Students in Chicago Public Schools were not pleased with their free lunchroom food- not that they are being too picky but because the food is outright "disgusting, unhealthy, unappetizing and overly processed." When these kids' palate cannot take it anymore, they did something revolutionary; they took the issue of school cafeteria food in the internet.
Every meal in nearly every CPS lunchroom is made by the district and are given free to every student. With the federally subsidized program's intention of having kids coming from low-income families benefit from free meals, ending mountains of sometimes fraudulent lunch paperwork, moving lunch lines faster, and making it easier for everyone to get a school meal, officials expected to see an increase on the number of kids who take the meals.- but that was not what happened.
Instead, about a million lunches declined in the first year and more than 800,000 in the second according to CPS records. It clearly shows that free meal does not entirely mean they're something you would be glad about.
Junior Shirley Hernandez, one of the honors civic students from Roosevelt High School took a bold step in addressing this cafeteria food issue: launching the School Lunch Project website and a petition to change food in the district this month. "We want bigger portions, more nutritious food and [food] partly handmade from scratch," Hernandez said. "It's a human right to have decent food, not the lowest quality of food."
Currently, students are presented with a menu of mostly processed fast food. Roosevelt civics student Duyen Ho believes this could create long-term health problems to the student body. "The fact that we eat fast food every day is going to affect us in the long term... It's going to affect us a lot," Ho said.
CPS records show that the three most frequently served are pizza, cheeseburgers and chicken patties. They are definitely full of preservatives, fillers, stabilizers and additives despite the recent directives to the National School Lunch Program requiring meals to contain less fat and sodium and more fiber than previous lunches for healthier school meals.
The School Lunch Project website reveals the bad effects of these ingredients to one's health, shares links to research materials and offers a gallery of sometimes graphic lunch photos. This initiative done by Roosevelt high school students have gained attention from parents, students, teachers and the CPS principal.
The Roosevelt students also voiced if they would be given permission to eat off campus or even go home for lunch as other Chicago students have done in the past or currently do.
In response to the issues raised by students in the website, the CPS central office sent a statement to WBEZ saying that "the health and wellness of our students is among our top priorities, and we will look into the students' questions about their meals".
The lunch protest by Roosevelt students is among the numerous complaints about unsatisfying and unhealthy school food that have appeared this year in the Hancock High School newspaper.
Some CPS students also shared the same sentiments by posting photos of their lunch on Twitter.
