What is your favorite part of the school day? It’s a question that gets asked all the time. Most of the time, the answer is lunch – a great time to hang out with your friends, gossip, go to club meetings, make up tests, and especially eat your lunch. With so many students on campus, it begs the question: what do people eat during lunch? Is it a packed lunch? Something with a thermos? Something that they eat over and over every day? Or is it just school lunch?
The CHS campus is full of many happy eaters and some unhappy ones. Sophomore Quinn Freede, is reportedly very bored of her lunch. For her entire time at Claremont High, she has consistently brought microwaved rice and some sort of seaweed to school.
“I am probably going to hate it one day, that is what happens to all of my lunches,” Freede said.
It is an easy meal for Freede to compile, she sticks her rice in the microwave, grabs her seaweed, and goes to school.
While Freede makes her own lunch, senior Linnea Anderson has had her lunch made for her ever since she was a kindergartener. Her hard working mom and noted philanthropist, Christy Anderson, prepares quite the balanced lunch for her kids.
“My mom packs my lunch, because she likes doing it and I don’t mind.” Anderson’s lunch included trail mix, a meat stick, yogurt, a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and school milk (which her boyfriend senior Gabriel Maxson kindly gave to her).
Maxson, Linnea’s generous boyfriend, who sits with her, usually eats school lunch, which for him is a drumstick and a tangerine from the cafeteria. Maxson’s favorite part of lunch is not being in the classroom, but rather being out and about in the quads, specifically in the 600s. His taste in lunches has (thankfully) evolved from his outrageous creations involving mixing multiple food objects into milk.
“We used to fill the chocolate milk with a bunch of stuff,” Maxson said. “Like the insides of burritos, and hot sauce, and stuff.”
Like Maxson, sophomore Izzy Pineda gets the daily school lunch. Pineda’s lunch had taquitos, watermelon, and two tangerines. Pineda raves about how the school has never served watermelon before. Her excitement about this fruit led to her telling a story about the tangerine thief.
“In middle school, I was known as the tangerine thief,” Pineda said. “Because I always had about eighteen tangerines on my plate everyday.”
She reportedly stole the fruit from people who were “not going to eat them anyway”.
Sitting across from Pineda, sophomore Charlie De La Rosa had a very challenging lunch that included a previously consumed Uncrustable, grapes, Doritos, Goldfish, a tangerine, mini chocolate chip cookies, and a thermos of soup that refused to open—an experience shared by many thermos carrying students and their friends.
When asked if her food held any cultural significance De La Rosa was quick to defend her lunch.
“Uncrustables are pretty culturally significant,” De La Rosa said. “I have had one every single day since elementary school.”
The CHS lunchtime remains a significant break in the day, where students can unwind from their classes throughout the day, gossip, and cram for their next period. Most importantly, they indulge in a wide variety of foods from packed to school-bought.
