Eating Healthy at Lunch: A Lost Cause?

Healthiness is definitely a concern for AISG’s student body. Although we have healthy choices for lunch here at school, such as the salad bar, they are not chosen very often over the cheesy lasagna and the oil-filled chow mein. How do we make ourselves eat healthier at lunch? 

School lunch provides us with many choices, such as the noodle bar, the international cuisine, the salad bar, and the variety of sandwiches and snacks you can purchase from the cafe. Although these choices are all accessible to us, the international cuisine and the noodle bar are the most popular. These two choices contain very few vegetables, meaning that they have less nutritional value. The international cuisine (30 RMB) normally consists of rice, meat and a small number of vegetables, whereas the salad, a less popular choice, lets you pick an assortment of vegetables for only (21 RMB).

Some people eat the noodles, such as David S. who told us that his reason for eating noodles is, “Because I don’t find the other options as attractive.” To encourage students to eat healthier at lunch, the menu should have more of a variety of food, instead of just meat and rice. To encourage more healthiness, the flavor could be boosted by spices or healthy oils, such as olive oil. This would make the dishes more attractive, therefore encouraging students to consume healthy food.

The salad bar, one of the healthiest options for lunch, has one big problem: the price.  Students such as Anna K., Grace C., and Sanshiro M. would eat the salad bar if it were cheaper and had more selections. If it were more attractive in terms of price and options, students would be grateful for the option to eat healthily and enjoy lunch. The cafeteria should add more options to make people eat healthier, as suggested by new eleventh grader Megan H. Also, the cafeteria should just have more variety because every day we are just eating the same things over and over, as pointed out by senior  Tiffany C. One of the staff members in the cafeteria said that she believes that the salad is the healthiest food in the cafeteria because every other dish has something cooked in lots of oil, and for salads you can choose to not have these options.

Informing people about eating healthy is also a very important part of improving health consumption levels in school. A ninth grader Grace C.  Suggests that the school should put up posters about eating healthy around the cafeteria.