Let them eat cake, it might be healthier than our lunches.

I want to start this out by saying this in no way a criticism of the cafeteria workers. I personally have complete and total respect for anyone who can put up with over a hundred demanding high school students who feel the need to use exact change, try to sneak that extra cookie and can’t remember their lunch number half of the time. These saints of the lunchroom do the best possible with what they are given. What they are given, however, isn’t much.

Fairfax County Public Schools tend to be very conflicting when it comes to the health of their students and when I say health I’m talking about the food and drink we are provided with. Recently FCPS has banned soda in seven schools. What a healthy and noble act, now the students have to have water or milk! This is what the administrators are thinking. Here is what the students are thinking: Great, now I’m left with a choice between water that I don’t even want to know where it comes from and milk that isn’t always liquid. This has happened before; an innocent student has opened their milk, expecting a refreshing drink to find a foreign substance with the consistency of Jell-O. This is not to mention that a fair portion of WS’s water fountains decide to take days off and simply won’t work.

Gunning for student health is a monster that takes time and legitimate effort. Administrators will tell you to ignore the horror stories, but what if they aren’t stories? Has no one ever wondered why most student prefer to eat the snack line food to the actual ‘meals’ we are served? School lunch rules dictate that a student must have a side dish or fruit of some kind as an attempt to force the student to eat healthy fruit. When you pick an apple that is rotted on the other side it you begin to wonder if this is a prank, or when you swear your mashed potatoes looked back at you. Okay that last one wasn’t true, but all others are completely true and have happened at WS.

Now I’m sure there are many more schools in the United States that have it much worse than WS. I have personally been in to many schools to count and have seen the worst of the worst when it comes to school lunches, especially in California where a boy was actually sent home for breaking a tooth on the quesadilla. But I have never seen a county more hypocritical about it. WS is located less than an hour from the District of Columbia, where First Lady Michelle Obama has attacked obesity and unhealthy choices, but the most edible items outside of the snack line are the French fries and the cookies on good days.