What Happened to Lunch?
Written by Sydney Weber
Photo by Shridula Arun
Entering the lunchroom at East Ridge High School, you can hear the complaints of students as they talk about their lunch for the day. Many complain about the portion sizes, available food, and lack of variety. While these problems are impacting the daily life of many students at East Ridge, it’s also affecting hundreds of schools across the country.
Many cafeteria workers are struggling to get the supplies and food they need, and students are starting to notice how greatly that impacts their own lives. There are many contributing factors to the hassle of getting food for lunch, but COVID’s effects on the supply chain stands out out as the main culprit.
Elizabeth Benjamin, a junior at East Ridge High School, believes that offering free lunch may also be partially to blame: “While I appreciate the consideration of the school and the state with their policy of free lunches for all students, I do think it has taken a toll on the quality of lunch here.”
Many students at East Ridge have begun to raise the issue that the school lunches have declined in both their sizes and quality.
“It’s like we’re getting the same portion sizes as kids in elementary school, and it's just not sustainable. The general size of the provided meal hasn’t really changed, but all of the extra options that we could get in previous years are gone, so it feels like our lunches are really small,” says Benjamin
“I think that the lunchroom staff are trying their best but it’s just hard for them because I think that so many kids here really don’t need their lunch to be free and it’s just adding onto all of the struggles of getting food and giving it out right now,” says Benjamin.
“I’ve also seen changes in not only the food at lunches but also the process. With free lunches a significantly larger amount of people are getting lunch at school, and this has definitely impacted the process it takes to get lunch. The lines are so long that it takes me half of the lunch period to get my food, and it doesn’t help the staff to have to deal with double the amount of kids getting lunches now,” says Benjamin.
“It’s definitely been a struggle to get supplies this year,” says Chris Jennrich, the Director of Nutrition at East Ridge High School. “I order tons of food and I don’t get half of it. I may order eight cases of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches a week, and I'm lucky if I get one. I feel bad for our students, but that is all I can get.”
“I think a big reason we can’t get all the food we order is because nobody is working, so we can’t get the food from our suppliers,” Jennrich says. COVID has impacted many different parts of life, but one major one is the supply chain. With fewer people working in all the points across the supply chain, including in factories, distribution, and schools, it makes it harder for supplies to be acquired.
The supply chain’s effects on school lunches has also caught the attention of the USDA. In a press release on September 29th, the USDA announced many actions they were taking to help support schools amidst the crisis. One of these plans was the distribution of almost $1.5 billion to schools in an attempt to offset costs that state and regional nutrition administrators had faced during the pandemic. They also plan to waive some requirements in schools about some of the food that needs to be served to try and accommodate the struggle of acquiring food items.
“A lot of students say that our portions aren’t enough, but that is all we’re allowed to serve. There are many federal and state guidelines on what we serve and the amount. The district makes those decisions on our suppliers and they use the government's guidelines in that process,” says Jennrich.
Before COVID some students were eligible for reduced price or free meals at school based on their household income. During the 2020/2021 school year, East Ridge provided free lunches for students and their families to pick up. Free lunches for all students during school were only introduced at the beginning of the 2021/2022 school year.
An article in Kare 11 states that the free lunch policy was created by the United States Department of Agriculture, or USDA, who work with the Minnesota state government to apply it in schools. While the USDA has stated that they plan to continue free lunches in schools until June of 2022, it is unknown if they plan to continue it after that.
