Most of the food that schools serve apparently do not even meet the proper health standards met by fast-food restaurants. According to an investigation by USA Today, the majority of the nation’s fast-food chains have higher safety standards and higher quality food in general over school food. This unmistakably shows that we still have a long way to go.
The actual items on the menus are not much better. School food programs offer quite limited foods, and usually only include unhealthy foods such as hot dogs, burgers, or fries. The low variety of food may influence a student to simply skip lunch or the horrible taste and quality may make them throw it away immediately after buying it, which is simply a waste of money and resources.
As for the milk, it lays on another level of low-quality, and personally, I never accept it and have rarely seen others accepting it. If one ever bothered to look at a typical school milk carton, they would see the unwholesome amount of sugar and calories, which, paired with the taste, do not make for a gratifying experience.
They also come in very restricted portions, and, in my experience, do not leave the consumer satisfied most of the time. The food is hardly enough to meet the needs of a grade school student, much less a stressed out high-school student that still has 3 hours of the day left to go through. One of the most ridiculous examples of this is the “Clux Bowl”, which appears to be a scoop of mashed potatoes and cheese combined with 4 or 5 chicken nuggets on top.
The unhealthy, disgusting choices of foods and small portions combined lead to an even worse problem. Junk food. Since the food sucks and there’s so little of it, why not just grab a few bags of chips and a cookie and call it a lunch? This is becoming a prevalent problem, and even if one does not eat only junk food, almost always, they will have some sort of unhealthy snack in their tray, alongside their crappy lunch. It has been a while since I have seen my friends grab a lunch without a cookie or a bag of chips.
One may argue that schools are trying to improve their meals and add foods with more nutrition, such as vegetables or fruits. However, the ‘vegetables’ or ‘fruits’ that they serve usually hardly meet the minimum requirement. The salads taste and look like cardboard, and the fruits look unwashed. They should at least have some sort of wrap or protection on them, as I have witnessed many people touching them and leaving them afterwards.
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