Since news of the renovation plans were announced there has been a buzz about the new cafeteria. The upgrade from the dungeon to what many call a “high school musical” cafeteria, has exited many students.

Although the cutting edge cafeteria is appealing, in our opinion the food is not.

With the major change during lunch, we along with many of the students and staff, would be pleased with a change in the actual food we eat.

BCPS has let down Hereford along with the rest of the county in food execution, with little change in the food year round.

“The shape of the pizza is really the biggest change [this year],” said math teacher Jim Rhoads, noting that the pizza is now served shaped as a circle instead of a square.

We are sure that really changes the taste.

If you visit the BCPS lunch menu for high schooler’s, there isn’t much diversity from pizza, cheese steak subs, mac n’ cheese and chicken, which is just served in different shapes. These come with a side of vegetables or fruit cup year round.

However, Baltimore County has created a new feature: a lunch menu on the BCPS Now app, providing nutritional value facts on each menu item. This may be helpful, but it has little effect on the actual food being served.

Along with nutritional facts, there are pictures of all the food items and a description of each item. We were not surprised to see all the items looking far better than they are actually served.

“Tangy tomato sauce encased in a tasty whole wheat crust, topped with low fat mozzarella cheese,” is BCPS’s description for the cheese pizza.

To our estimate we saw 70% bread, 5% cheese, 5% sauce, and 20% grease piled into pools along the sides. All that was going through our heads was: Would you like a side of pizza with that yellow grease?

“I will never eat their food,” Kara Schmidt (’18) said. “I don’t think it’s real food, and it doesn’t smell good.”

An article in Daily Mail said studies have reveled school lunches have less nutritional value than meals served to prisoners.

“Equally alarming is the revelation that meat products go through fewer standard tests [for school lunches] than the ground beef served at fast food chains such as McDonald’s and Burger King,” Daily Mail stated.

We don’t think anything is more unappetizing then the fish hoagie that causes the sparkling new cafeteria to reek. It would not be hard to imitate a Febreeze commercial with this smell, the county thinks it smells fine but we know it reeks.

We avoid coming to the cafeteria because the smell is just so god-awful. The food provided doesn’t complement our brand new cafeteria at all.

And the app? Lynda Dufek, one of our schools cafeteria workers, said no students have used it yet.