For the past few weeks I’ve been deployed to Churchill Secondary School with other VSB exempt staff. We’ve been tasked with supervising school lunch. Each day I arrive at 11:40 and plant myself in front of the lunch line. When the bell rings, the lunch room is swamped by hundreds hungry of students. Kids come from all sorts of backgrounds and cultures. The lunch line quickly grows as kids pile in to pick up their lunch.
The options are numerous. In addition to the burgers and pizzas one might expect, there’s also great soups and chopped salads, Chinese dumpling soup, chowmein, spicy chicken Caesar salad, daily-made sandwiches and pasta. In fact the local lunch cooks are empowered to occasionally bring their culture cooking-styles to the table. Things like French fries and corndogs are still sold, but they are baked (not fried). In fact the kitchen apparently tossed out their deep-fryer years ago. In the vending machines students can purchase healthy snacks. No coca-cola allowed.
It is a long way from some of the horror stories I’ve seen on Jamie Oliver’s infamous Jamie’s School Lunches. Certainly not a lot of the reheated crap that made England’s school lunches so famous and sparked such a reform campaign.
Still, after talking with lunch staff, the battles stay the same. Keeping cost down and preparing food that will be eaten (rather than ignored) seem to be as important here as they are in England. According to the Churchill lunch cooks, it can be a fine balance to find something that checks both the healthy box and the “kid friendly” box.
This afternoon I sampled the spicy chicken Caesar and I gotta say I was impressed. The salad was fresh and the chicken flavourful. In fact it seemed to be particularly popular among the students.
Certainly feels like a long way from the deep fried chicken strips I remember in my youth.