Letter to principal, why school food is lacking nutrition

There is a huge problem in the lunch room which needs to be addressed quite promptly. Due to the selection of foods available to the students, my peer’s health is at risk as well as my health and I would like to see some of these problems be fixed. First of all, the nutrition facts of all products should be easily accessible so the students and I know how healthy or unhealthy the food is. Secondly, there are more unhealthy then healthy foods to choose from making students choose horrible foods instead of better foods. Lastly, the latter of the lunch periods do not have healthy foods available because the earlier lunch periods eat the already limited healthy salads and sandwiches.

In order to talk about what is and is not considered healthy, you need to have a definition of each. Healthy food would be low in saturated fat and containing limited amounts of cholesterol and sodium. Also, it should be rich with essential vitamins and minerals. Unhealthy food would be products high in saturated fat with a lot of cholesterol and low amounts of nutrients. If I wanted to pick a “healthy” food, I would need to read the nutrition label. The problem in the lunchroom is that many nutrition facts for items are very hard to find. It affects my health directly because I take a gamble on what I think is healthy since there is nothing to tell me how much fat is in what I want to eat. Something that I think may be healthy could be horrible for my health. The same is true for my fellow peers. Without knowing what is in our food, how can we make the right decisions when choosing what food we would like to eat?

Another problem we are facing is the amount of healthy foods as opposed to unhealthy foods that there are available in the cafeteria. The ratio is horrible. To approximate, for every one “healthy” item, there are about five “unhealthy” items in the lunchroom. With these numbers, don’t you think it would be quite difficult for a student to pick healthier food over the unhealthy food surrounding it? Some students have personal factors that affect their ability to chose healthy food. A good example would be their will power. If someone is surrounded by very fatty but extremely tasty foods, there is a good chance they will choose to eat fattier food over a healthier kind of food.

Earlier lunch periods seem to be eating most of the healthy food that is sold in the lunchroom leaving sixth and seventh period lunch with even less to chose from than the already small selection. When I went to grab a sandwich sixth period before my class started, I was horrified to find out that they were all sold to other students before me. I ended up grabbing a package of “poptarts” which is extremely unhealthy since I was so hungry and needed something to munch on. If we want to increase the overall healthiness of the school population, we need to make sure everyone has an equal chance to buy whatever healthy food it is they want to eat.

I propose to fix the nutrition label problem by clearly labeling whatever food item is being served by Sodexho including all of the nutrition facts necessary to consider how “healthy” it really is. For the imbalance of food choices we have in the cafeteria, the easiest thing to do would be to even out the ratio between healthy and unhealthy foods so students have a better chance of picking something healthy to eat that they find tasty. For the problem pertaining to the later lunches not having certain heathy food options available, I suggest that we simply buy more of the healthy food choices (salads/sandwiches) from Sodexho so we do not sell out of them right away.

I challenge you to start taking some steps to fix these problems in the lunchroom. If nothing is done now, my friend’s health as well as my health will begin to decrease. Bad eating habits are being formed and there needs to be some changes in the school cafeteria to stop this. Thank you for your time.