Have AISG Students “Bean” Eating Well?

Are our Rams eating healthy? A lot of students buy school lunch, and concerns are arising on whether or not the lunch is nutritional.

Is it the responsibility of the school to ensure that students are eating a nutritious lunch everyday? It certainly seems that way. Chartwell, our school’s caterer, states in their information sheet: “We’re here to provide a choice of high quality, nutritious and well-balanced food to meet our consumers needs throughout the day and throughout life.” How much of that really applies to AISG students? To find out, The Beacon carried out an investigation to see if AISG students were really “eating their greens” or “getting their five a day”.

Take a look at this week’s menu:

Initially, the menu seems to offer a variety of items that cover all of the groups from the food pyramid. However, if students are only eating the pasta, they are missing out on essential vegetables. There are also concerns with the words “fried” and “creamy”, which do not sound like they will bode well with students’ cholesterol levels.

Apart from the set lunch that changes everyday, a salad bar is also available for students. Students can purchase a plastic container at the cashier for 19 RMB and then they are free to add whatever they want to their bowl. The colourful array of vegetables and proteins seem to satisfy nutritional requirements, but efforts to eat healthy seem to be redundant when students slather their vegetables in Thousand Island dressing, which appears to be the the most popular choice of dressing.

However, when I asked several students who bought salad for lunch why they bought it, they responded by saying, “it’s not because of how it’s supposedly healthy” but because “the hot lunch today just didn’t look that good”. Juniors Gwen Farm and Alice Fiorito also thought the lunch choices were subpar and said, “the pairings of the lunch aren’t that good. Usually they have potato dishes with rice, and that’s just carbs with carbs.”

When asked if they considered themselves healthy in terms of diet, they eyed the can of chips on their table and replied, “to an extent.”

Senior Nancy Peng seconded their opinion and voiced that, “the food is really greasy sometimes. Like, the fried chicken we had today, that was probably really unhealthy.”

It seems like AISG students are concerned about their diet; however, with limited choices offered at school and higher priorities in life (i.e. academics), eating healthy is not that possible yet.