Chronicles of the Schoolies
“This entire process has not only made me more grateful for the people that do prepare our lunch, but it has also made me realize how ungrateful and naive we all can be when we don’t see the entirety of something.”
Part 1: Back to the Past
The beginning of the saga of school lunches in the American school systems can be traced back to the early 19th century. It started with advocates such as Maria Montessori who emphasized the importance of food and nutrition when it comes to education. However, it was in 1930 (During the Great Depression) when the federal government started to take a role in providing food for school children. The WPA(The New Deal’s Work Progress Administration) initiated the first federally funded school lunch in the year of 1933. Over the decades, the program had expanded and has undergone multiple changes and reforms, including the National School Lunch Act of 1946, which served to permanently provide federal funding for school lunches. Today this organization serves millions of children daily.
School lunches in their first few decades were rough because they were such a new idea and they were also being rolled out during times such as World War I, World War II, and The Great Depression, and more. But school lunches did have their prime starting in the 1940s to the 2000s. Students during these time periods were fed different things, all of which were way better than what we get served now. For example, during the 1970’s, schools would allow fast food restaurants to serve their food in cafeterias to the students, so students would eat things like: chiliburgers, hamburgers, oven-fried chicken, buttered corn, and Jello. In the early 2000s, kids got served grilled jerk chicken, barbecued pork sandwiches, and fresh (instead of canned) fruits and vegetables.
So what changed school lunches forever? In the 2010s during Barack Obama’s presidency, school lunch programs were overhauled by the federal government when the President signed the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act. tThis act set policy for the USDA’s child nutrition programs and then Michelle Obama also stepped in, making the school systems focus primarily on student nutrition and student fitness.
Now, as we can all see and probably agree on, school lunch is below mediocre and a lot of us refuse to eat it unless something specific is served that day and some of us just choose not to eat the lunch at all, and that is when things take a turn for the worse. The hunger and lack of nutrition in students can also affect how they show up to school and how they even behave in it as well. The lack of nutrition mixed with the feeling of hunger can make students irritable, fatigued, and it can lead to mood swings. Overall, it can just make everything a mess – not just for the student but also for the teachers as well, and for the parents and guardians of those students.
Part 2: The Elephant in the Cafeteria
Can we just address the elephant in the room? School lunches have drastically changed from back then. Now, they are just plain worse. School lunch is critical to student health and well-being, especially for low-income students—and ensures that students have nutrition they need throughout the day to learn. But how can that work when the food provided is unappealing? How easy will it be to focus throughout the day without a real meal? The real question is: who to blame?
Some may say it's the insufficient cooking of the cafeteria workers. Others may say it's just the food. But from experience in our school, it's just the lack of resources given. In this case the cafeteria workers aren't to blame. Our school has been suffering from the lack of gas to even turn on a stove for a period of time, which drastically limits the work of the cafeteria workers.
We heard that back then school lunch was booming. From freshly baked brownies, cookies, cupcakes, fried chicken, and macaroni and cheese. Shoot, we wish we were born back then. Now we are given gluten free cookies that taste a little too healthy for a cookie. Like: how do you ruin a cookie? From what we heard from some teachers, schools nowadays are so focused on being healthy and having proper nutritions, to where the fun of eating is rapidly dying when it comes to school.
Ms. McNair stated: “Back then no one really cared about whether we were eating healthy, we were just eating good. But now food is really based on healthy eating and the fun is sucked out of it.” Meanwhile all the effort of trying to be healthy is wasted because kids rather bring food that they like, rather than eating school food.
But don't get it wrong, some school lunches are good some days. Like Monday’’s when we get those nice chicken nuggets and fries with ketchup. Or on Thursday’s when we have baked chicken with vegetables. But those days mean the schoolies are only enjoyable one or two days of the week. And there are five days in a school week. So, what happened to the other three days? The real problem we need to face is that DOE schools are given less-quality foods to eat. There should be no way a school doesn't have gas. It isn't fair to kids who don't have money to spend everyday on lunch. Is it so much to ask for appeasing foods?
Part 3: What We Don’t See
Have you ever wondered what the process of getting our school lunch looks like? If not, then you’re definitely wondering now! As Jeremiah Padial mentioned, our school lunch has worsened over the years in the name of “health and nutrition.” While we very much know how the students feel about school lunch, I wanted to get more insight on how those who make the lunch feel about the food they make, the process of preparing and serving school lunches, and overall what their day to day looks like.
The process of preparing for these interviews was tough. Before I got a chance to interview the lunch ladies I had composed questions that initially questioned their career work and how they feel about what they do, which already steered me towards the wrong path with this paper. I decided to not only re-brainstorm my questions but also observe what they actually do during the day. After doing all of that I not only got the chance to interview CSH’s lunch ladies but also spoke to some of the lunch ladies at my sister’s middle school.
In the name of journalism, despite my fear of lunch ladies, I got courageous and tried to figure out what it looks like to have to cater to a bunch of annoying middle schoolers. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t terrified of having to speak to lunch ladies because of how they are portrayed on television cartoons: mean, big, musty and just overall short-tempered as hell. I was honestly shitting bricks and considered not even writing this issue. But nonetheless I still went forward with this process.
Cafeteria workers at my sister's school promptly begin their day at 6:00 AM to prepare breakfast for 4 different schools in one campus, grades K-8. Based on the day, they might be wheeling in cartons of milk from a delivery truck outside or some of them are already on to lunch prep. Breakfast has to be started and tables must be wiped with a hot towel and cleaning solution before 7:45 AM, which is when the school buses and children start to roll in.
Unlike CSH, my sister’s school serves hot breakfast to their students at least 3 times a week. On Wednesday’s, they even serve bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches! On Wednesday’s, they even serve bacon, egg, and cheese sandwiches! The eggs are real eggs and the cheese is, according to my sources, not as questionable as most school cheese’s are. But what shook me was the fact that they serve Canadian bacon (that’s high end meat fren!!) to those who can eat it and oatmeal with granola and (real) fruit as another hot breakfast option for those who can’t eat pork.
After breakfast, Cafeteria workers prepare lunch and keep the food warm for all schools by putting the food they made in a metal pan and steaming it. During lunch prep all hands are on deck. There’s two people preparing the tables and someone sweeping the floor from whatever mess was left during breakfast. I learned that similar to students, it's not all work. The workers will sit and gossip about what they do know and share their personal lives with one another which makes getting through the day all the more easier.
The food they prepare at my sister's school comes pre-sliced and sometimes frozen too, so that it doesn’t really require much construction in terms of the use of knives. But because they plan to serve 4 schools, it is a tedious process and everyone is assigned a role. There’s the front line row, Luis and Romero prepare the food that gets served first and hand it to the students. There’s two people always in the kitchen to make sure that something is going in and out of the confectionary oven when need be. And two other people to ensure that students take their fruit and their milk with the lunch that's provided.
Lunch for my sister's school, which is the last school to get lunch, begins at 12:45pm and their menu changes everyday. When speaking to the cafeteria workers, I was curious as to who came up with the menu. So that's what I asked. Angela, one of the nicest lunch ladies of all time, and her complete opposite Shonandra, one of the realest lunch ladies of all time, responded to this.
Angela: “I can honestly say that back in my day I’ve eaten better food when I was in middle and high school but better food doesn’t necessarily mean healthy. If you’re looking for a hearty and mostly healthy lunch, I think the menu we get provided with does just that.”
Shonondra: “The lunch we serve and prep is a lot healthier than a lot of the foods these kids put in their body early in the morning. Lunch has gotten healthier overtime and I think it's important for us to recognize what we do have. It's easy to not take into account what our reality could’ve been.”
My sister’s lunch menu changes every week but the overall weekly lunch includes Pizza on Monday, Beef Patty on Tuesdays, Burritos on Wednesdays, Chicken and Fries on Thursdays and Dumplings and Rice on Friday. That was the menu for that week and the foods are subject to change for the following week. After lunch is served the tables are folded up and everyone is cleaning. The floors are swept, shined and caution signs are put up to avoid accidents.
I realized while writing this and reviewing notes and interviews that no matter the facility or school building, the experience is overall the same, but the mindset, as well as the team one works with, differs. The workers at my sister’s school start earlier than ours, they work hard to prepare lunch and make sure we’re fed, despite some people not loving it. This entire process has not only made me more grateful for the people that do prepare our lunch, but it has also made me realize how ungrateful and naive we all can be when we don’t see the entirety of something.
The purpose and idea behind this wasn’t to bash school lunch or to discredit the people that wake up early to make it. I wanted to investigate something that's commonly bashed, something that we as students don’t recognize: all the work it takes for us to be able to even grab a tray of nuggets and cajun fries. I want to thank and appreciate all the workers that do make our lunch, and the custodians that do wipe our tables and sweep our floors – the people who repaint the walls, and take the bathroom trash out.
If you take away one thing from this, it's that you don’t need a degree, 4 or more years of school, a suit or long trench coat, and walking big and awkward briefcase for others to consider your role important. In this day and age it is way too easy for us to discredit those who aren’t deemed important in society because they don’t have the things I previously mentioned. You’re just as important as the next, if not more!