School Lunch Altercations
It rained today. Hard. It seems that rainy days always bring on heated discussions between Jim and I on the subject of school food. Here’s my opinion. (This may end up as a rant, so I apologize in advance.)
First of all, it’s hard to consider the food served at my high school as actual ‘food.’ Take the pizza, for example. I have had a boycott on school pizza since sixth grade, when I somehow ingested a mushy piece of the french bread variety and ended up with a high fever (102 degrees) and serious nausea. I blame the pizza because I can, and because I want a reason to hate it, other than the horrible taste. Jim put it best:
What they do is take a piece of rancid, old, fit-to-be-used-as-leather cheese and barf all over it, place that on a slice of white bread, freeze and thaw it not once but four times, and serve it lukewarm and mushy on a styrofoam tray probably made up of the same ingredients as the pizza.
– Jim Grant
Yup, that’s about it. Cafeteria pizza is almost always served as an option along with the regular entrees, except on Mondays when the cafeteria orders it from a local restaurant for $5 per large, cheese pizza and swindles us students by marking it up to $2.00/slice or $3.50 for two slices. That’s both outrageous and wrong. Five dollars per pizza amounts to fifty cents a slice, assuming that the pizza has ten slices. The company who runs the cafeteria could easily profit by selling the pizza for $1/slice, but no, they have to price it at a level four times higher than it should be. Some students just order a pizza themselves and have it delivered to the school to save money. (The same pizza that the cafeteria gets is $8 without the school discount that the restaurant gives the cafeteria.)
And if you think those prices are blasphemous, at Sonoran Trails, which, like the other schools in the district, has its cafeteria managed by the same company, We were once charged four whole dollars for ONE slice of pizza. They weren’t even big slices! And even worse, kids actually bought it, because they had to if they wanted to eat. The only other option was to brave the snack bar, which was always plagued by insanely long lines and lots of “straight” jerk children who liked to hump your backpack.
Now, for the piece de resistance (spl?). A year or so ago, my family and the family of my mother’s friend all stayed three days, two nights at the Scottsdale Princess hotel, a fancy resort/waterpark where we had a timeshare thing availalbe. Sure, it’s only ten miles away, but it was still fun. Anyway, my mom’s friend who used to work with her, Laura, was laying out by the pool and decided to order a cheeseburger from the hotel restaurant that doubled as a bar to serve the pool area.
I saw the tell-tale silver and blue wrapper and knew what was coming. Yes, this was a hamburger from the same company that runs the cafeteria at Cactus Shadows. This famous burger has been found on various occasions with green cheese on it, a piece of blue plastic tucked inside, and, once or twice, a bit of charred bacon under the bun. I still end up eating it (I actually prefer it to the pizza), but I know it’s bad for me.
So, Laura bites into her “burger” hungrily while I watch from behind, chuckling. She almost seems to choke, and then she swallows forcibly to get it down. She didn’t vomit it back out, but let’s just say that was about the only bite she took.
This poses a question: if adults hate the cafeteria food as much as the kids do, then why are we still forced to eat it? And not only that, but why must we pay a full $2.00 per day to eat such garbage? In Utah, lunches were $1.25 and you actually got something that was both nutritious and tasty, qualities of which CSHS’s cafeteria food possesses neither. Furthermore, why do they grade kids by their performance in PE (rather than effort, as it should be) when they feed them such crap that it is impossible for them to ever get a good grade?
I’m not trying to blame my out-of-shape-ness entirely on the cafeteria food, but I can only imagine how much healthier I’d be were I able to eat a good lunch everyday instead of somethng that barely even amounts to grease-injected fast food.