October 19, 2008

Lunch Time
Goodbye mystery meat, today's cafeteria crew creates tempting fare

By SAM CRAIG
of The Chronicle

     It’s 9 o’clock in the morning and Gary Buffum is pulling the handle on a giant oven. As the door swings open, chicken-scented steam comes pouring out, cascading up and traveling several feet across the light fixtures and ceiling tiles.
He pulls out about ten trays, filled with breasts, thighs and drumsticks, and puts them on a rack. There’s enough baked chicken here to feed a small platoon, or, more accurately, 340 hungry sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
     Before most people have had time to polish off their first cup of coffee, the cafeteria crew members at The Dalles Middle School cafeteria have already made and served breakfast and are now starting the rush to make lunch for nearly every student at the school.
     They get started early in the morning — 6:15, if there’s a big breakfast menu that requires lots of prep time, a little later if its something quick and easy like granola bars.
     They start serving breakfast before the bell rings in every classroom on campus. A program called “Breakfast in the Classroom” makes sure the middle schoolers’ growing minds stay as sharp as a No. 2 Dixon Ticonderoga pencil.
     Every morning, breakfast gets delivered to the kids, free of charge, right to their desks.
     “I know they love the food,” says Brian Hughitt, who works in the cafeteria. “They love the Breakfast in the Classroom program. A good breakfast, right when you get to school. It’s a pretty sweet deal.”
     Hughitt is the youngest member of the crew. A native of The Dalles, he left for a year to get a cooking certificate at Clark College in Vancouver, Wash. At 19, he’s back in town and newly married. Even though it’s his first semester on the job, he’s already getting to know the kids by name.
     “It’s kind of crazy,” he says, “But I really like it because I get to see the kids every day.”
     Now that breakfast is done, Hughitt is chopping cucumbers for the salad bar. It’s one of the daily lunch specials the kids look forward to. Fresh lettuce, broccoli, baby carrots, cauliflower, and cukes as well as a different fruit every day. The kids seem to like making their own salads better than just being served one, and, according to the staff, they tend to eat every last bit of it.
     There are still almost two and a half hours until the hungry stampede begins. A seemingly long time, but the cafeteria crew works down to the wire.
     They’ve got meals to make. And not just for the middle school.
     Dry Hollow Elementary needs ham and cheese sandwiches — enough ham and cheese to feed over 300 kids. Buffum pulls two giant metal pans, filled to the brim with ham slices, out of the oven. He sticks a meat thermometer into a stack of ham rounds. They’re at the right temperature, so it’s off to packaging.
     He puts the pans on a counter and puts a layer of cling wrap over top of them. Over that goes a sheet of tinfoil. Then they’re out the door and into a van for delivery.
     But it’s not just Dry Hollow that gets the spoils of the cafeteria’s labor. It’s every school. Cinnamon french toast for Chenowith, taco pizzas for Colonel Wright, pastrami subs for the high schools. You name it, the middle school cafeteria has probably made, packaged and delivered it to the other schools in the district.
     The food prepared The Dalles Middle School cafeteria is a far sight better than cafeteria food from many past students’ memories. The crunchy-in-the-wrong-places green bean casserole is a unheard of and there’s not a rubbery salisbury steak to be seen.
     There are some dishes that take longer than others. Breakfast pizzas can take two days and the macaroni and cheese takes three days. The first day means boiling 40 pounds of macaroni, the second day is for the from-scratch cheese sauce and the third day it’s all put together and baked.
     It’s a lot of work, but the time it takes is all worth it, and not just to students.
Day custodians, Gordon Arrendale and Henry Davis, walk into the kitchen, looking for some conversation and a good meal. Buffum plates some chicken straight from the oven and hands it over.
     “They have some of the best school food I’ve ever had, here,” says Arrendale, holding onto the red, plastic tray with a piping-hot chicken breast on it. “I went to school in the 70s, so I know how bad school food can get. The cheese sauce they put on the nachos here. It’s to die for.”
     There are orders to fill, and the crew is pushing as quickly as they can. They work like a well-Criscoed food-machine. Buffum is piling pepperonis on pizzas and putting them aside for tomorrow. Across the aisle from him, Hughitt is dropping apples into brown paper bags.
     For every field trip, every away game for all the sports teams and for every event that requires leaving campus for an extended period of time, the cafeteria has to make a sack lunch for each student attending. An apple, a cookie, a bag of SunChips, carrots and a hand made sandwich go into each bag.
     “We’ve been doing sack lunches all week,” Hughitt says, folding napkins into the bags. “They’ve had a lot of field trips going on. I think I’ve made over 300 sack lunches this week. I’ve been doing them in my nightmares.”
     With sack lunches just about done and the lunching hour upon them, the cafeteria workers switch their focus to the clock that’s edging ever closer to 11:25 a.m., when the seventh graders are scheduled to eat.
     Trays start flying, salad gets bowled and Taters get Totting.
     The menu for the day is a hearty one: Baked chicken; three varieties of potato, Jo-Jos, tots and coins; chili cheese burritos; bagels and creamcheese; yogurt; a salad bar; and mandarin oranges.
     The salad stations get a layer of ice beneath the vegetables before being moved out to in front of the kitchen, the chicken gets moved from the warmer to the steam tables, the burritos are popped into their warming tray just as the bell rings.
     There’s quiet for a few seconds. Hughitt and Diane Shaver, another cafeteria worker, take their places at the front counter. Buffum prepares extra trays of potatoes for the inevitable feeding frenzy. The rubber gloves are on and the serving tongs are at the ready.
     Then it comes. The sound of hundreds of sneakered hooves galloping toward the cafeteria. Laughs, shouts and screams echo through the halls and bounce across the tiled floor.
     Racing their way to the front of the cafeteria come the sixth graders. They form a line that stretches to the back of the cafeteria.
     The crew is swift. They hand over the food quickly without dropping so much as a single fry, but there’s still time for pleasantries.
     “What’ll it be, hon,” Shaver asks a student whose eyes are darting back and forth between the chicken and the bagels. He chooses the chicken and heads down to the salad to make room for the next kid.
     Like a voracious pack of cartoon termites, the class of sixth graders lays waste to the tray of burritos in less than a minute. The bagels are gone in five. They’ve gone through five trays of Jo-Jos and Tater Tots and there are still two grades to feed.
     As the line is finally cleared, the crew gets restocking. More milk from the fridge. More chicken, pull more potatoes out of the oven and quickly defrost several more packs of bagels.
     The bell rings, beckoning the seventh graders. They rush in for their half-hour of eating time, devour everything in sight, and leave as quickly as they appeared.
They’re followed by the eighth graders, a significantly taller group. They can see over the counter and are much more picky. Some of the girls turn up their noses at the sight of the chicken, choosing instead a yogurt or a bagel, and many of the boys eschew main dishes altogether, choosing instead a heaping pile of tots.
     The bell rings again and the eight grade heads back to class, leaving a mess in their wake. Mandarin orange slices litter the ground, smooshed and sticky. Ranch dressing is slowly slopping off the side of the salad bar. A fry has somehow managed to get lodged in a door jam, instantly mashed.
     The crew has a mess to clean, trays need washing, bowls and utensils have just come out of the dishwasher and are ready to be put away.
     There are meals still yet to be made for tomorrow.
     Today, they’ve made more thanr 700 meals just for the middle school, more than 1,000 more for the other schools. They’ve served more than 1,000 cartons of milk, 350 chicken legs and dozens of bagels.
     The cafeteria staff goes through the same routine every day, keeping kids in The Dalles from going hungry.
     Buffum stands at the kitchen counter putting the finishing touches on stacks of pepperoni pizzas that are scheduled to head out the door tomorrow morning.
     “You’ve got to stay on your toes,” he says. “If you can’t get it all done by Friday, you’ve got until Monday to tell yourself, ‘Boy, I won’t do that again.’”