Are Good High School Lunches A Thing of The Past?

Arrowhead made their food cater to the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, but not to the students pallets. The students at Arrowhead High School say the lunches are terrible because of how healthy the school is trying to make them. Granted, Arrowhead is just trying to follow the laws and regulations that the state made for school lunches. The glory days of high school lunches are over according to some of the students at Arrowhead.  What used to be good food and food worth buying and eating has vanished.

The school lunches in the U.S. went from greasy pizza, salted French fries, and saucy chicken wings to low fat, low sodium, low calorie and food that doesn’t look like what it should be, along with fruits and vegetables which are making students cringe. These are just a few responses students at Arrowhead gave.

According to https://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/27/sunday-review/why-students-hate-school-lunches.html?_r=0. In France, where the childhood obesity rate is the lowest in the Western world, a typical four-course school lunch (cucumber salad with vinaigrette, salmon lasagna with spinach, fondue with baguette for dipping and fruit compote for dessert) would probably not pass under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, because of the refined grains, fat, salt and calories. Nor would the weekly piece of dark chocolate cake. Not only do French students get better food, but they get more time to consume it. French children may get up to two hours to eat their lunch rather than the 45 minutes Arrowhead gets.

Harry Smiths, a sophomore at Arrowhead High School, says, “When I was studying abroad in Europe. I visited one of the schools with a French host family, and as I tasted the food I realized that the quality was actually a lot better. As I compare it to the U.S. school lunches, the food tastes almost homemade. Now that I am back to the American food at Arrowhead, I had to switch to cold lunches because of how grossed out I was at the sight of our lunch food.”

Students aren’t happy and say they wish they could just eat good food and get along with their day. They feel that taking away all the calories and sodium doesn’t help their health at all. Students say it is unnecessary that schools restrict their intake.

Katie Thurow, a sophomore at Arrowhead, says, “I think the school lunches are falsely advertised because every single day I go to get food, there are TV’s outside the doors that make the food look a lot better than it actually is. And also they try to spice up the names by saying its gourmet, when really it’s just a mystery meal.”

An example of the mystery meal would be the burgers, at the Arrowhead cafeteria, that don’t even look like a burger. It looks like a rubbery, thin, small piece of something that would come off the sole of a shoe. Arrowhead High School, and schools across America should try to actually make something good. It doesn’t have to be back to the way it was before 2012, but it could still be better than it is now.