Students in Scotus have experienced the same lunches for at least six years. Whether it is hamburgers, potatoes, chicken nuggets, deli ham sandwiches, hot dogs, runzas, chicken patties, or tacos, everyone can say that they are sick of having the same lunches over and over again. It is time for a change and a chance for students to bring food that interests them and ignites their taste buds. Many people in this school can list all of the items that are included in one certain meal because they have eaten it so many times. Allowing sack lunches would offer a wide variety of meal choices for the students who have been eating the same food for years. Many important reasons come up when people think of why they should bring sack lunches to school. …show more content…
Even though the school board believes all students should eat school lunches, the students should have the option of bringing sack lunches to teach them about nutrition, to keep them from being hungry all day, and to avoid allergies. Students will not always be with their parents, so they should pack their own lunch to learn about what foods are healthy. Many kids eat school lunches because they cannot get any nutrients anywhere else. If the student is taught properly, they will soon be able to pack a healthy lunch that will provide all the nutrients they need. Ross Atkin, a writer for Christian Science Monitor, wrote about what a good lunch should consist of. He gathered his research from the American School Food Service Association. Atkin insists that a good meal should contain protein, grains, fruit or vegetables, and of course a good drink (16). The lunch could of course contain a good dessert as well. When I packed my own lunch at Lost Creek Elementary, I packed different foods each day, and my mother let me pack a dessert. Some of the foods that could be packed include apples, bananas, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, granola bars, pretzels, peanuts, muffins, and many more items. If parents can teach their kids what a good meal should consist of, then they will be able to pick out food that is healthy when they are living on their own. Atkin believes that there is one major point to consider when packing a lunch. He explains, "Students can eat only so much during short lunch periods" (16). This is big because when students are packing a lunch, they should remember not to pack too much food because they only have a short amount of time to eat it. There are many benefits of packing a healthy lunch, and that is why Scotus should allow the students to pack their own lunches. Scotus cafeteria always has a main meal and a salad bar, but the students do not always become full. Therefore, students should fill a lunch box with items they like and bring it to school. When I see the food the cafeteria is serving sometimes, it makes me sick. They serve many lunches that I do not like because I am a picky person. I go hungry all day until I get home. Some people do not eat breakfast and go all day without eating a good meal. According to Kenneth H. Cooper, 19 percent of students skip breakfast (48). These kids may go the whole day and all the way through practice on low food intake. If they do not get a good amount of healthy food, their brains do not function as well. This is why students should pack their own lunches. The students can fill up their lunch boxes with food that they like. It will need to be healthy as well. After school, many kids may complain about not eating enough food. I know this happens very often in my house. My sister and my brothers complain about how bad the lunch was today. They then go find food to eat such as pizza rolls. Students need to bring their own lunches, so they do not have to go hungry. Recently, the National Food Association added many rules as to what a school lunch must consist of. The lunches have to contain many more healthy items, and the cafeterias have to provide a certain amount of fruits, vegetables, and grains in the meal. In a personal interview with Scotus’s Certified Cafeteria Manager Kathy Hoops, she explained that she has to provide proof of all the healthy items she includes in the meals. Hoops mentions that she has to spend many hours thinking about what needs to be in the lunch. Just because the lunches are healthy though, does not mean that the students will eat them. In an article written by Samantha Olson, a researcher, John Hopkins, gives evidence of how many kids actually eat the food. “Nearly six out of ten students won’t even touch a healthy food option on their plate,” (qtd. in Olson). This shows that many kids do not like to eat healthy food. At Scotus, we have to take a fruit or a vegetable. Many students take them and then throw them away when they are done eating. That wastes a large amount of food. Requiring healthy food that students do not like is not the solution to giving them good lunches. Students should bring healthy food that they like and will eat. Even though the cafeteria requires healthy food to be served, not everyone can eat all of it because they may be allergic to it. The world contains many different foods that students are allergic to, so those students need to bring their own lunch if they have allergies. Some common food allergies are cow’s milk, peanuts, tree nuts, eggs, fish, and wheat. These items are used to make many other foods, so a student may not be able to eat many other foods as well (McKevith and Theobald 40). These students should be able to bring their own lunch, so they can eat something that is good for them to eat. This will also reduce the amount of allergic reactions they have. If a student comes in with an allergy, the cafeteria should not have to take away certain foods because of them. In Scotus, if someone is allergic to peanuts, the cafeteria would have to take away peanut butter bars and other desserts as well. This would upset many students who like those desserts. Not only allergies, but also diseases can cause students to need their own lunches. One big disease that would cause a problem is anorexia. This disease makes someone not want to eat food because they feel as if they are fat. Their mind tells them that they should not be eating the food. If any students have this disease or others, they should be able to bring their own lunch and pack food that interests them. That will increase the amount of food they will eat and help them grow strong. The school can only try so hard to provide food that everyone can eat, so it would benefit many students if they could bring their own lunch. Although Scotus has had this policy of not bringing sack lunches for many years, the school board should allow sack lunches.
The reason for not allowing sack lunches according to the manager of the cafeteria, Kathy Hoops, is that when the kids pay for their lunches, they provide a good amount of money that allows the cafeteria to pay their staff and buy food. The cafeteria is its own section separate from the school, so the cafeteria staff does not get paid from the same account as the teachers. Hoops contributed her thought about how this money problem could be fixed. She portrayed the thought that if less kids purchased school lunches, then she may not need as many staff members or have to purchase as much food. The school could also allow the cafeteria staff to join their account and pay for them. This would account for the less amount of money coming in due to sack lunches. This way of serving food may interest many different people from other schools and could make Scotus more accessible to others. If more people come to the school, then those people will pay tuition and the school will gain more money to be able to give to the lunch ladies. Paying for tuition is enough for Scotus students, and bringing their own lunches would save them money. Scotus should allow students to pack their own …show more content…
lunches. Not making enough money is not the only misconceived notion about bringing sack lunches, not making enough food is as well.
Even though a fear of the cafeteria ladies is that they will not know how much food to make each day, students should bring their own lunch and the teachers can create a system to solve this problem. The staff believes that if students bring sack lunches every day, or change it every other day, then they will not be able to prepare the right amount of food. This problem can be solved in many ways though. At Lost Creek Elementary, we highlighted our names on the attendance sheet if we wanted to eat the school lunch the next day. This could easily be changed a little bit to a high school setting. The first period teacher can take attendance like usual and then ask everyone if they will be eating today’s lunch, or tomorrow's lunch. Whatever choice works better for the cafeteria. That way, the staff knows about how many to cook for. Each day, the teacher can announce what the next lunch is going to be, so students can prepare and decide if they want to eat that lunch or not. Another way to guess how many kids to cook for is to take a count of how many students eat that lunch each time. They can keep track of how many kids eat that meal and use it to estimate the amount for the next time. Hoops exchanged information about how she keeps production records of how many kids she fed that day and how much food she made. That would be similar to what they could
do. It may also be easy to see what meals the students like and which ones they would rather not eat. If the meal is a popular one, they would know to make a large amount of food. The school has many easy ways to help determine how much food to make, so students should be able to bring sack lunches to school. The school board may believe that school lunches are the best choice for students to eat, but the kids should be able to bring a personal lunch, so they can learn what foods should be included in a healthy lunch, to become full from a good meal, and to protect them from allergic reactions. When children leave their parents, they will need to cook for themselves, and they should know how to prepare a healthy meal. Another reason why they should bring a lunch is so they can eat a meal that they like and will provide full nourishment, so they will not be hungry. Also, many kids have allergies and may need to be away from certain foods, but they need to be fed also, just with a different kind of food. For the kids that have been eating Scotus’s lunches for many years, they can finally have a chance to switch it up and eat something outside the regular meals. Even though it has been this way for such a long time, change is good and many people will be grateful.
Janet Poppendieck is a professor of sociology at Hunter College in New York, and additionally she is the author of several books including her most recent Free for All: Fixing School Food in America. This book centers on America’s recent interest in whether or not our school lunches are healthy. This issue has been put into the spotlight recently through shows such as Jamie Oliver’s School Food Revolution and in the news because recent changes in the Nation School Lunch Program’s dietary guidelines. Poppendieck’s book looks at the in depth reasons into why school lunches have turned into what they are today, what challenges need to be faced in order to fix school lunches, and ultimately how our the system should be fixed. She accomplishes this by interviewing her current college students about their previous school lunch experiences, working in a school cafeteria, interviewing current school employees, and looking at the history and policies of the National School Lunch Program.
Though proponents of this method argue that it has lowered meal debt and the amount of families failing to pay, Stacy Koltiska refutes this claim by saying: “[The ones making these policies] are suits at a board meeting… They are not the ones facing a child and looking them in the eye and taking their food away.” While it is irrefutable that debt in schools is a problem that must be tackled, it is not a justifiable excuse to take a child’s midday meal out of his or her hands and throw it into a trash can because his or her parents can not put money into their child’s lunch account. There is no excuse for denying a child a hot meal or making them go hungry during the school day for something that is not their fault. Their dietary and nutritional needs are not a bargaining tool for the school system to use under any
Schools are spending too much money with this program that could be spent on other benefits for schools. Rather than using the money to get students new technology or property it 's wasted on a lunch program that students do not enjoy nor want to purchase. In the Article, “School Lunch Food is Not Fresh, Students Say” Journalist Audrey Levine interviews high school students about they feel about their school lunches. “It’s way too expensive now, but I’m still buying,” said senior Stephanie Huang. “And I don’t think more people are bringing lunch because
Schools are meant to give our children a healthy and nurturing environment, and yet so much of the lunches in schools are fattening; does this stop schools from achieving the aforementioned goal? Childhood obesity in the United Sates continues to be a growing problem despite so any new programs to help combat it, and new research is showing how schools may be playing a large role in childhood obesity. School lunches are showing to be the problem, they encourage poor nutrition in our nation’s students, and simple reform is proving to not be enough to stop the rise in obesity rates.
has to spend more money on changing school lunch system from eliminating unnecessary spending portion of system and create farming class. As reported by Cooper, “ The National School Lunch Program needs 8 billion dollars to feed 30 million children a year to serve high quality foods.” However, this price of amount has to be double to serve healthy foods to students because our next generation has to grow up with high quality foods not with low quality foods. Moreover, according to Cooper, the U.S. spends more than 100 million dollars on fast foods portion which the U.S. suppose to spend less amount of money on fast foods to improve the entire food system of the country. If the U.S. government lower the expense of fast food system and raises the amount of money for school lunches, entire schools of the U.S. would get positive results. For example, students could brainstorm very fast as Albert Einstein, and gain more energy to work out on their gym classes. Furthermore, school have to create agriculture class for students to have strong knowledges in foods. Students can literally be ware of what they eat at their lunch times; they will know vegetables grow in the ground and how foods are really fresh. Therefore, schools must provide farming class as in Berkeley; students have rights to know how foods are important to them. As a result, students could get a lot of benefits for changing school
Most students would love to have off-campus lunch, just like many other students at other schools or in other countries do. If the other schools in the country offer an open-campus lunch, why can’t the Oak Creek High School student body also have an open-campus lunch? With certain restrictions, policies, and rules set, the student body and faculty of Oak Creek High School should be allowed the privilege of an open-campus lunch program. So if the student body is responsible and capable of handling these privileges, why can’t the Oak Creek High School student body and faculty also have an open-campus lunch?
Allowing healthier school lunches will decrease obesity in children because it will give them the proper nutrition to reduce the risk of health issues. Since obesity causes many health issues, maintaining a proper nutrition will reduce the risk of health issues. According to Star- Telegram, a daily newspaper that serves Fort Worth and areas of North Texas states, “[School lunches that have] a meal of pizza sticks, a banana, raisins and whole milk has given way to whole wheat spaghetti with meat sauce, a whole wheat roll green beans, broccoli, cauliflower, kiwi and low-fat milk … This change will help more than 2.4 million Texas students who receive a free or reduced- price school lunch to lead healthier, more active lives—in and out of the classroom”(Par. 2 and 4). School lunches are supposed to guarantee students a well balance meal, so they can have the energy to proceed with their classes throughout the day. Meanwhile, students who receive a f...
But, if they do not like the food served, they won’t eat so they starve for the rest of the school day, which can lead to not focusing on class, feeling sick, and eating too much at dinner. The final reason our school should get a new lunch menu is because there are many problems with the food. For example, many students say the food is cold, fake, and disgusting. Students, Jordyn Gilbert and Leah Gelik, found mold on the lettuce in the salad.
Lunch time is a time to take a break from the day and recharge for the rest of the day. In elementary schools it is also a time to meet up with your friends and socialize. Lunch time is not only time to eat. It is important for the mental, social, and emotional health of the children as well. Children need them chance to unwind and destress, which is promoted by socializing with friends. “Lunch should be an enjoyable part of the school day for students, offering a break from classroom work and a place to relax, socialize, and become nourished.”("The Cafeteria: Creating a Positive Mealtime Experience", 2013) Lunch time should be done in a setting where
“More than a third of the county's children are overweight or obese.”(Gustin, 1). As shocking as this is, it's true. One of the big reasons that children and teens are overweight is because of the foods that they eat. They are fed these fattening and unhealthy foods by the school system. Their futures can be changed if we change our choices. Having more nutritious lunches can have a positive impact on the health of American teens.
Lunch is one of the most important meals of the day and is consumed mostly in school cafeterias for children and adolescence. Wholesome lunches are vital in maintaining a healthy metabolism and give children energy for the rest of the school day. Children are advised to eat healthily but do not always do so because the choices of tastier, fatty foods offered in school cafeterias. The National School Lunch Program, NSLP, which is a federally assisted meal program operating in public and nonprofit private schools set nutritious guidelines for lunches served in school cafeterias (USDA). However, school campuses still offer foods high in fat as well as selling candy, chips, and soda in their vending machines, as well as their school shops. In order
First, longer school lunches will cause classes to be shorter, resulting in less learning time. The students will not gain information quickly, and would have less time to ask teachers questions. Teachers would have to stay at school longer. Teachers already have to stay after school to grade assignments, and bring work home as well. They will have to plan lessons and grade. If they do this, they will be extremely tired and will not be attentive in class. If they are tired, they could fall asleep in class, and might not teach the best that they can. Students already having less learning time will get terrible teaching and information, and then they will not be smart. Non-intelligent students might not get into university or college, and would have to work without a degree, earning little money. Longer lunches will have an impact on teachers, and students' futures. The school district should not agree to have longer lunches, as it will be awful for students.
Do you remember your favorite “School Lunch”? I do, I essentially had two favorites; pizza and hamburgers with fries. Think back, wasn’t there at least one school lunch that the lunch ladies made that everyone was so excited to eat. Kids that habitually brought their super hero lunch box with thermos would leave it at home and be in line for pizza or burgers and fries. We could also go back for “seconds”, it was the best meal of the week including what was served at home. The federal government has been involved in the NSLP (National School Lunch Program) since 1946 with the implementation of the National School Lunch Act. These initial programs developed the commodity distribution program for schools, institutions, needy households, summer
Students learn and do their best when they are hungry, and uncomfortable! That makes perfect sense right? If you’re like most Americans, this may be one of the most ridiculous statements you have ever heard. I know I have never done anything better hungry. Many students sit through their lunch time at school because they have no food to eat because they don’t have the money to afford it, or they are not able to bring food from home for various reasons. This is why many schools have free and reduced lunch programs. But not everybody can apply for these programs; even middle class families in today’s economy sometimes can’t give their child cash every day. Times are tough, and every family is different. These are good programs, but they are not good enough. One child missing a meal, and going hungry is too many in my book. That’s why I think it should be at least a state law in North Carolina, if not a federal law, that offers free lunch in all public schools for all students, regardless of income. This way it’s simple, cost effective and easy, and nobody will be singled out, or go hungry if they do not bring their lunch from home.
Why is this a problem? Cafeteria food is often cheap, bought in bulk, high in calories, malnutritious, and microwaved. Student polls and opinions prove this. Therefore, this leads to a suggestion: Healthier, tastier foods and a better, more advanced lunch system should be implemented. First of all, students aren’t motivated to eat unhealthy, not-tasty food.