As teenagers, and as people in general, trying to build healthy habits around food and nutrition is an important topic among the students of Mid-Pacific. But what is the school doing to help students educate themselves on this arguably paramount issue?
Concerns about the quality and the relative health of the food served at Mid-Pacific is among one of the loudest complaints you can hear in and among those students who buy their lunch from the school cafeteria. Ask any student who regularly sources their lunch from the snack cart and they'll tell you there's something lacking.
“They have so much junk food. They have Airheads, Sour Patch Kids, all kinds of candies. It's not good if that's the only thing people are buying from those places,” said sophomore River Holden.
Where does Mid-Pacific get its food? The school has a partnership with Sodexo, a food-services and property management company that dominates the market of catering for institutions. If you’ve ever eaten in a food court here in Hawai'i – chances are you’ve eaten their food. Sodexo operates in around 45 countries, pulls in 38 Billion dollars every year, and owns 7 prisons in the UK.
Sodexo supplies the school lunch, but a majority of students get food from the snack cart, where there is an overwhelming amount of processed foods.
“A lot of people are just used to it, so they don't really think about all of the processed foods that they're eating. It's just been completely normalized,” IB psychology teacher April Babcock said.
Barely anyone–teacher or student–notices it anymore. “junk” food such as potato chips, cookies, cakes, and ice cream are all served at various locations around campus.
This, however, is a problem not entirely perpetrated by Sodexo.
“A lot of the superprocessed foods that we desire are manufactured in order to trigger our craving. High salt, high sugar, We tend to gravitate towards those choices, even if they're not the best. So I do think it's more like the food industry, manufacturing things that keep people coming back,” Babcock said
Students have a responsibility to themselves and the community to make good choices, and inspire change among their peers. After all, you do control what you buy from the school. Change is possible, of course, and a lot of students do seek change in the form of more available healthy, whole foods that they can eat at school.
“I wish they had more fruit there. That's always the number one thing that's taken off first. If they were smart about supply and demand, they would see a massive demand for those fruit cups. I think [students] do want [healthy food],” said Holden.
A partnership with Sodexo should be exactly what it sounds like. A partnership. But the norms of ultra-processed foods is a dangerous one, for a multitude of reasons. Something needs to change, and the main offender here is the very people who supply the food.
“The cultural shift needs to start in the form of nutrition, education, and people wanting [change],” Babcock said.
