A few weeks ago, a survey was sent out to all students currently enrolled at HMSA. This survey asked about everyone’s favorite and least favorite food in general, along with everyone’s favorite and least favorite school food. Let’s take a look at the preferences of our 32 respondents, shall we? 

Now the big question is, what was everyone’s favorite food, in general? The majority of the respondents (34.5%) chose french fries, closely followed by ice cream and pizza. For fries, most respondents’ reasons were that it’s a tasty quick snack. However we also had some very “specific” descriptions of french fries: “It’s warm and gooey on the inside.” 

Now where it starts to get diverse is with dislikes. The most commonly disliked food were hotdogs, but almost everyone who answered gave a different response. 

In terms of student opinion on foods provided by the school, for breakfast foods, by mass, 45% of the students chose the banana and chocolate bar as their favorite offering, closely followed by the chocolate chip muffin and the cinnamon toast crunch bar. I was surprised that very few students chose sunrise bites (the breakfast cookie thing), but the few who did had some good reasons. “It has whole wheat, which makes it a healthy breakfast. It also tastes really good, especially when you pair it with milk,” wrote Santiago. Over 50% of the students said that they hated the breakfast corndog, mostly for the reason that “[i]t doesn’t taste good.” 

For school lunch items, the majority favorite was the chicken tamale, as it is “warm and tasty.” The vote for least favorite was really close between the spicy chicken sandwich and cheese pizza (interestingly also one of students’ favorite foods, in general), with the spicy chicken sandwich only winning the least favorite by one point. Students were divided on whether they disliked the chicken sandwich because it lacked spices or was too spicy. One student commented, “It tastes like rubber.” 

Although the sample size for our survey was small (about 5% of the student population), I hope that we could eventually use this information in the cafeteria, so the students could get more of the foods that they like. After all, good nutrition helps make healthy Aviators.