My grandma always used to say: “When I was your age, a loaf of bread only cost a nickel!” It’s funny now, walking into our cafeteria and paying that for a packet of ketchup.

Thanks to the Board of Health and Nutrition, the school and cafeteria administrators have begun trying to limit the students’ sodium intake by giving out only one packet per sandwich and two packets per order of fries. And if they want more? They’ll have to pay a nickel per packet. However, it isn’t totally about the health of students, it also serves as a way to save money for the school.

Having people pay for ketchup is like paying to go bungee jumping. It isn’t going to kill you at that second, and if you can enjoy your burger with a deliciously tangy squish of ketchup, it seems like a good way to go someday—on a tasty, salty deathbed. Anyway, people are going to buy their ketchup one way or another. Either they’ll pay a nickel per packet or bring in a Costco-sized jug to share with the neighbors. Either way, it appears the district won’t be paying thousands of dollars on ketchup this year.

Whenever fries were served last year, kids made gigantic pools of the stuff on their trays and drained half of it in the trash cans, making the amount of waste superfluous. That would be an infuriating and unnecessary mistreatment of money and of the awesome stuff people are fighting to salvage now. The pump wasn’t a terrific way to distribute the beloved condiment, but there must be better ways to go about it. Maybe a teacher could man the ketchup pump station and judge the correct amount required. It could be as simple as bumping up the number of ketchup packets for sandwiches.

But then, if the school really wanted to control over-consumption of sodium in students, why not eliminate mustard? It has a higher level of sodium and really, who likes mustard anyway?