2nd Week: A spotlight on our school lunch

I wasn't hired to witness school lunch, but it has become part of my daily routine, a situation I scratch my head about everyday at lunchtime. How did I get here?

The principal at this high school worked some serious magic to get me hired by the Career Technical Educator arm of the SFUSD and also get an extra refrigerator and a small convection oven for our vocational cooking classes. After working in the restaurant world and then owning my own restaurant, I find myself here wanting to connect these students to their workforce skills through professional cooking and serving scenarios, which I've been doing since roughly 2007. Basically, I treat inner city youth of various ages like my employees everyday, showing them as many aspects of the different jobs in a restaurant as I can, using these scenarios as access points for working skills you need in any job. We are still trying to find the budget funds but for now, just being here is quite a feat.

The logical place to have class ends up being the cafeteria, where the refrigerators live. So my desk (it was my great Aunt Julia's desk) is angled towards the main part of the room, where school lunch is served.

I could get into the details you already know about school lunch. "Prison food." That is how some students term it. What we can say is that it looks clean and that its nutrition is monitored in a way that allows it to be legally served everyday of school for less than $3 per student, including food, labor and travel costs. What I wasn't prepared for was how school lunch actually happens. This high school only has a half hour for lunch, so perhaps I'm seeing an extreme.

I didn't realize how coming together to relax and refuel was so important to me, I just assumed that lunch is breaktime everywhere. In my restaurant, we always knew that the ambiance, the way you treated your guests could save any qualms around the execution of the actual food. The magic in the room we called it, when satisfaction and enjoyment around food was practically contagious, and the room had a beautiful sense of community. I know it is not fair to expect a school lunch room to ever feel like a restaurant, this is just my background on coming together to eat.

But there are no guests or hosts in this half hour. The students gather their required three items so the count is valid and can be reimbursed. I don't want to get into the minute by minute details, but the feeling of the room ranges from hollow to frantic depending on the day. For students who arrive 15 minutes into lunch they often can't get a main course "Sorry, you'll have to come earlier next time." Perhaps I don't understand the big picture of how this lunch room got to this point and the need for this kind of control - but what is all this teaching?

It is easy to explain to a student the justifications around why the food itself is how it is, one could even slant it with the amazement at everything a student gets for the small sum spent(but not really). It is much harder to explain away the devaluation of them as people in this half hour break. As I try to teach the value of host and guest, teamwork and positive professional behavior, trying to make it real, I watch the broken cogs of reality work themselves in this same room at lunch in a reverse direction. Entitlement, lack of respect and lack of care, need to be turned into empowerment, respect and care all around. How do we do this?

By the way, this may be a small continuing education high school I am sitting in, with students who have had trouble completing their coursework for a myriad of reasons, but I've seen more reality in the eyes of these students in these few short weeks than I have in my employees. Every student deserves these values. If we spend the money and begin here, we lay the groundwork for fixing many of the other broken cogs ahead. Experience is our biggest teacher and example our best experience builder, fixing our food and how we come together around food with our youth is the best example we can set.