Great. You Made School Food Healthful. Now Can You Make It Taste Good?

SpecialKRB/Flickr

This is what high school students want back in their food supply.

​According to the Los Angeles Times,high school students in the LA Unified School District are rejecting the district's new, more healthful cafeteria food en masse. The school spent last year reformulating its dishes, introducing new flavors -- Carribean meatballs, quinoa salads, lentil patties -- and giving the boot to corn dogs and strawberry milk. They held comprehensive taste tests of the new dishes, even, and scored a 75 percent approval rate.

But school administrators either underestimated the teenage appetite for French fries or the kitchens screwed up the execution of the food  -- badly. Kids are going hungry or sneaking in chips for lunch rather than eat many of the new offerings, the Times reports, and even school principals are asking the district to bring back hamburgers. Is it a case of students with conservative tastes, or institutional food cooked badly?