After Regents week, Townsend Harris students were greeted with a new grab-and-go lunch system in the cafeteria. After nearly a month of experiencing the new system, students have started forming opinions with many praising the shorter lines and increased options as others have raised concerns about crowding and availability.
“I think it’s really smart that they finally added a simpler lunch system because it’s much faster and much more organized. People can just take what they want, and it’s not as packed,” said junior Oliver Saraki. Senior Natalie Tamma said “the line, while it still gets congested, eases up faster so you don’t see a line across the entire lunch room for thirty minutes.”
While the new lunch system did earn mostly positive feedback, some students said that the system can feel rather chaotic. Senior Jade Deen said “there’s no such thing as a line anymore and everyone’s just jumbled up, clustered over the [grab-and-go stations] to get lunch.” Senior Ananna Ali said that during sixth and seventh lunch bands, “it gets heavily crowded and messy.”
Despite the crowds, students said the new system does seem faster. Sophomore Oliver Remus and Ananna both said they were previously deterred by long lines that persisted throughout the entire band and the new system allows them to get school lunch more frequently.
Although unexpected for most Townsend students who were not aware of the change before Regents week, the grab-and-go lunch system was not an entirely new concept. Sophomore Sydney Zhang said, “I’ve definitely seen [the system] in a lot of other schools over the summer. I went to Thomas A. Edison High School for a program, and they had the same layout. Ready for students to grab and go.”
Junior Anisha Islam criticized the general availability of food under the new system, asserting that “there’s…no more food left” during the latter half of the band. Jade said, “it is limiting [when we can get] lunch because back when we used to have the regular lines, I could get lunch anytime within the band. But now I can only get it near the beginning, and it’s not as accessible as before.”
With seemingly smaller quantities of food available, senior Shreya Patel asked, “what if someone has dietary restrictions and … could only eat one specific dish then it’s gone? What happens next?”
Likewise, paraprofessional Amazing Grace Lianos speaks from experience in her previous job, “I think students favor this system more because it supports their independence to grab-and-go their meals whenever they please. We had the grab-and-go system at Long Island City High School, and I would say that it was a more convenient and efficient system. I think students favor that more than having to wait for people to serve their trays for them.”
However, with the grab-and-go system in place, more work has been added to the lunch aides’ plates, who prepare the hundreds of meals the student body receives every day. One lunch aide told The Classic that “each meal has to [be] individually prepared and packaged [to be] put out” adding that it’s “more work [than] just serving it off the line.”
However, they said the system was going well: “It’s better than I thought it was going to be. I wasn’t expecting it to be as easy as it is. I thought it was going to be a lot harder on us, but it’s not that bad. The students seem to like it. It’s a little bit more work for us, but it benefits you guys better.”
