When I was nine years old, one of my favorite shows was “Great American Chefs” on PBS. You’d have one person alone in a very quiet kitchen, making one fantastic dish. Watching it, I knew that was exactly what I wanted to do.
So when I started working in the culinary industry at 13, I thought that was how it was going to be. It turns out, nobody cooks like that. Anywhere. Ever. The kitchen was always incredibly busy, full of people cutting and cooking and managing chaos, and I fell in love with it right away.
I spent 25 years working in restaurants and bakeries before I made the jump to school food. I’d been volunteering in my kids’ school, and it was clear this was a place I could really make a difference by pushing to cook more meals from scratch and cut down on plastic and single-use items.
One thing you learn for sure in restaurants is that you have to know what your customers like. At West Contra Costa Unified School District, we see our students as partners in building the recipes we cook and serve. We want to know exactly what they think and what they like, even if it’s something simple, like spaghetti with bolognese sauce.
When we made our old bolognese recipe, what we heard from students was that it was too watery. It was missing that flavor and character that you get from a really good quality tomato sauce. From a chef’s perspective, what that tells me is that we needed to fix the basic ingredients. So we came up with a new recipe that draws its flavor from delicious, healthy, locally grown foods.
We start with Bianco DiNapoli tomatoes, which are organically grown in Northern California. The onions come from about 60 miles due east of here, in Turlock, while the garlic comes from a little ways south of us in Gilroy, the garlic capital of the world. Combine those with a little basil and some high-quality meat from Mindful Meats in Marin County, and you’ve got a great bolognese sauce. The response we’ve gotten back from the students has been fantastic. They don’t know it, but the ingredients we’re using are the same ones that are used in some of the best restaurants in Napa Valley.
The people who work in our kitchens have a mix of backgrounds. Some come from catering or restaurants or things like that, while for others, this is their first food service job. But whatever their background, we make sure they get what they need to do the job. Everyone gets food safety training, of course, and I teach a lot of “culinary boot camps” to build the skills of our team. We start with basic knife skills, cooking basics, and we have opportunities to grow into advanced baking and things like that. If you want to learn, the sky’s the limit.
But whatever route people take to get here, I feel like we all do this work because we love cooking for kids. It’s the most rewarding part of this job. When you work in a restaurant or a bakery, you’re serving faceless strangers who often don’t even know you’re there. Working in school food is a whole different ball game. You’re serving kids who are happy to be there, happy to have the food you’re serving. They’re glad to see us, and we’re happy to see them. It’s much more fulfilling than any other job.
I’m proud of what we’re doing here at West Contra Costa Unified School District. We’re cooking more meals from scratch, using more wholesome, local and organic ingredients and fewer heavily processed foods. And we’re not just doing that in one school. Our team cooks 15,000 meals for 56 sites, every single school day.
I talk to people all the time who tell me they wish their district could do what we’re doing here, I tell them to keep advocating for it, because there’s change coming.
Here in California, the whole state is moving toward better and scratch-cooked food. And it doesn’t stop there, either. The USDA is making sure that schools across the country are doing a better job of incorporating more scratch-cooked foods into their lunch menus.
It’s an exciting time. School food is getting better than it’s ever been, and we’re pushing to keep this momentum going.
