Many students, such as Kate McAllister ’21, walk into the cafeteria on Tuesdays excited to finally be able to get pasta from the pasta bar. However, recently the number of pasta days have started to lessen and people have become confused. “When I walk into the lunchroom I often hear ‘Why is [there no] pasta today? What happened to pasta day? I think that too because pasta is the best lunch option that the school has,” McAllister said. She thinks the pasta is so popular because you have the freedom to choose the amount of pasta and sauce you want. “It is filling and you serve yourself. I think that is the big difference with pasta day [is that] you serve yourself,” McAllister said. “Just recently we had Mac and Cheese for lunch and the lunch lady gives you a cup worth of a scoop and as a teenager we need a little more than a cup of pasta to fulfill ourselves.”

Ethan Richards ’19 noticed the school’s pasta days have started to diminish from previous years. “When our class first got here in 2016 what we had every Tuesday was pasta day and we got used to that,” Richards said. “Now it is our senior year and it is kind of closing off, I think it is like every other week now. So we have kind of noticed a little bit of a change.”

Cafeteria Manager Boe Stobner says the number of pasta days depends on a variety of things. “It is all really nutritionally based according to the USD regulations…We have a winter cycle menu and a spring/fall cycle menu so it rotates every six weeks,” Stobner said. “We rotate that cycle menu and that kind of cuts into your pasta bar.”

Stobner also says the food service director LaRae Doll likes to change up the menu and add different types of pasta that are not as popular as the pasta bar. “LaRae likes to put variety in the menu, so we always have a breakfast day that is the French Toast Sticks [and] that will kind of get in the way of pasta day,” Stobner said. “Tetrazzini is another reason we do not have your pasta bar every Tuesday… even though it is pasta it is not red sauce, alfredo, cheese sauce kind of pasta. It is different, it is not what you are expecting necessarily.”

Doll says some of it is based on the popularity of certain dishes. “As we were creating the menu this last time we had also gotten some feedback that some of the people liked the chicken tetrazzini… so on those every other weeks we have pasta bar or some sort of a pasta meal like the tetrazzini, or the mac and cheese, or something like that so that we were not doing pasta, pasta, pasta all in a row,” Doll said. “We kind of look at the itemization of what the kids are typically buying and try to put the most popular items on those days so we can rotate them and use other items as fillers that kids might like…I mean there was really no other reason just I did not want to be too repetitive and put too much pasta.”