High School Cafeteria

    Forget about a soup, a main course and a bottomless cup of sweet tea. Junk food is in school cafeterias in the USA on a daily basis. Also you can buy breakfast there in the morning – a very sweet donut – or a snack during the main break – a candy bar (such as Snickers or Mars) and a packet of chips.

    So what can you eat for lunch? You can choose from 4 meals every day but they are almost the same every day. Try to guess what is the longest line for – a hamburger with French fries. This is completely the same every day. And the shortest line? That is for a baguette or a sandwich. I have never had one because I don’t like cold lunch. On a third place you can choose from about 3 kinds of pizza which are slightly different every day. And on the last place you can have a “normal” meal (defrosted and heated up not cooked at school). This meal is the same every Monday, every Tuesday and so on. It is some pasta or rice with meat and sauce. In my opinion the portions here were the smallest so I didn’t visit this place very often. Basically I visited this place only on Wednesdays because there was a Teriyaki chicken with steamed broccoli and rice. This is one of my favourite meals even now. I sometimes cook it at home because you can buy the Teriyaki sauce in Czech shops too. It’s a kind of soy sauce.

    Let’s talk a little bit about an American pizza. The ingredients on the top are basically the same as on an Italian pizza but the bottom part is very different. An Italian pizza is less than 1 cm high and an American pizza is almost 3 cm high. It tastes like bread or a salty cake.

    My favourite part of the meal is a salad. You can make your own salad every day from different kinds of vegetables and choose from 2 or 3 kinds of dressing. And what do you drink? In the price of the lunch ($2 which was about 60Kč in the year 2003) you can have a very small box of orange juice (about 1dl) or a bigger box (about 2dl) of milk or chocolate milk. Do you think it's weird to eat a hamburger with milk? Don't worry. All Americans drink it and I'm the proof that you won't be sick after such a combination. It's actually quite good.