(♫)
One thing I noticed when I moved here
is that Seattle is completely different from Chicago
and so, and it's more diverse.
In Seattle, we have like so much diversity
people, all different backgrounds
where food is really important to all these different cultures.
I have 26 countries represented in my school
at Denny International.
Chief Sealth also.
Not all of these kids are going to go for hamburgers, fries and pizzas.
They want other things.
I immediately started to reach out
to different community groups, student organizations,
parent groups just so I could get a better understanding of the city.
Like the type of spices, type of dishes.
You know, what type of food do you know your kids eat when they're home?
You know, what would they like to see in the lunchroom?
From there I just started a game plan, how can we start
incorporating the different type of cultures in the food?
So a kid, no matter what their background is,
when they come into that cafeteria, they feel like they're at home.
When I came in, we actually cooked.
We cooked everything by scratch,
and then we changed over to where more things started to come to us.
We just would heat it up.
One of the very first things I did was improve quality.
You know, try to get away from processed foods, bringing more fresh fruits,
more fresh vegetables.
But then I brought in a district chef,
So I really
was very on board with the mission of
presenting more culturally relevant food.
And I feel like that's how people learn different cultures
through food the best, especially young children.
I am an immigrant.
I came from Brazil
and so I started here at first grade and I just remember the corn dogs.
I'm like, What is this thing on a stick?
Nachos and just the cheese sauce.
It just didn't feel to me like a meal,
like a comforting meal that I was used to, like a home cooked meal.
I think that whenever we do, do items that are made from scratch,
we really see like the benefits of that.
Our kitchen is pretty big.
It has a lot of like industrial equipment. So it's here.
So it's, let's put it to use.
Like we did a Somali chicken stew.
We served salmon chowder.
And that was like smoked salmon from Lummi Island.
Delicious.
That was a big hit.
The salmon chowder, the wonton soup.
I really want to do more of those
because I think the kids will really go for that.
We work with students.
We had a student from Haiti.
Hi, I'm Emme Collins, District Chef at Seattle Public School.
And I'm here with Angel Doss, Seattle Skill Center, culinary student
at Rainier Beach.
And she's going to be teaching us how to make her family's recipe
for Haitian chicken stew, which I'm then going to take.
And we're going to be serving it up to the students
at all the Seattle schools.
I think a lot of people underestimate kids and their palates.
And at first, like, some people were like, oh,
what kid is going to eat lentil stew, you know?
And it was like, let's try it out.
I'm always like, let's try it out, see how it does.
And we did it and it was like probably the most popular thing
that we put on the menu last year was a lentil stew.
That's really good.
Thank you.
It was March 12th,
my 60th birthday,
and I was done with work.
What we thought was three weeks.
We came back on that, I believe it was the 16th that Monday,
and we were open for business
because we had to make sure the kids got fed.
When the pandemic started, you know, we knew that families
who was already in need, you know, they need even more support.
And then we're going to get a bubble of families
who haven't struggled before,
that's going to start struggling.
So how can we maintain what we already started
and create a welcoming environment
so people don't feel embarrassed or ashamed
to come and pick up a meal?
When this first started, we weren't doing hot food because it's like,
how do you serve hot food?
Everybody, like, I feel like all the school districts
around the nation was, you know, doing prepackaged stuff,
doing box, like just boxing things up for people to take for the week.
And that's kind of like what we started as well.
It's just like sandwiches and cold meals and stuff.
(Sound of palates being moved)
So right now we have 40 meal sites.
We have direct home delivery.
These two schools
are one of the largest food distribution sites in Washington state.
Amazon is delivering to over 3000 families daily.
They make the boxes really fun.
There's good meals in there. There's fun things.
They got cereal, they got milk.
They got fresh fruit, vegetables.
I think we started out with about 375.
Now we're up to 615 to 637.
We average around 30,000 meals a day.
We're also delivering to housing units
and shelters directly from our central kitchen.
Fare Start donated meals, extra supper meals.
City of Seattle have set up meal sites
at different housing units so we can distribute meals to them.
No matter where you live,
there should be a meal in close proximity for you to be able to pick up.
I've seen many times, like families coming in
and parents coming in like in tears, like just very thankful
that we're able to provide food for their family
because they either lost their jobs, they're desperate.
They don't know what to do.
At least they can come to one of these 40 sites
and make sure that their children are fed.
Thank you have a great day.
Thank you, you too.
We've done a really good job during the school year on
making sure we represent different cultures through our food.
And, you know, we took a step back for a couple of weeks
and then came up with a game plan on how we can continue to do that.
Like, let's get back to like our goals and what we wanted to do
and we still can do it even through this situation that we're in.
And we've proven that we were able to do that.
You know, serving.
Yeah, we have like sandwiches and salads as options, but
we're also still cooking from scratch, making culturally relevant food.
I try every month.
We've done like a special.
We did gumbo last month. We're about to do.
One of our supervisors is of Eritrean background
and there's a lot of like Ethiopian Eritrean families in our community.
So I'm working with her
and members of the community to make their typical food injera
with like a stew, like a lentil stew that they do.
So I think that they're going to make good food
that the kids can come in and grab,
and they're going to they're actually going to be eating
instead of just taking the fries out, throwing the rest in the garbage.
We're just going to continue to grow and continue to be creative.
I can't wait to get back in service so they can really show us
what they're going to do.
That's what's going to be good.