The School Cafe: Giving Up Quality for Lent
March 19, 2014
Lent is a pious time of preparation in holiness for the celebration of the resurrection of Christ. Lent starts on Ash Wednesday and ends on Easter Sunday. During these forty-four days, the faithful traditionally give up certain luxuries and wants in a show of humility and repentance. It is also tradition during the Lenten season to fast and forsake meat on Fridays.
The Xavier cafeteria follows this tradition, so the food options are limited on days without meat. However limited, these food choices should still be appetizing. On Ash Wednesday, the first non-meat day, a veggie quesadilla was served. This consisted of green beans, celery, peppers, onions, and cheese. No amount of sauce could dilute the pungency of that dish. The other choices were pasta, which typically comes with a dried out red sauce; macaroni, which suffers from a similar dryness; fried dough, which is really a dessert rather than a lunch; and cheese sticks, which although pleasant to the senses lack in sufficient mass needed to fulfill the average student’s pallet.
On normal Fridays the cafeteria has served pizza. This is not an excellent dish, but it surpasses the other options. It is made with a poor quality, soft cracker-like dough, but the sauce provides a nice zesty flavor, and the cheese is not the same consistency as plastic like the other cheeses of the lunch room are. The pizza also comes with a doughy stuffed crust. This is basically like having giant cheese sticks on the end of each slice, and as mentioned earlier, the cheese sticks are very good.
Although dishes like the stuffed crust pizza are good for a pious lenten meal, the school cafeteria needs much more delectable variety to please the student body.