to procure healthy foods given the budget they are given by the government.  Schools are given less than $2.00 a child to feed them, which is not nearly enough.  Another problem is the guidelines given to them by the government, the current government guidelines allow them to serve food that is not considered healthy by dieticians which continues to degrade the reputation of the food.

The federal Food in Schools program which is responsible for providing food to students has historically struggled.  This program accounts for up to 20% of all food served in the National Lunch Program, including the majority of their protein including beef and poultry which add up to 40% of all purchases made through the program.  The program has been known to be unreliable, from delays and price fluctuations to canceled orders.  This unreliability poses a major threat to cafeteria workers trying to provide a healthy lunch to their students every day.

I talked to several students to get their opinions on the food from the Capital High School cafeteria.  The first person I talked with was Meredith, Meredith eats a school-provided breakfast nearly every morning, so she had some valuable insight into the quality of the food served.  “It isn’t very good, but it’s kinda my only option in the morning.”  I also talked with Jay Yee, another student at Capital who said, “I stopped eating it because the quality has gotten worse over the years.  I used to get it during freshman year sometimes, but not now”  This decrease in quality makes sense, as a watchdog agency investigating the school food system revealed the issues that COVID-19 created and that the system hasn’t fully recovered from.  

There are many issues with school lunches, but as I discovered they’re not within individual schools themselves, it’s a part of the system as a whole.  There are some things we can do to help solve the issue of school lunches, you can contact your representative or senator, and ask them what they are doing to solve the issue.