Here’s the thing: eating healthy is a good idea. Obesity, especially in the case of our youth, is a serious issue. The government’s programs like Michelle Obama’s 60 minutes of physical activity a day campaign are aimed to alleviate this culture of unhealthy lifestyles. We have even seen it inside our school, with the disappearance of high fat foods, white bread, and french fries. Now, we are served sweet potato fries, more vegetables, and required to take fruit with our meal. While these measures may be less likely to choke up your arteries, requiring students to take a fruit, whether or not they want to, is not only wasteful, but useless.

If students don’t voluntarily take the fruit, the likelihood of them actually eating it is slim. The suggestion of the school to eat healthier will have little to no effect on their dislike of the food. People don’t eat things they don’t want to, especially when they are at school. Many teenagers I know subsist on an independent diet of potato chips and fast food—one of the fabulous things about being young. Eating healthier, in theory, is a good idea. However, forcing students to take fruit they don’t want will not make them eat it.

The strange pile up of untouched fruit cups directly behind the payment keypad may seem curious at first, until you see that after paying for their meal, students will ditch their fruit less than three feet from where they paid for it. Rather than saving the food for someone who would actually eat it, fruit cups, not to mention money, are being wasted.
Preparing enough food to provide for our school’s student body is difficult and expensive, let alone making it healthy. However, instead of requiring hot lunch to be bought with a fruit, it should be an option, not a requirement. Having healthy options available to those who wish to live past the age of thirty are appreciated and will be eaten. But for those of us who don’t mind eating like a binge-inclined farm animal leaving the fruit in the line will decrease the waste.