Serving sustenance

Torch writer Hilari Palodichuk features cafeteria staff, one on the most underappreciated, but important, groups within the school environment.

Nathan Baszuro

Cafeteria staff serve students their hot meals during lunch time.

Lunch is probably everybody’s favorite part of the day. But, do we actually know our cafeteria staff? Most people don’t say anything to our cafeteria staff, even thank you. However  the cafeteria staff keep doing their job and they all love what they do. 

The lunch ladies start their day at 6:30 every morning, and end at 1:30 every day. When they first get to school, they have a small meeting together about how their day is going to go. After their meeting, they get to work. First they start to get breakfast ready; Johnna serves the breakfast.  After breakfast, they start to prepare for the first lunch. Melissa is one of the main cooks who helps prepare the food, but she is not the only one – everybody helps. The first thing they do is get the food in the oven and then out in the containers. All of the food is made fresh for every lunch so that everything stays warm. After each lunch, they also clean everything that needs to be cleaned. 

Lunch is not  always everyone’s favorite because they are very limited to what can be made. All of the produce is ordered by one of the cooks, her name is Joleen. Ordering the food is one of the most important jobs because if she didn’t order the food, we would have no lunch. You may have seen trucks outside our school. Those trucks are what our food comes in. Milk comes Tuesdays, fruit comes Mondays, and food gets delivered whenever it can be, but there is a lot of food in the freezer for lunch. 

  Lunch is always so crazy because some people just need to get their energy out and lunch would be the time to get that energy out. “Sixth grade lunch is the most chaotic because they are brand new to the school so they slowly learn the rules and get better through the year,” Melissa, one of the lunch ladies, expressed.  The hardest part about the job is that you have to make food for so many kids and most of them don’t even use manners. But the staff  keep working and the most important thing is that they work together no matter what. Please and thank you are the most important words to the staff, so always remember to use those very important words.