Ahhh, lunchtime. Aside from giving you a desperately-needed brain break, lunch is also one of the few moments during your school day when you have control: Do you get the hot lunch/a la carte cafeteria option or do you go with something brought from home? This is no easy choice—Bill Gates probably still struggles with the same issues at the Microsoft cafeteria (or so we'd like to think).
In the name of science, we've spent every lunch break this week researching, analyzing, and cataloging all the pros and cons of both high school lunch options. It's now time to reveal the results of our investigation:
Freshness
If you bring your own lunch, it will sit in your locker or backpack for three hours, soaking up that awful "school smell," or, alternatively, making everything in your locker smell like leftover meatloaf. If you brought anything that was meant to be eaten chilled, it will be a very unappetizing room temperature by lunchtime. And certain meat-and-cheese sandwich combinations tend to congeal into an unsavory mass—for example, ham, cheese, and mayo often fuse into a tepid layer of chamayo.
In theory, the hot lunch at school should be fresh, as it's made that day on the school premises. And some items, like yogurt, actually will be a much more pleasant cool temperature when purchased at school. On the other hand, are those dubious BBQ Chicken Tenders ever really fresh?
Bartering
If you're one of those kids whose parents stuff your BYO lunch with goodies like deluxe turkey sandwiches, a selection of fruits and veggies, a fruit roll-up, brand-name potato chips, and a piece of homemade apple pie, you're in a great position to trade with your lunch neighbors.
Then again, if you planned on getting hot lunch, you can bargain with something more powerful than food: CASH!
Tacos
If you're lucky, the hot lunch menu at your school keeps a taco bar in regular rotation. Mmmmm, tacos.
It would be pretty tough to carry tacos successfully in your BYO lunch. You can only look on in envy as your hot lunch friends devour theirs.
Smooshability
Your BYO lunch might have looked awesomely delicious when you packed it in the morning, but it could end up looking like a flattened pile of mush after a few hours banging around in your book bag of choice. Unless, of course, you have one of those fancy-schmancy structurally reinforced, reusable lunch packs. In which case, your stomach and the environment thank you.
Your hot lunch doesn't risk being smooshed by your textbooks, but it often has a generally mushy texture.
Poison
You're not sure why, but the cafeteria lady serving hot lunch seems to hate you, and you're pretty sure that if you get food from her she'll put poison (or worse!) in it.
Your mom loves you. You're 100% positive your BYO lunch is poison-free.
Flirting
Waiting in the hot lunch line gives you a chance to make small talk with that cute kid in your geometry class. Fishing for conversation topics? You can always commiserate over the sad state of the school's green beans.
With a BYO lunch, you have absolutely no excuse to chit-chat with that cute kid standing in the hot lunch line (unless you want to offer him your fruit roll-up).
The Late Afternoon Crash
Unless you want to pull a Napoleon Dynamite and stuff some tater tots in your pocket, it's kind of hard to save something from the hot lunch for your 6th period blood sugar crash.
With a BYO lunch, you can easily set aside an apple or Twix bar for later in the day. When your stomach starts making really loud grumbling noises, you'll have something to quiet it down.
Creativity
If you tote your BYO lunch around in a paper bag, you can turn the bag into a hand puppet after you're done eating.
A hot lunch tray makes a really lame hand puppet.
Are you a hot lunch patron or a BYO-er? Or do you dabble in both, switching it up every so often to keep lunch life interesting?
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