As a high school student, it’s easy to grab food from the cafeteria without thinking too much about who made it or how it got there. However, Leland and Gray senior Soob Soobitsky decided to delve deeper, going beyond the dishes on the lunch tray to the dedicated kitchen staff who prepare meals daily.

Soob wrote this article as part of school journalism class, with the final version finding its way to the school newspaper. Jake Gallogly, featured in this article is in his second year heading up Leland and Gray’s kitchen, in addition to being Windham Central Supervisory Union’s food service manager, Jake is always looking for new ways to incorporate local foods into the school district’s kitchens.

A Day in the Life of the Leland and Gray Kitchen, by Soob Soobitsky

TOWNSHEND, VT- Everybody walks in the kitchen, grabs their food and leaves. But nobody wonders where the food they are eating comes from and how it leads up to being served. Well, you’re about to find out.

Working all day in a school kitchen is different than working in a restaurant kitchen. There are three main people who work in the L&G kitchen: Heather Garland runs the cash register and helps prep, Jake Gallogly is the head chef, and Joy Kondracki is Jake’s main helper and backup. Luara Lee Martin is the Deli runner, and Lou Dauchy helps prep foods for lunch and breakfast. 

Breakfast starts off with the kitchen staff putting out all the quick foods, including coffee, yogurt, granola bars, and sandwiches. Breakfast used to end later in the day but now ends at exactly 8:30 AM. 

Around 9:00 AM, after breakfast is cleaned up, the staff starts lunch prep. This involves cutting everything up for the salad bar, including fruits and vegetables, and making deli sandwiches and PB&Js. The kitchen staff has to watch out for dietary restrictions. Some students are gluten-free, some are lactose intolerant, and some are vegetarians, so there are many different kinds of food they have to make. 

Almost all the food students eat at school are locally grown or made from scratch. Heather single-handedly makes all the pizzas everyday with her own hands, but many believe they are frozen pizzas. The dough and all is made from scratch. Heather starts making the pizzas around 10:00 AM so they are ready and warm by lunch. A few local places the school gets frood from are Maple Brook Farm, Harlow Farm, and Leaping Bear Farm. For milk, they recently switched to local Miller Farm a local organic dairy that’s 20 miles down the road in Vernon, VT. “It almost costs the same for us to use bulk milk as carton milk, because students use less of the bulk milk and waste way more carton milk,” said Jake Gallogly. 

The food director has a list of meals he makes for lunch and tends to rotate them around so they aren’t being served too much in a month. He also uses leftover food to prevent the waste of food.

Even though they have to make all this food for our school, they also have to make food for other local elementary schools including Jamaica and Windham. They also need a driver to drive the food to those schools. Dorthy Fontaine is new to Leland and Gray and is getting trained to be the cook at Jamaica Elementary School.

Laura Lee Martin, the deli runner, comes up with all of the deli options on her own, she uses resources that she has learned in past jobs to help with that. “I watch a lot of Food Network and I get a lot of ideas that way. Then I sit here and I figure out what we have or what don’t and I try to put combinations together. If that doesn’t work I go back to my roots at St. Brigid’s Kitchen in Brattleboro where I learned how to make do with whatever we had in donations.”

Although each of the L&J staff has specific roles, they all take turns doing what has to be done. Everyone has a job to clean when there is spare time in the kitchen. The kitchen has a very good organizational system. Everything has its own certain spot and when they don’t have something they need, they can borrow it from a different school.

The kitchen staff tries to clean up as soon as the students leave the room they can get out around 1:30-2:00 PM and cleanup takes about an hour and a half.

Lunchtime can get pretty chaotic, so they have a few methods on how to keep kids intact during lunch. There is always an assigned teacher to stand up in the upper cafeteria part and other teachers in the lower part. If students are still misbehaving they will be asked to not have lunch in the upper part for a minimum of two weeks. They try to have all kids pick up after themselves because that is not part of their job. Jake said, “Luckily we have a lot of hands this year which makes it easier.”

The kitchen staff doesn’t mind taking turns doing what has to be done. “When it comes to daily duties we do try to switch it up because its more fun and gets really boring if you do the same thing every day” said Jake. The head chef’s favorite part of his job is the community. “I like the fact that I’m able to work in the community that I live in and support students and adults that live around me.” working in the kitchen is not all about making the food and cleaning up. The main part about a school kitchen job is the community in it.” Heather said, “I like being able to see the kids change through the years, so its not just about cooking food and serving food. It’s about connecting with the kids.”

Soob will be able to further pursue their interest in where food comes from and how it’s prepared by participating in this year’s Journey Away semester program. In Journey Away, which evolved from Leland and Gray’s pre-pandemic Journey East program, students explore food systems and culture in Vermont as well as through several weeks spent traveling and learning in New Orleans, France and Vietnam. The program focuses on interfacing with farms, businesses, and other community members as a mode of learning and students earn math, social studies, natural history and English credit in the process.

Food Connects’ Farm to School coaches work closely with Leland and Gray’s Farm to School Team, which is tightly linked with the emerging and exciting Journey Away program.