This year, the Bonds Wilson Campus lunch staff has dramatically changed the way they serve their food. For better or for worse, this change threw every person through a loop on the first day of school and confused a lot of the returning students.

In previous years, there was an Orange Chicken/Cheeseburger line, Pizza line, hot lunch line, and a salad bar line. As the hot lunch line meals changed every day, you could always go back to the other three lines if you did not want hot lunch that particular day. This was a great system as there was the excitement of having a new lunch every day in addition to the pizza and Orange Chicken. These random lunches included Chicken Alfredo, Grilled Cheese and Tomato Soup, General Tso’s Chicken, Salisbury Steak, and Quesadillas. All of these delicious meals are no longer a part the lunch schedule. Along with this, the short life of the soup line was brought to an abrupt end at the start of this year. The soup line was one of the busiest and most healthy lunch lines that even the people that brought their lunch wanted to have.

This year, they have kept the salad bar and the Orange Chicken/Cheeseburger lines the same, but they have dramatically changed the pizza and hot lunch lines.  The pizza line only serves one slice at a time, and they are made from a different material than the pizzas before. I feel as if the focus on student health has been overtaken by the desire to save money by spending money on foods such as wings and smaller pizzas.

I decided to make my way to the cafeteria and interview the nutritional staff at Magnet on these changes. They explained to me that the change from Smart Pizzas to “Big Daddy” pizza was the result of an experiment at “a few” other CCSD schools where it was determined that students were significantly happier with the new pizzas. However, this is unfair to the schools that enjoyed the Smart Pizzas and did not take part in the experiment that changed the pizzas for the entirety of Charleston County School District. In addition to the pizza line, I got a reasonable explanation for the change to the hot lunch line. The nutritional staff explained to me that a great amount of food was being wasted when one meal was made each day in the hot lunch line. Now that they have changed it to the wing line, this eliminates food waste as they can reuse the food that was not bought the previous day, simply by reheating it. Finally, I was informed that the Soup line will be reinstated within the next few weeks.

Overall, I feel like this change is a good and bad situation for the student body. Now the hot lunch line has much less desirable foods that are also less healthy. However, this change eliminates a significant amount of food waste and therefore saves money for the school district that can be used in other areas of our education.