Farrell Levenson ’11
Staff Writer

The Staples High School cafeteria caters to over two thousand students daily, offering everything from a salad bar to a made to order style sandwich station. It serves everything from piping hot fries to chilled fruity smoothies.

Some of the options appear extremely healthy, especially the wraps. However, we found a copy of the nutritional facts available online, a wrap that’s generally advertised as a healthy alternative, the turkey and cheese wrap, had 613 calories.

Food that purely has an enormous number of calories is a huge problem in our cafeteria. A chicken Caesar wrap, which simply consisted of chicken pieces, lettuce, and Caesar dressing, had a whopping 668 calories.

In the Staples cafeteria, the total fat content of the food is unacceptable. According to teenshealth.org, for each 100 calories food has, it should have at most three grams of total fat. The BLT and cheese sandwich had 574 calories and therefore should have about 18g of fat. Somehow, Staples High School managed to make the sandwich contain a massive 41g of fat, twenty-three more fat grams than recommended.

Also, Staples serves food with an appalling saturated fat content. According to fda.gov, a person should consume an absolute maximum twenty grams of saturated fat per day. The aforementioned BLT and cheese had a monstrous 16.78 grams of saturated fat- packing a day’s worth into one sandwich. The fact that one mere sandwich can be so nutritionally atrocious is a problem with the Staples High School cafeteria.

In order to solve the health crisis, Chartwells must make some changes to the food selection offered at Staples. First, minor alterations such as changing dressings from regular to ‘lite’ will help cut down extra calories. For example, Ken’s Caesar dressing has 170 calories for 2 tbsp whereas Ken’s lite Caesar dressing has 70 calories for 2 tbsp (Calorie-Count.com).

The cafeteria also needs to make the nutritional facts more readily available for students, possibly by posting them around the room or by the cash registers. Even if seeing the facts doesn’t stop students from buying the unhealthy foods, it will at least cause us to think about the consequences of consuming them.