Is Free Food really worth it?
September 21, 2021
This may sound cheesy, but this year’s school’s food isn’t very grate.
The State of Illinois allowed students to receive free lunch this school year, due to new Federal grants. The students at Warren Township High School aren’t very fond of the food this year.
This begs the question: is free food better or worse? After returning to school full time in August after being out of in person learning since March 2020, students are not happy with the free lunch that has been provided. Given that the lunch is free, it does not mean it is worth eating. Students have been asking for the school lunch to return to what it was before everything went into E-learning.
Students are so upset with this year’s school lunch an anonymous Student at Warren Township High-School took it upon himself to create an Instagram account (@wths_food_disaster). The account features photos of rotten apples, moldy bread, and very doughy pizza, just to name a few.
We decided to ask the owner of the account how he feels about the food this year, he claimed the food was “really poor, dangerous even, I would say. So much expired dairy products, and sometimes even choking hazards like uncooked noodles and rock hard fries. Just an overall risk to eat the lunch”. I asked him what drew him to create the social media account in the first place, he said “it started when I drank some expired milk”, He was then followed up with does he feel the social media account is helping Warren or hurting their reputation. “The account is helping Warren, we managed to get the President of Quest Food Services (the lunch provider) to come and speak at school on September 16th”. He also mentioned that he made a Change.org petition and went through back and forth emails with the President of Quest.
We decided to ask another student about their feelings towards free lunch, he was asked if the free lunch was worth it. He simply replied with “No”, we followed up with what he believes to be a potential solution to the school food problem, “I think they should go back to the food that was over at the O’Plaine Campus”. As you can see students aren’t very pleased with the school food; however, we decided to ask Quest what are their thoughts on the School food.
Quest is the company that Warren Township High School uses to provide the products sold in the school cafeteria. Quest has a high performance background rating number 33 out 50 for being one of the best food management companies in the world, according to “Food Management Magazine”. After asking a Quest employee whether or not if the school lunch helps students or makes it worse, she answered with “Well, we are all recovering from COVID-19 and it is still affecting us.” She then went on to say “We can’t do things like we could before COVID for example we can’t use the fryers or anything like that.” We followed up, asking her if she thinks the school food will ever return back to normal and she answered with “we will see” and “I hope so”.
