Mix It Up or not; school lunch campaign will do little to break cliques
Oct 15, 2012, 11:16 AM | Updated: Oct 11, 2024, 1:03 pm
If you encourage kids to sit at a different table than their friends for one day, will it make a lasting impact on cafeteria culture? (AP Photo/file)
(AP Photo/file)
Most people are familiar with being nervous in a school cafeteria. Ross and Burbank host Dave Ross says he’d do anything to avoid being the kid left with the only open seat at a table of unfamiliar students.
Cliques in school cafeterias are legendary, but one group determined to break it up with a campaign called Mix It Up at Lunch Day over 10 years ago.
The Southern Poverty Law Center explains the campaign as follows:
“Students have identified the cafeteria as the place where divisions are most clearly drawn. So on one day – October 30 this school year – we ask students to move out of their comfort zones and connect with someone new over lunch. It’s a simple act with profound implications.”
Host Luke Burbank thinks the program sounds pretty benign.
“It seems like a pretty innocent little experiment to do at lunchtime.”
But The New York Times reports a group called the American Family Association is calling the campaign “a nationwide push to promote the homosexual lifestyle in public schools.”
The NY Times reports the evangelical group is asking parents to keep kids home from schools on Oct. 30, the date of the event.
“I find it interesting that because of this sort of pissing match between Southern Poverty Law Center and this so-called family group that now they’re going to try to stop this maybe ineffective but basically harmless exercise of kids at lunch trying to sit with other kids,” says Burbank.
Both Dave and Luke think regardless of Mix It Up Day’s intentions, it will inevitably do little to combat cliques in schools.
“This is a quixotic mission. Kids ‘clique up’ in high school,” says Ross.
Luke says it’s just sort of a natural tendency to sit with those you feel comfortable with and that’s something that doesn’t really change even into adulthood.
“Let’s say if your work has a cafeteria or lunch eating area, I think if somebody you don’t know comes and sits down next to you, as an adult you’re sort of able to override your natural impulse, but inside somewhere you’re going, ‘boy, I wish it was just me and the people I already know.'”
“You wonder why I eat lunch alone,” says Ross. “It’s just to avoid the whole situation of who do you eat lunch with.”
