Over the years, students have dreaded eating school lunches, and on occasion, upperclassmen attempt to scare freshmen with tails of moving mystery meat and toxic green gelatin with chopped carrots hidden inside. 

School lunches are simply inadequate. When students go through the lunch line and find some strange attempt at chicken salad as one of two options, they are not likely to want to eat it.

One reason why students avoid eating some school food is because it doesn’t taste good. Plates of pasta that are barely cooked and some red sauce with a strange taste are practically inedible. Students are not going to want to eat at school if they can barely stomach what they are being served.

Almost every day after lunch is over; the kitchen staff is faced with what to do with any leftover food. There is suspicion that this leftover food is served the next day considering fish filet sandwiches are served one day and fish filet casserole is served the next.   The problem is that none of the students wanted to eat it the first time. On some occasions, the staff is faced with not enough food, and the students who haven’t gone through the line or showed up late ended up without food or have to find a more expensive alternative.

Another problem is that there are limits what the staff can and can’t serve to such a degree that the staff ends up making the same dishes every week. As a result, the menu lacks much variety and students get tired of the same food every week. Within the past month alone, bean burritos have been a constant staple on the cafeteria menu, and every day the staff has excess burritos to deal with the next day. Overall, the staff needs to be more creative in what they serve.

                While the food they serve students is balanced and nutritious according to regulations, the reality is that they tend to serve a lot of one food group and not enough of another one. On many occasions, the cafeteria food lacks the balanced elements to a proper diet that they seem to endorse so thoroughly. There are easier and more affordable ways to make balanced and nutritious food if the staff, the USDA and the Texas Department of Agriculture is willing to put forth the effort to change it.

                The easiest and possibly the most effective way to change the current lunch situation would be to take a survey. Over a period of a month, give out surveys and take record of what kids want to eat and what they don’t want to eat. The staff could easily keep track of what they have left over and what they don’t have enough of, and adjust what they serve based on the information they collect. Another advantage of taking a survey would be having the ability to test out new dishes or methods of serving leftovers that would entice the student to want to eat at school. Once again the current food situation is a sad one, but with a little effort and some ingenuity the whole way students see school lunches could change.