High School Students Go Viral for Creating Giant Potluck Buffett in School Cafeteria

If you hop onto Google and type in "Why does school lunch..." some of the first autofill queries that pop up don't exactly inspire confidence in anyone thinking about whether or not to get food from their cafeteria's kitchen. Questions like "why does school lunch make me sick?" and "why does school lunch taste bad?" should not be ranked as highly as they are on the world's most popular search engine.

Food Revolution Network answers that first question in a post that addresses some of the issues that school lunch programs face, stating, "many nutritional experts still find school lunches to be inadequate. Most meals aren’t prepared from scratch and don’t use fresh fruits and vegetables. Instead, foods are frozen or made elsewhere and then heated before serving. This food preparation creates meals that are far from fresh and, sadly, unappealing."

Some high school students in order to get grub that's more agreeable to their palates have resorted to using delivery apps like DoorDash to have their meals brought to school. However, eating out all of the time could become very costly, and those driver fees can start to add up a bit.

You could always bring your own food from home to school, but you still miss out on having a freshly prepared meal. But these students came up with another idea.

One that combines the communal aspect of eating with your friends in a cafeteria, but yields everyone a chance to have food made right in front of them, just the way they like it.

In a TikTok posted by Clare Scott on the popular social media platform, she showed how she and her friends combined different food items to create a lunch sandwich buffet.

Different students brought different ingredients to the buffet, in the short, 11-second clip we see a bag of bread, paper plates, a bottle of soda, a case of Dr. Pepper cans, packages of deli meat, tomatoes, cutlery, cheese slices, a box of Chips Ahoy cookies, a jar of mayonnaise and a bottle of mustard.

Clare writes in a text overlay: "our entire lunch table brought sandwich supplies for a lunch buffet"

The video ends on a student showing off her plate of food: a sandwich with four cookies on the side.

The clip racked up over 111,000 views on the popular social media application, and Dr. Pepper's official TikTok account commented on the idea writing: "This is genius."

It appears that several other TikTok users thought that Clare and her friends were onto something as well.

One person wrote, "I just know them sammiches was bussin bussin"

Someone else said that their grandson has already boarded that lunch buffet train with his own friends: "My grandson does this with his lunch crew I end up cooking something at least twice a week"

Others said that they just did delivery to the school, Jeff Spicoli style: "we use to use the pay phone in halls half hr before lunch and order pizzas"

Some remarked that they would do the same thing except not in the cafeteria but on the school bus: "I did this back in the 90s on the bus"

Folks out of school said that their co-workers did the same exact thing at their jobs, too: "I had a group of guys on my team at work that did this mon-thur they had a crew potluck then they are out on Friday."

Would you want to try that out one day with a group of your friends, everyone buys some ingredients and they put together a meal?

Depending on the amount of time that you have allocated for lunch and access to certain appliances, the type of meals you'd have access to may be restricted, but there are plenty of recipes available online that meet those parameters.