Note: If you already know about the purpose of this petition you can skip this but if you need convincing or just want to hear what I have to say please read onward.

About our lunches:

Our school lunches are bad, at least that's what I and my fellow students here at Sky View Middle School think and by the time you finish reading this I think you will agree. To prove how bad they are I went and asked some of my fellow students what they thought of our lunches and got a few mixed answers, the general consensus I got was that the pizza was good but the rest of the food could range from "ok" to "really bad". Why is this? To understand that we need to go back to where the lunch comes from.

The root of the problem:

Our school lunches (according to a teacher at the school) come from the high school where they have an actual kitchen. They make the meals there box them up and send them to us to be put in a freezer until they are pulled out and reheated onto a plate. You know how food doesn't taste as good reheated? This is because of a phenomena called Warmed-over Flavor. This phenomena is a result of the quote "changes in eating quality and oxidative deterioration of dishes during different thermal processing" (International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science
Volume 31, March 2023) Which put simple means the oxidative decomposition of lipids (fatty substances) in the meat into chemicals. These chemicals are what makes reheated meats or other reheated foods taste bad. This is the issue that plagues the students in our school.

The skeptics among you might just say "Well if you don't like it bring lunch from home!" and to that I say this: what if the parents of the children don't have enough money? I am 100% sure that at many kids in my school can relate to that right?

How do we solve this problem:

We can solve this problem by simply removing the middle man and giving the people who work in the cafeteria an actual kitchen to prepare our meals in. This prevents any foul tastes from entering the food because the food is never frozen in the first place. In fact the only reason the school's pizza tastes so good is because of the Warmed-over Flavor phenomena which actually happens to have a positive effect on certain foods like pizza.

Conclusion:

We need to take action to fix the flawed lunch system at our school and allow our cafeteria staff to use fresh ingredients to make us fresh meals. Plus a better lunch makes for happier students and happier students get higher grades. For the sake of our eighth grade lunch and the lunches of the sixth and seventh graders we must change the lunch system for the better.

Resources:

Author links open overlay panelJianying Li, Highlights•The eating quality of beef and potatoes was influenced significantly by various reheating methods.•The content of nucleotides in beef and potatoes increased but in soup decreased after reheating.•The content of free amino acids increased with b, (MR), A. effect of microwave, Becker, A., Burgos, G., Bordoloi, A., Chen, D.-W., Du, H., Dinh, T. T. N., Feng, C., Folch, J., Feng, X., Gong, H., Giri, A., Jiang, S., Kanzler, S., Kuda, T., Luo, X., Liu, J., … Yu, Y. (2023, January 12). Effect of reheating methods on eating quality, oxidation and flavor characteristics of braised beef with potatoes dish. International Journal of Gastronomy and Food Science. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1878450X2300001X