School lunches are my favorite part of the school day. After of eating disgusting, unhealthy, processed food, I am enlightened to hear the efforts the schools are making to provide tasty proper nutritional value to its students. The average high school student, according to USDA standards, must be given healthy lunchtime options in order to fulfill this nutritional intake. Therefore the school makes a wonderful effort to provide healthy, appetizing, and fresh food choices to their students.

As soon as I step foot into the school, my stomach growls on the thought of what the school lunch could be. I usually hope it will be the infamous rotisserie chicken. The succulent dried bony chicken is one of my favorite things to eat at school. Just the appetizing sight of the tiny little chicken ribs makes me drool. However, the best part of the chicken is the red vein meat that awaits after you rip off the rubber skin. When my friends grow disgusted at this chicken, I become flabbergasted, because who wouldn't want to eat this chicken? Not only is it visually pleasing and tastes phenomenal, but I'm sure it provides multitudes of vitamins and minerals. Since the meat is assumably fake, the manufacturers can inject all the vitamins and minerals you need for the day into that one piece of chicken. This same process applies to the rest of the meat centered meals, like the taco meat, chicken nuggets, deli turkey, chicken patty, hamburgers, hot dogs, and popcorn chicken. Isn't that convenient? Plus, it's a win-win for both the school and students because the school can buy these nutritional meats for cheap prices.

My other secret lunch desire is that I may get the alternate lunch. The alternate lunch is equally as filling as the hot meat lunches and is thus something I always get. The options for alternate lunch are as follows: salad, pizza, bagels, soup, and the occasional leftover lunch from a previous lunch. The salads are a favorite for everyone at our school because the salads are full of color. They possess hues of green, clear, and my favorite color brown. The school is also very considerate to the people with sensitive teeth at our school because the lettuce in the salads is always warm, flimsy, and has no crunch to them. Isn't that nice? The pizza is another daily favorite at school because, who doesn't like reheated pizza? Everyday there are five or six circular pizzas sitting on foam trays in the alternate line. The pizzas have so much character, you would want to just stick all of them in your pocket to bring home. The rubbery dried yellow cheese of the pizza slides back and forth on the canned tomato sauce. The pizza bread as has no crust or crunch because who likes to hear the crunch of pizza? Answer: No one that I know. Plus, if for some reason you are absent from school and miss out on eating the pizza, don't worry, those pizzas will be there all month. This same policy applies to the moist wet bagged bagels, the bins of salty chicken broth soup, and the leftover hot lunches. Except the hot lunches do circulate more than the alternate lunches. My favorite leftover hot lunches are the Thursday lunches that are reheated and served on Mondays. Alternate lunches are always a great back fall if I don't feel like trying the hot lunches and serve as a great tasty meal.

Besides the regular meals, the snacks are a great accent to the tasty meals and are just enough to top off and cease your hunger. The hydrating icy clumped orange juice always satisfies my thirst and my need to chew on something. The apples are just sour enough to make my face cringe, and it's just like eating candy. The carrots are a personal favorite because you can never choke on them due to the slime that covers them. How safe right? Those meals sides are the perfect snack to have with our meals.

Not only does the school cater to students who are always hungry, but they also cater to students who are not hungry and are trying to lose weight. Most students think that the school doesn't care as to how the lunches are 'disgusting', but they do. In fact, they make lunches grotesque on purpose. If students think the lunches are gross, they won't eat lunch, thus they lose weight. How ingenious right? The other way to think about it is that the students will eat the lunches and become ill or nauseous from the food; therefore, they will be too sick to eat snacks that afternoon or dinner that night. If the food is really toxic, some students might even fast for that night and maybe even into the next day, especially if they ate the turkey and gravy. No longer will students have to spend money and pay for dinners, breakfasts, a gym membership, or even a diet program when they can just eat lunch at school. Most students actually nowadays bring lunch from home because they don't particularly like the lunches, thus saving their family even more money even if they don't buy any food from the school at lunch. School lunches are 'different' for a purpose and are the school's secret way of helping students lose weight and save money.

I would like to take this moment to thank schools everywhere for those wonderful multi-purpose lunches and the unique qualities they possess. The bland revolting tastes and colors of the food really just make me excited to be in school. The new flavor and textures never cease to amaze me, as they are usually different from what I would expect from a certain food. I don't know what I would do without the nutritional value school lunches provide, because at home all I eat is that boring authentic foods, like meat, that only embodies certain vitamins and minerals. Thank you, school, for those quality lunches, as they make me smile; and immensely nauseous.