Susan Lee portions out lunch at Tenakee School on Friday, Nov. 18, 2011. (Photo: Deena Hand)

Tenakee Springs | All right, grown-ups: Remember school lunch? The mashed potatoes served with an ice-cream scoop? The hair nets? The stuff that wanted to be pizza when it grew up?

Well, the students who are growing up now, in Tenakee Springs, will have very different memories of the middle of the school day. They’ll remember meat and potato croquettes, or chicken a la king, or any of the myriad of foods that are part of the Tenakee Springs school lunch program.

“I don’t think what we’re cooking is any different than what you guys do in Sitka, or whatever,” said Wendy Stern, as she chopped vegetables. “I think what makes it unusual is the availability of fresh produce.”

Stern, who shares cooking duties – a week on, a week off – with Susan Lee, a trained chef who travels to Juneau every other week and comes back with a LOT of produce. Some of it is on the cutting board that sits right in front of Stern.

“There will be some out there that will pick these mushrooms right out of their salad,” she says. “Others that used to pick mushrooms out of their salad and now eat them, so you see, headway’s being made. I try to chop them up small so that I hide them.”

While some of the produce comes from Juneau, a lot of the vegetables come from local farmer Dale Ziel. The community has a fairly active local food scene. Besides her duties at the school, Stern helps organize a farmer’s market here in the summer. She says people in Tenakee take their produce seriously.

“It’s only in Tenakee that I’ve heard of broccoli wars,” Stern said. “People won’t speak to each other if someone takes too much broccoli and it’s the beginning of broccoli season, or someone wipes out the peas, and you’re the next one in line and all the peas are gone. We’re talking major bad feelings about stuff like that.”

There are no wars in the line at Tenakee School, though, where students are given carefully measured portions of food in accordance with USDA guidelines. Parent Shawna Harper says that’s part of the reason the program exists.

“We decided to do it because we wanted to ensure that our kids were getting healthy food during the day,” she said.

Harper helped start the lunch program about three years ago. Produce isn’t the only thing that comes from local sources. So does protein. It’s not unusual for the school to get hold of a fish someone’s caught or some local venison. Harper says processing those things correctly takes a little extra work.

“But, it also means that we’re not feeding our kids beef that we don’t know where it came from, and chicken that could be questionable,” she said. “They’re eating a lot of fresh fish and venison as well.”

Harper said it’s important to teach the building blocks of a healthy diet, but that the lunch program also fosters a sense of community.

“There’s a lot of camaraderie with it, because they all sit down in a family style setting and they joke, and they laugh, and they really enjoy lunch together as one big group,” she said.

Lunch is served under the atrium at the center of the school. It’s taco pie with a fresh green salad today. Seventh grader Quinn Kiel says he likes the lunches here.

“It’s less like fast food and more like food-food, I guess,” Kiel says.

He says the menus change a lot, which is nice, and that students can put in special requests on birthdays.

“Or if everyone begs hard enough, long enough, we’ll eventually get it,” he says. “I pretty much eat everything. Some people they don’t like stir fry. Some of it I like more than other things, but I basically eat everything, yeah.”

With 10 palates to please, you’d think organizing the menus would be difficult.

“You know, I love it,” says Susan Lee, the trained chef who oversees the program. She also teaches cooking to the students, and introduces them to world cuisines. Lee says the students fill out surveys at the beginning of the year about the things they like and don’t like.

“And then I just warn them that, well, everybody likes something different and doesn’t like something different, so we’re going to have at least one thing throughout the year that you won’t like,” she says.

Most of the students try everything, and eat everything, and that they have pretty sophisticated palates.

“The biggest thing is for kids to enjoy food and enjoy cooking and be interested in it, know where it came from, know the history of it,” Lee said.

And that, she says, teaches them to be smart eaters now and hopefully, for the rest of their lives.