If you were or are anything like the average student, you’ve probably had a school lunch before. And if you’re anything like the average human, you’ve probably known them to be repulsive or, at best, tolerably inedible.
What does one classify as tolerably inedible, exactly? Well, first, let’s set the scene. It’s noon. You, always getting up five minutes before you have to scramble out the door, didn’t have time for breakfast. So you’re starving. As you walk down the hall, the smell of days old food and leftover scraps in garbage cans fill the halls. It’s thick, and it fills your throat with the pungent odor of reheated meat and soggy bread. Maybe you’re not so hungry after all.
But then you get in there, and you grab your popcorn chicken or slimy cheeseburger, and you get used to the bits of food on the ground and the smell of bleach on the tables. The spongy popcorn chicken isn’t so bad if you smother it in hot sauce. You can choke down the slimy cheeseburger if you douse it in ketchup and mustard. Besides, they have milk and lemonade to wash down the stale, cardboard aftertaste of freezer burn. Tolerably inedible.
Pasta is one of the school lunches that I actually like, though. Cavatappi noodles and a halfway decent marinara sauce make it one of the better lunches at school. Taco day is another good one: tortillas chips, hamburger meat, cheese and jalapenos. Better than chewy, slimy, low quality hamburgers, at least. It’s sad, really, that cafeteria food is only good relative to the bad.
But then you get home and it turns out that you’re having pasta for dinner, too. You see the noodles being boiled and the sauce being heated and that heavenly smell makes your mouth water. School lunch never made your mouth water. And when you taste the pasta it’s not rubbery like the school’s is. The sauce actually has flavor; you don’t have to add a packet of salt to taste something. It’s not until you taste the real thing that you realize how bad school lunches really are.
It’s pathetic how low quality the things we feed growing kids are. Freeze dried, plastic wrapped, spongy hamburgers with condensation on the bun. Lunchables would be a better substitute.
But why are they so tolerably inedible? Maybe because there’s no other option at school? We’re too lazy to pack our own lunches? We can’t afford our own lunches? Or maybe we get used to the taste. The grainy mashed potatoes, the stale croutons, the breaded chicken that you remind yourself is supposed to be crunchy as you peel the breading off the meat.
Whatever the reason, I only have two things to say. First of all, bagged lunches are only the second tier on the pyramid of lunch food. On the top is out-of-school hot lunch like soup or grilled cheese or take out -- stuff you can’t bring to school without a microwave or a stove. Bagged lunch (or aptly named “cold lunch”) is under that, while cafeteria lunch comes in last. Secondly, the “goodness” of food is only measured by what’s below it. When you have nothing to compare school food to it’s not necessarily bad. When you go home and eat literally anything else or bring in a bag lunch of literally anything else, however, school food quickly becomes the scum of the Earth.
From this, it’s clear that one of two things needs to happen for school food to become tolerable instead of tolerably inedible. One, the quality of school food needs to improve drastically: better meat, less frozen, more fruit. Two, bagged and out-of-school lunches must be banished from existence.
The choice is simple, really.
