School Lunch: An Assortment of Opinions

If there’s anything students at BHS can agree on, it’s not which school lunches are good or bad. The Bison Bistro serves over twenty different lunches on a three-week rotating schedule, and there is no shortage of disagreement about which are best. 

A random survey of 28 students from all grades showed little consensus on which lunches were good or bad, and almost always disagreement when it came to picking a favorite.

The survey asked students to rate each lunch on a scale of 1-5 stars, and provide which one they thought was the best.

Super Nachos and Taco in a Bag were two clear leaders, with very high ratings on average. Super Nachos had an average rating of 3.57 stars, and Taco in a Bag had an average of 3.50. General Tso’s was ranked 4th by average, but ranked third in the number of 5-star ratings, with 25% giving it one. Chicken alfredo was in 3rd overall with an average rating of 3.11 stars.

Almost a third of the surveyed students said one of those four lunches were their favorite. That still leaves two thirds who think otherwise, but there are still a lot of students that attest to these lunches’ popularity.

“In my opinion the best lunch is General Tso’s,” Keon Mech ‘30 said. “Taco in a Bag is up there too, but usually it’s a really long line so I just get something else.”

Another important topic to bring up is the alternate lunch line. It rotates on a weekly schedule, containing lunches that students can reliably get instead of the main lunch. Some of these are even as popular as the main lunches.

“I really like the chicken sandwiches,” Mech said. “I also like the chicken wings, those are my favorites.”

Chicken sandwiches and chicken wings are two popular alternate lunches, with Philly Cheese Steaks and Lemon Chicken being pretty popular as well. However, not everyone agrees that these lunches are worth getting. In fact, some students rarely go in the alternate line.

“I really don’t like the bone-in wings, they have so much fat on them,” Walter Ellis ‘28 said. “I only go in the alternate line like once a week.”

Ellis and Mech’s contrasting opinions are backed up by data from the survey, with 15% giving bone-in wings a 5 star review and 29% giving it a 1-star review. In fact, almost every lunch had a disparity like this, with 1 and 5-star ratings being the most common across all surveys.

If there’s anything that could be learned from the school lunch opinions of BHS, it’s that it’s hard to say that a lunch is good or bad. If one student thinks a lunch is great, another will probably say that it isn’t. Maybe school lunch lives up to the old proverb: One man’s trash is another man’s treasure.