Good Vibes at Lunch Time

Good Vibes at Lunch Time

Getting to know one of many students experiences, routines, and opinions about what they do in the lunch period

Written by Jarrin Baradi

Lunch is the time to take a break from the hard work in school and chow down with friends. Whether a student brought home lunch to eat leftover fried rice, poke bowl, and many more food cuisines. Maybe if home lunch isn’t to a student’s liking, he or she can always buy school lunch from the cafe and snack shack. If it’s the loco moco, bentos, or one of the famous lunch specials is tornadoes on Thursdays. After eating a plate or two, most students would continue talking with friends, walk around the hallways, talk story with the teachers, or play in the field. A few prefer to take the time to catch up with work, or study for any upcoming tests. With one of the many students that was kindly open to talk about her experiences during the lunch period is an 11th grader, Ana Resurreccion. One of the topics we asked and she shared was her favorite food from the lunch menu, usual hangouts, and what to bring back from the old lunch menu.

Many students have favorite meals and lunch combos that are either home lunch or school lunch. If he or she brought a home-made lasagna, or bought a slice of pizza with a side of dippin dots flavor from the snack shop to ear. Some prefer to eat anything cheap or smaller food, like PB&J sandwiches or ramen, and the recently added malasadas added to the snack bar menu! While for Ana, she usually buys school lunch from the cafeteria. Furthermore she said, “I usually enjoy getting lunch from the daily specials each and everyday.”. In terms of favorite food from the cafe she answered, “I like the middle line’s fried chicken the most.”, which fried chicken is served on Tuesdays. With many choices to choose from any line each day, everyone has their own preferences in what they want to eat! Whether it’s home-made beef stew, cheeseburgers from the normal menu, or chicken nuggets from the daily specials.

There’s open places around the school to sit and eat with friends or have some alone time. Whether it’s in the cafeteria, outside benches and tables, near the stairwells, or anywhere. As many students enjoy hanging out together with their friends, some feel comfortable eating alone, and many more reasons. We then asked Ana’s answer to where she usually hangs out after finishing up her lunch in the cafeteria, and that is in the classroom. Her reasoning being, “I enjoy hanging out in the classroom, so I can get peace and quiet from everyone else, get to know the teachers better, and also study for my next class”. In a way this helps her benefit to stay on task, or get ahead in class. Just like Ana has her little hangout area around the school, so does everyone else. Either it’s used to do something productive, or to talk with friends! Maybe even get along with your teachers.

The school’s lunch menu is enjoyed by everyone. Though some students would want to eat something more. Whether grab another plate or two, or prefer to buy snacks from the vending machine. Yet others wish there were more meals to the menu, maybe bring back some old lunch meals to the menu. Some of the students who stayed longer at Damien around their middle school years are sure he or she misses some of the food items that used to be on the menu. When asking Ana’s answer about which food to bring back to the menu she answered, “I heard that the calamari and the tater tots would be very good side meals other than french fries, so that would be nice”. Surprisingly later on around the week of Ash Wednesday, both of what she requested came back to the menu! One of which is calamari added back to the lunch menu, while tater tots added back to during the breakfast hour. Though these two only appear on Fridays due to the start of the Lenten season. 

Overall lunch is everybody’s time to just take a breather after all the schoolwork, or the time for self care. Where everyone has their routine with the time they use during lunch period. Whether he or she uses it to spend time with friends, do last minute studying, or the time to do self-care and have some personal space. Though one thing we all can agree on is that lunch period is the time to chow down on our favorite food!