Moses+B's+2015+OpEd+Article



What is the first thing that comes to mind when you say "school lunch"? Do you picture food that is fresh, hot, and well cooked? Or do you picture really old food from McDonalds? Also why do we think of school lunch ladies as "fat, old, and mean"? Why do cartoons portray this? It always seems like the lunch ladies in cartoons serve green goo and make the kids eat it even though the kids are about to vomit. So why does the food look and taste so gross?

Every day I go to the cafeteria to get breakfast and lunch. For breakfast I usually get the pancakes that are packaged, without syrup (because they don't have it anymore), a chocolate milk that has ice chunks in it, and a black spotted banana. But I don't eat all of it because it tastes gross. Now, I think that it costs three dollars for this, is that worth it? I only eat the pancakes because they are warm, and are made from somewhere else other than the cafeteria. For lunch I get the tater tots, which I spend about a minute, looking for the one that has the least amount of burnt sweet potatoes, then I get a burrito that is made by the cafeteria ladies that always takes forever. Even though the tortillas are wheat, it is still a little crunchy. Then I go to the salad bar and get soapy grapes, sour oranges, black bananas, and once again a chunky chocolate milk every day! Every time I almost throw all the food away because of how gross it is. But are the lunch ladies the ones to blame?

According to my retired grandma who used to work for Ventura High's cafeteria she says that "making the food is an intense job. Everything is timed, you have to keep things on schedule and there is lots of pressure". So knowing that this job is not an easy job, I asked how she would cook the food and she said " The temperature of the food will always be at the right temperature...we always checked them before we served them... and if they were bad we would throw them out". So I told her about how the the grapes are soapy, the oranges are sour, and the bananas are black and this was what she said "first of all you are not supposed use soap while cleaning the grapes, I don't know how or why the grapes turned out to be soapy...the bad bananas should have been checked before they were served to you and the oranges, well I don't have an explanation for that...basically the staff at your school has not been trained correctly. I asked her if maybe the student workers in the cafeteria had anything to do with the food and she replied, "the students are not really supposed to cook the food but if they do they should have been trained by the staff". So then I asked her about my chunky milk, she said, "We don't put that up, the milkman does and those chunks are ice...all we did was move the crate up to where the students could grab them".

I then asked her about how often does the state and health department check the cafeteria, she replied, "The health department checked us once a year and the state checked us every five years". This was frequent because Ventura High School had the most amount of free and reduced lunch students.I asked what they would do with the food if some of it was still leftover and she replied, "We could only reuse the food one more day...if it didn't sell then we would throw it away".

I also asked her how she felt about the way lunch ladies are portrayed and she said " I take offense to it...the food is really hard to maintain because there are so many students that need to be served...people don't understand". Then I showed her the picture of the hamburger I bought on Friday just to make my point across that school lunch is nasty and she replied, " I can't believe that they serve that kind of food to you guys...it looks like a dead blob that has cheese on it". I told her that the meat was "as hard as a brick" and she said, " you need to complain about this because I don't think they know how bad the food is...I bet if you were to get a group of your friends and complain to them everyday there would be a significant change in the way your food is prepared". I honestly don't want to do this because I don't want to make a big deal out of it.

I finally asked her if the pay was worth the work and she replied, "No, this was one of my toughest jobs, everything is timed...there is so much to do...too much work for what you get in the end". Did she enjoy it? She said, "Yes! I got to know all the great students on campus from athletes to smarty-pants and I made life long friends who I always go out to breakfast and lunch with".

So the people to blame for the bad food in the school cafeteria, is both the cafeteria staff and the students. If the students start to complain about the bad food the lunch ladies will change the way they make it, but if they don't how will staff know if we are satisfied or not?