School lunches: It's All About the Presentation

BOSTON, U.S. -- For the past few months, students and adults at Boston Latin School have been getting locally grown vegetable samples during lunch time. This is part of a program to serve different varieties of vegetables grown by local farmers for lunch. The school's YouthCan group is pushing to get local foods into the school.

There have been fliers and posters in the dining hall. To help get students on board, green bean samples were given out to see if students would prefer these to other lunch offerings. This has led to a debate over whether the experiment is worth it or whether lunch should just be kept the same.

Kathleen Dougherty, a 16-year-old student was asked if people who buy lunch and have vegetables on their trays usually eat them. She said, "Not at all. No one touches their vegetables, they don't even get considered." She added that the vegetables don't look appetizing, looking mushy and unpresentable instead. Josie McDonald, also 16, said that she had seen people eating vegetables, but she herself would not like to eat them and thought they didn't look like they were cooked very well.

Calling for local products is not going to immediately make vegetables appealing at lunch time. The food will have to prove itself and its freshness.
All the students interviewed for this story said they didn't like the way their current lunch items look. It all came down to one thing: presentation.

Michael Riley, a sophomore, said, "If the vegetables looked better and didn't look mushy I might think about trying/eating them." He talked about how he doesn't really eat lunch on a regular basis and that he wouldn't want to
touch the new food because it doesn't matter to him if it is locally grown.

Carol Bowe, also a 16-year-old old, said: "If there were more options,
people would most likely eat them more. Only serving a limited amount of choices can lead to conflict because some people don't like those choices and just won't eat them. Presentation is everything, if something looks gross most people won't want to eat it."

School lunches should be healthier and trying to get a healthier menu by adding more vegetables could benefit many students. The problem with that is most students don't care for the food they are being served, so they won't eat the new healthy choices. Including more locally grown vegetables in school lunches could be a good test to see if it really is the choice in vegetables or the way the food is being cooked and served.