By: Sarah Katz
Every day around noon, students rush into the cafeteria awaiting their next meal. Some wait in line and immediately sit down and begin to eat. Others take one glance at the menu before turning around and heading around the corner to Essen. But does anyone ever stop to think about the whole process that goes into making the food? Who makes it? Where do they get it from? How long does it take to prepare? In reality, there is a tremendous amount of thought and preparation that goes into the food we eat everyday–far more than many in our community imagine.
Even though the school lunch is included in tuition, only 16.66% of our student body eats the school lunch everyday according to a survey of high school students. Junior Hannah Bernstein believes that many people go out to eat because of the food-filled neighborhood LREI is in. “We go to school in such a great area and there are so many cool restaurants [and] people just want to experience that.” She believes that the study body is ill informed about the work that goes into making the food. “People have no idea how much work goes into it,” she explained.
The whole process starts with planning out the menu. Head chef Eric Baer plans out the menus fourteen weeks in advance. “I basically know everything we are serving from first day of school all the way to the first week of December,” he said. The menus are very complicated and need to be meticulously planned out. “We think about what products we need, what ingredients we need to source, what equipment we need, how it is going to be prepared, how much time it will take, and we make sure we don’t cook too many items the same day that need to be cooked the same way,” Baer said.
After the menu is planned the kitchen staff needs to cook the food. Baer explained how the entire process can take up to three days to cook a single meal. “For example, the pot roast, I have to bring the beef in two days ahead,” he says. “I have to butcher and season it, marinate for 24 hours overnight, then the day before it’s served it has to be cooked and braised because you know stews take a long time to cook. So we cook it the day before, chill it overnight, and then warm it up next day, so it takes three days for some things.”
Three days is far longer than the 1-5 hours that 66% of the LREI community thought a typical meal required. “Wow, that’s crazy,” sophomore Elisabeth Seiple commented, “our community really needs to respect all the work that goes into making our food.” Furthermore the kitchen staff prepares hundreds of meals every morning. “Every day we make about 750 meals. We have to make extra just in case we need more,” explained Junior Sous Chef Edrice Jean-Baptiste.
Additionally, after all the food is cooked it needs to be cleaned up. Jean-Baptiste explained the process. “Myself or Eric will bring the plates to the kitchen and they get washed and sanitized. [In total] it will take us at least two hours after serving the food to clean up.” Jean-Baptize explains how his job is made more difficult when the student body overfill the bins with their dirty plates. “If you see that [the bin of plates] is full, let us know. If it’s too full I have to take multiple trips but if it’s less full then it is a lot easier,” he said.
But not only is our food well made with a lot of care, it is also very safe and healthy. Junior Isabelle Mercado explained that the food at LREI is such a contrast to the unhealthy meals at her old public school. “In my public school the food was so bad,” she said. “There wasn’t any healthy options…and it was the same five meals every week for the entire school year. There was no salad bar or anything,” she said.
On the contrary, at LREI we source all our food using companies that get produce locally. In fact, one of the companies we use, DiCarlo, a family owned supplier based in Long Island, was just awarded a Superior Rating in food safety by SAI Global, a third party food safety management company–the highest award attainable.
Junior Sous Chef Edrice Jean-Baptiste feels very privileged to work with such fresh produce. “The diversity from fresh apples to fresh collard greens to fresh chicken make the difference in cooking,” he said. “It is really awesome when you’re working with fresh herbs. I love the smell.”
Even though the work is hard, Baer says, it is very rewarding. “In restaurants people go out to eat for entertainment purposes, to experience different and new and exciting, and that’s wonderful, that’s great,” he says. “But cooking in a school setting, the work we do has a little more value–it is affecting people’s lives, it is broadening their horizons.”
Sophomore Peter Mamaev is an example of why Chef Eric loves his job. He ended up trying new foods he never would have eaten before. “Before I came to LREI I had never eaten a taco,” he said. “The school cafeteria helped me experience new foods.”
Even so, Isabelle Mercado thinks that the work the cafeteria staff does is very underappreciated in the study body. “It’s really good food, it just kind of shows the privilege in our school community,” she says. “Having gone to a public school my entire life, I know what gross food tastes like.”