The Los Angeles United States District tries its best to give students meals that fill their stomachs with the most affordable, healthiest options.

Throughout each day, students are provided with breakfast, lunch, and dinner meals to ensure that their nutritional standards are met. However, the topic of school food has been a debate amongst students on whether it is actually worth eating.

Families are sometimes not fortunate enough to provide their child with proper meals, so it’s important for schools to take action and prepare food for all students.

And that’s what LAUSD does.

An undisclosed amount of LAUSD’s proceeds goes towards providing 130 million free meals per year. LAUSD has been trying a food-relief-effort to make food sufferings within families less severe, thus providing 100 million meals. A majority of the students always forget to pack lunch for school, so knowing they’ll be able to have food at school gives them one less thing to worry about.

But, looking at the school foods itself, it seems as if they take the student’s health with a grain of salt.

Unfortunately, school food lacks taste and is far from satisfying.

Many years ago in 2010, LAUSD’s school food was actually appetizing. From pulled pork BBQ sandwiches and hot wings for lunch, to warm pancakes for breakfast, a student would not go home hungry.

Portions were also significantly bigger than they are now, and they have not tried to hide it. School cafeterias have begun serving 3 chicken tenders, 3 pieces of teriyaki beef, 3 pieces of everything.

The amount of food students are given to eat is very questionable. There is an obvious imbalance in the meals and nothing is done to change this. Typically, a well balanced meal has a serving of carbohydrates, protein, fat, and fruits or vegetables.

In reality, the school does not meet said standards if they give students the option of getting a medium sized fruit smoothie with a side of cookies, a drink, and vegetables as the full meal.

Some days, they even give the same meals consecutively. And if students are at the very ends of the lines, they don’t get the same options as the people who got there first.

There is an upside that LAUSD has provided to their students. Now, students have the ability to see what food is provided ahead of time. The Yumyummi app is a free and downloadable app that can be used when you don’t feel the need to wait in line for food options you don’t like, and can even prepare a meal for yourself at home beforehand.

LAUSD is also big on purchasing its produce from local farms, to not only to make sure students are getting proper nutritious food, but to support the farmers.

One of the biggest misfortunes of school foods is no one really eats the entire meal. Students wait through long lines only to grab a chocolate milk and throw the rest of the food away. We see it every day, mountains of barely touched food and piles of spilled food everywhere.

While there are downsides to school food being provided, it’s very important for free breakfast and lunch to be provided for students nonetheless. There can be different ways to handle these problems and fix them, so that’s what the next step should be to have a better meal experience for students.