Cafeteria lines makes eating practically impossible

During my first two months as a sophomore, while making the transition to main campus, I noticed a major difference in how lunch ran in comparison to the ninth grade campus. On one hand, we have an hour which we are free to converse with friends, seek help in class, and explore most of the campus. On the other hand, the lunch lines are unbearably long. With all the time it takes during lunch I have no time to munch on my food.

Being someone who regularly eats their lunch from the cafeteria, I found that it takes fifteen to twenty minutes or sometimes half an hour to eat lunch. Because of the waiting periods, I only eat lunch at school a couple times a week. Other people have felt annoyed too about the lunch line. Recently a student even wrote a letter to the school on how to better organize the lunch line. Clearly, the time it takes to get food is also consuming time for more important things to do during lunch such as tutorials for class.

The time it takes to wait in the lunch line takes away time to attend SMART lunch. Many students try to take advantage of the hour long period to get extra work or get help from a teacher. For many students, lunch is the only meal they’ll get to eat during the day, which raises the question: which is more important, eating or getting help in class?

Another problem with the lunch line is how disorderly it is. Even with the three lines at lunch, the lines are more of a group of people squished together rather than a neat, organized lunch line. Due to the amount of people in the lunch line, people cut, often causing to others to wait even longer. I can’t play innocent and say I haven’t done this myself, but if the lines were better organized, we wouldn’t have a problem with people cutting. In addition, if somebody cuts the wrong person in line, there could be a fight. The last thing we need is a fight during lunch.

Lunch is a basic requirement for students, and all of us who eat lunch want to get our food as quickly as we can. After a long day of working in class and taking quizzes, and tests, most people just want to grab lunch and talk to friends, not stand in line by themselves and awkwardly check the phone every five minutes. The school definitely needs to do something about organizing lunch, as it is cutting in time for tutorial in class. A considerable option that the school may consider is introducing microwaves to the cafeteria. This way, people who already have food from home can take up less space in the lunch line and just bring food from home to heat up.

I understand that there is not a fallible solution to this, but everybody deserves to eat during lunch, be free to talk to people, walk around campus, and get help if they need to. We have an hour to do what we want, but still, it is not enough to do what we need to do. The school needs to recognize this as a problem for students with conflicting priorities. There may not necessarily be an easy way to fix it, but there is a way around this problem without eliminating SMART Lunch. Feeding over 500 students in one hour is, without a doubt, difficult, but I just hope one day the students won’t have to wait in line for 20 minutes just to get a soda.