The lunch line at Naperville Central, while fairly disorganized and sometimes overstimulating, is always constant in its core menu offerings. Every day, I notice students order the same exact foods and during non-lunch hours, many taking advantage of the cafeteria’s sodas, chips and other sugary snacks. While an occasional snack is okay, eating a lunch primarily consisting of foods high in carbs, fats, sugars and salts can result in illnesses that shorten lifespans. With the school’s emphasis on eating healthy, they sell a curiously limited amount of truly healthy foods, making me wonder if school food is the best nutritional choice for our bodies.
For a start, there simply aren’t enough vegetables being sold. Central students who order every day cannot get all of their vegetable-related nourishment from the meager vegetable offerings, which usually consists of soggy lettuce. Red and orange vegetables are higher in Vitamin C, while darker greens are dense in iron, calcium and protein. In contrast, veggies like Iceberg lettuce have little sustenance other than water and fiber.
Speaking of nutrition content, school entrees are poorly balanced at best. Take the daily pasta option, an extremely popular choice. Paired with a choice between two sauces, two types of meat, and the option of an additional breadstick, these boiled bits of dough make for a delicious and enjoyable menu.
But that’s exactly what they are: boiled bits of dough. Although Healthline admits that there are benefits to pasta that we don’t see in other processed grains, it still overloads us with unnecessary carbs, especially when consumed regularly. Topped with some salt-concentrated meatballs and an extra breadstick for even more carbs, the school is welcoming angina pectoris like there is no time to waste.
The imbalanced diets don’t stop with pasta, though. Every single day, pizza is available, a meal that consists mainly of bread and oily cheese with a smidgen of canned tomato sauce. The cafeteria’s burritos, walking tacos and nachos revolve around a base of either wheat-filled chips or a flour tortilla, complete with a large dollop of glucose-heavy rice. The various types of burgers: bacon, cheese and regular, are mostly bread buns with a salty meat patty.
The wraps may be the only options that are not predominantly processed carbs, but the ones sold in the preorganized plastic boxes are sold at over $3.45 as a minimum compared to $2.95 for the regular line, making them a very expensive option. Students are getting an overwhelming amount of carbohydrates from school lunches, a macronutrient that is essential for life but should never be consumed in surplus.
The overload of carbs in the cafeteria prevents those who have celiac or a gluten allergy from enjoying school lunches as well. In nearly all of the menu items, some form of wheat is incorporated. Not only can those items not be consumed by those with restrictions, but the risk of cross contamination is posed. School lunches are supposed to be accessible for everybody, not just those without allergies. We cannot limit options so drastically.
On top of the deficient nutritional quality of the main meals, there are too many unhealthy snack options offered for students to even attempt to make healthier choices. It’s extremely difficult to resist the temptation of chips, sodas, energy drinks, and cookies. I would know, since I struggle with that myself. So blatantly providing students with sugary, caffeinated snacks while encouraging them to make better choices is quite hypocritical.
It’s okay to have a few treats, but when there are enough to replace an entire meal, concerns grow immensely. The cafeteria is decked with rows and rows of heavily processed, salty and sugary foods surrounding the checkout areas. Refrigerators hold dozens of cans of caffeinated drinks like Bubbl’rs and the checkout counter always offers enormous sugar cookies.
Lunch periods are meant to be a time of rest. Scheduled in between periods of intense learning and constant tests, lunch allows students to refuel their bodies, but only when nutritious and filling options are offered to our students.
Baked chips are still chips. Sugar is always digested by the body, whether it is in a school setting or at a local Dunkin Donuts. Caffeine, whether it is sold in a school or sold in a gas station, is still caffeine. By pursuing this cheaper route in menu options, Central is inadvertently pushing a cycle of unhealthy eating habits on its students. As a result, students cannot choose healthy lunches even if they wanted to. In short, the school couldn’t be doing a better job of giving us the very things that they warn against.
If students can be provided with such a large amount of junk food, why can’t they be provided with more variety in fruit selection? Put the assortment of fruits next to the different types of vegetables sold and it looks like we are getting a royal buffet of apples, oranges, canteloupe, watermelon, honeydew, grapes, and more, when in reality, we aren’t.
To satisfy a “balanced” diet, one can add on a single side of fruit, turning their “regular” lunch into a “lunch combo” with a slight increase in price. Having to pay extra for fruit disincentivizes me from even picking it up, and it’s likely the same goes for others too. Not only that, but if a student decides to buy another item in addition to that fruit such as a carton of milk, the price gets even higher.
While a student may select a fruit of their choosing, the recent shift to prepackaged cups of cut fruit restricts the serving size to around 5 pieces as well. The D203 Nutrislice website states that one serving size of the “Fruit of the Day” is ½ of a cup, but the tiny containers that we see in the lunch lines barely seem to contain 2 ounces, a measly amount for the price increase. Our lunch program promises to offer a nutritious and balanced diet, but the actual menu seems to indicate that they may prioritize cutting costs over fostering healthy habits.
This hypocrisy is tiring, but its real-life health implications are far more concerning.
Central’s lunch line is setting up its customers for a lifetime of arterial plaque and Type 2 diabetes, contradicting its core beliefs as a school community. Instead of offering unlimited Bubbl’rs and stale breadsticks, Central should focus on expanding its green options. If the school truly wants to make our lunches healthy, these options should not only be available, but also appealing enough. For tired and unmotivated high school students, a healthy lunch could be the change that boosts their day.