Food is the heart of the soul. In fact, food is one of the basic necessities of life: it contains nutrients – substances essential for the growth, repair, and overall functioning of the human body. Food brings people together, food is happiness and food is love. However, a large majority of high school students feel as if the cafeteria food provided by Novae in the school is not up to their standards and therefore feel greatly disappointed.
Originally, I intended for this article to focus on all the expenses of school, and essentially, to answer the question: “Is school, in general, a scam?” However, in order to answer such a controversial and complicated question, especially in a school newspaper, I would have to divide this question into various different categories and sections, not to mention the countless hours of research I would have to conduct in order to give a full and unbiased answer. So, I have decided to start smaller and answer a different question – Why does the cafeteria food not live up to student’s expectations? And more importantly, why does it seem that the pricing keeps increasing though the quality does not?
Interestingly, the majority of the prices in the cafeteria have increased by 31%, which, in the long term, is a significant change, especially for students who are unable to bring their own lunches from home. As an example, the average break time snack in addition to the everyday lunch before would charge a student around 16CHF. However, now with the new prices introduced, this charge has become 21CHF, an increase of 5CHF. Now, if a student bought school lunch for every day of the year, for approximately 180 days, the total would originally be 2880 CHF. However with this increase, the pricing is now roughly CHF 3700 – a whopping 820 CHF difference! With over 65% of students purchasing the cafeteria food, this increase in price is incredibly noticeable and severe for many families. Despite the Novae staff’s explanation last year, there still seems to be a large sum of money which the student’s feel as if they have been, essentially – scammed.
The Novae staff in our school stated previously that they had, “increased the quality and that had a price,” so they were “obliged to raise the prices a little if we want to have quality and make lots of home-made things.” However, many students have a very different opinion in terms of the quality of the food and its’ pricing, especially after the frequent ups and downs in increasing and decreasing the prices. Additionally, the average inflation rate in Switzerland this year was only 2.1%, so what was the extra 29% added to the price for? A few highschool students have personally spoken about this matter, with one person pointing out that despite the prices being raised, there was little to no difference in the quality, which is exactly the opposite of what the Novae staff had told the students. Unfortunately, we cannot make assumptions about the profit that Novae gains as students are not aware of the additional costs that Novae spends on cooking and buying its food.
In regards to the nutritional value of food, despite many of the meals from novae being regarded as “organic” or “fresh”, a large portion of students disagree. As an example, one high schooler had reached out to me and given me her perspective on the quality of the school food. “I often feel as if the quality of the food is really low, because you can tell just by looking at it that it isn’t fresh and that it’s greasy,” she said. “Also, on multiple occasions, I’ve come across meat that was not cooked properly, had a strange texture, you know all things that don’t reassure students when they eat their lunch.”.
In fact, multiple students have openly shown their dislike for the school food: “Quality has gone down drastically over the years. It used to be good, and now people struggle to find edible food, especially in the South campus. In the south campus it’s always burgers, fries, or pizza. The food is made in advance and is kept there so it doesn’t taste fresh, it gets soggy by the time they serve it to us.” Despite Novae presenting their food as something nutritious, healthy and overall, “high quality”, a large majority of their food is not, particularly their snacks. Twix, Balistos, chocolate bars and proccessed snacks are all available to the students, not to mention the countless amount of pastries and sweet drinks given, all which have are high callorie but low in nutrition. In addition to that, the prices for these snacks are still incredibly high for something that can easily be bought in bulk at a very low price.
Something else that is quite shocking is novae’s so called, “home-made things”: There menus have asterisks (*) to indicate whether or not the meal that is available for purchasing is home-made or not, but on further examination, only 2-3 meals are actually home-made per week. So in actuality, how healthy is the food given to the students? With there being no other available option other than Novae’s cafeteria food to the students, whilst other schools allow their students to purchase lunches outside of their campuses, the students who have no time to bring their own packaged lunches are forced to buy ridiculously expensive meals, so thus, the cycle continues.
There is so much more distressing information I could write about, which would actually be a much longer, detailed article, though I would like to really stress that this is a real, actual issue, that should be more discussed in the school and that there should be a larger, physical change in school regarding the cafeteria food. As a writer in the High, there is only so much one can do to analyse, explain, and tear apart the issue, but it is another thing to solve it. So, I ask of everyone reading this to please take some sort of action, because, after all, if Food is the Heart of the Soul, then I believe that Novae’s is stone cold.
