How To End Food Fights? Ask the Students

It happened again today. I was standing in the cafeteria when I heard the dreaded sound of yelling, chairs scraping the floor and students scurrying for cover coming from the other side of the room. Food fight. Ugh.

I rushed over to find french fries, ketchup and peaches everywhere and students complaining about another destroyed lunch. 

“Why do they do this?” one girl asked of no one in particular as she scraped ketchup from her backpack.

Good question. 

Our school has had a rash of these occurrences over the past year. Using the video surveillance system, we usually find the participants and issue consequences. Anyone found participating in a food fight is assigned lunch detention that includes clean-up duty. This measure was implemented after students complained that “nothing was being done” about the food fights.  

The students had a point. It seemed to students that they were the only ones being impacted by the food fights and that the administrative team was looking the other way.

Although I’m not a fan of consequences that can embarrass students, clean-up duty is related to the transgression and other students could see that there was in fact a consequence. Plus, it gave our custodian some much-needed assistance. 

The fact that the food fights continue to occur, much to the annoyance of the majority of our students (and all of the custodians), tells me that perhaps the administrative consequence isn’t the solution to the problem.

In our school 45 percent of students are eligible for free or reduced-price lunch. Our state is one of the top five “hungriest” in the nation. And here are our students throwing food.

These are the same students who rally together to bring in tens of thousands of cans and boxes of food for local families in our community during our annual canned food drive. I’m thinking that the answer to this issue may need to come from the students themselves.

I shared these thoughts with a couple of our leadership students. The looks on their faces turned from anger to excitement.

“We need to do something about this,” exclaimed Nancy.

There was enthusiastic talk about assemblies and activities to help students make the connection between food waste and hunger. 

I can’t wait to see what they come up with. 

Ryan Fear is a high school dean of students in Oregon.