Smooth peanut butter, blueberry jelly, whole wheat bread. Sliced Red Delicious apple. Baby carrots. Seeded pretzel slims.

Lunch.

As I sit at the table in the junior section of the cafeteria, I pull my green and navy flowery lunchbox out of my backpack, and open the tinfoil covering my sandwich.

Right as I am about to take my first bite, however, I look around to see backpacks, not friends, on all the seats around me. I become      immediately embarrassed, my face turning bright red, my mind reeling: What are people thinking about the girl sitting all alone? I drop my sandwich back on the tinfoil and scurry away from the empty table into the cafeteria to find my friends who are buying a school lunch.

Walking through the cafeteria, I push through hordes of people who knock into my backpack and reach for food in front of my face. On my way to the sandwich line, I must maneuver my way through the never-ending line, pushing my way through the tiny gaps between groups of people.

I finally spot some friends and proceed to spend 15 minutes waiting for them to get their toasted paninis. The table finally fills up enough for me to feel comfortable to sit down. With half of lunchtime gone, I am able to chow down on my long-awaited PB&J.

As I sit eating my lunch, people ask me why I use plastic bags to bring my apple and carrots every day, why I even own that lunchbox, meant maybe for a kindergartener.

Should I bring my lunch in a brown paper bag? I think not.

As I eat my home-packed lunch, people sometimes ask me how early I need to wake up to be able to make lunch in the morning.

I proceed to answer that while I eat breakfast every morning, my mom sits at the kitchen table with me and makes my lunch. In elementary school when I didn’t even know how to make a sandwich, my mom would of course pack my lunch every morning.

Eleven years later, we have yet to change this routine.

I have been one of the only kids to bring my lunch to school every day since elementary school. I know that as a proud owner of a lunchbox, I fall within the vast minority of juniors in high school. In fact, according to the Census Bureau, 31.3 million children in public schools buy their lunch from the school cafeteria each month.

Even so, bringing lunch to school makes sense to me. Despite being chided for my lunchbox, I save so much money. It costs the average person $1,025, to buy lunch every day for the school year, according to David Bass of Education Next. For me, it costs $3.75 for a loaf of bread, $4 for a jar of peanut butter, and $2 for the jelly. The bread lasts at least a week, while the peanut butter and jelly usually last more than a month. This totals to about $220 for the year, allowing me to save about $800 each school year.

Also, my mom has mastered the art of making my lunch. The proportion of peanut butter to jelly is perfect, the bread never gets soggy, the apple is never brown. It always tastes exactly the same, never failing in its deliciousness.

Most importantly, how could I bear to do away with my lunchbox? I definitely couldn’t and no one can change my mind on that.