Bon appetit: Western Placer schools move toward scratch cooking

No longer are the days of mystery meat and gruel. Western Placer Unified School District has been on a journey to transform the food served to its students, and at the helm is Food Service Director Christina Lawson. "Our goal is to serve local and high-quality items," Lawson said. "We are trying to get away from prepackaged items as well." Serving food during the pandemic was hard on the district because of all of the restrictions, Lawson said. Coming out of that time, coupled with addition of California Universal Meals, which requires districts to provide two meals to all students each day for free, sprouted a new direction for the food service in Lincoln schools. Lawson has been working toward expanding scratch cooking in Western Placer. She created Plateful as a way to engage students in scratch cooking through farm-to-table school tasting and education. The key ingredient to their shift in quality food was hiring District Chief Adrian Padilla. "He is one of the best things to happen to our department," Lawson said. "We are able to have the support we need to train our department away from just heating and serving." Lawson's efforts include holding cafeteria-wide tastings monthly across all primary schools, Meet the Farmer visits for third-grade classes, guest chef classes for seventh-graders and monthly Meet Our Chef opportunities for high school students. Through the state's Universal Meals program, Lawson said the district has a lot more funding to utilize to bring in more quality scratch cooking. They use a local food hub and try to source items from nearby farms and businesses. Padilla works out of the district's newest kitchen facility at Twelve Bridges High School to batch cook from scratch items which can then be shared among all campuses. The schools put out local grain salad, mac and cheese with in-house created cheese sauce, BBQ chicken, beef nachos, spaghetti and meatballs and more. Last year, Lawson estimated the district made 5 percent of its food from scratch. This year, that number is growing to 40-50 percent, which will unlock additional dollars from the state to continue growing the program. The district has spent $1.5 million in grants and additional state funding to build the scratch food program. "I feel lucky here in Western Placer that the stars align and we were able to move forward with this," Lawson said. "We increased our wages and hours, and 100 percent of our team now receives benefits. A lot went in to try and make this happen." Lawson also worked to better herself in preparation for the transition, working toward earning a Healthy School Food Pathway Fellowship through the Chef Ann Foundation. The year-long program, which is coming to an end this month, goes into the depth of "lunch lady land," as Lawson put it. "It's been amazing and it helped give me the confidence in knowing what is the best path for us in Lincoln," Lawson said. "The program has shown me the full potential of what our program could look like and helped me establish an awesome network of like-minded people in schools that want to do this work." Lawson said she is thankful for the local support from district administrators and the feedback has been positive regarding the new meals for students. "I'm really excited about everything that is happening in school food," she said. "This is the best time to be in school food." For more information on Plateful at Western Placer, visit wpusd.org/food-and-nutrition-services.