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The Cafeteria Lady was the second scariest person at my school, right after the vice principal. She wore a starched white dress and orthopedic shoes and she barked.
The Cafeteria Lady's job
A Kapolei favorite
-- and her image --
sure have changed
Dishing it up in KahukuBy Betty Shimabukuro
Star-BulletinMrs. Cafeteria Lady, if you are still out there, I'm sorry, I'm sure once you got home and took off your hairnet, you were a very nice person, but we all thought you were 100 percent, totally ferocious.
Heaven forbid we should scoop the rice wrong or drop food, or -- worse, even -- forget our own hairnet on cafeteria day.
In the year 2000, I decided it was safe to go back to the cafeteria. And last week being National School Lunch Week, it seemed a good time to revisit the Cafeteria Lady. Besides, what could she do to me now?
Life is different in the lunchroom. First of all, there's a 1-in-3 chance that the Cafeteria Lady is a man. No white dress, no hairnet.At Kapolei elementary, middle and high schools -- three schools within a three-mile radius -- all three cafeteria managers are men (two are named Alan, for what that's worth). Their boss is supervisor Shayne Kitano, another guy. His boss is Gene Kaneshiro, director of food services, another guy.
Not a situation you'd have even imagined a few years back, when women ruled the schools and men who cooked worked in hotel and restaurant kitchens.
"You always had that picture of the managers being women," says Kitano, who joined the schools in the 1980s. "When I came into the system, maybe there were two or three of us."
The men tend to have histories in the wider food-service industry, opting for school careers because of the more stable hours, the holidays and summers off.
"I decided if I ever had a family I would want to be home," Kitano says.
Alan Ogawa, cafeteria manager at Kapolei Elementary School, joined Anuenue School as a baker in 1972 after working as a cook in several hotels.
His pay was cut in half when he left the Hilton Hawaiian Village for Anuenue. He had to take a second job, but says it was worth it. "For me it was the shifts. I wanted steady days off."These days a cafeteria manager starts at $28,000 -- better than teachers, although most teachers outpace managers in about four years. Top scale is $38,700, with the level set by staff size and the numbers of meals served in the manager's cafeteria.
Ogawa remembers being well-accepted by the women in the cafeteria. "The ladies at that time, a lot of them were getting older -- plus that, they're short, yeah? -- they depended on us to carry things."
His counterparts, Curtis Haida at Kapolei Middle and Alan Ahn at Kapolei High, had both considered teaching, then went into the restaurant industry, only to return to the schools to connect again with students.
Both also have fond memories of their own school cafeterias. Ahn says he ate two lunches a day, plus the mid-morning "wiki" meal at Moanalua High. "The food wasn't the best, but it was 25 cents."
He and Haida, a Roosevelt grad, now handle breakfast and lunch service at two of the newest schools in the state.
Longtime lunchroom veterans remember a world light years removed from the shiny new kitchens in Kapolei.
Nancy Miura worked alone in her first assignment, at the now-extinct Ookala School on the Big Island's Hama-kua Coast. She cooked for about 100 students, starting at 7 a.m. "It was on a kerosene stove and there was no such thing as an oven at that particular school."
Those were the days of white uniforms, hairnets and polished white shoes, which eventually became optional and today are pretty much unheard of. Miura liked them, though. "Everybody looked so professional."
Miura did her own accounting and planned all her own menus. "Luncheon meat and pineapple -- that would be once a month." Canned meat from the federal goverment's surplus-food program went into chop suey.
The government also supplied cheese, but that was a hard sell among the plantation-camp kids. "They had to acquire the taste and it took awhile."
She even snuck cheese into slits in hotdogs.
But for the most part, the children were hearty eaters, both at Ookala and Miura's second assignment in Pahoa.
"We used to always have beets on the menu; now you cannot put beets on the menu," she says. "We also used to have lima beans."
Part of it was a greater appreciation for a hot meal, Miura says. "I cannot think of kids wasting food before."
Miura is now a supervisor, having left the cafeterias in 1977. Kids' favorite foods from her time: shoyu chicken, creole macaroni, Spanish rice, pigs-in-a-blanket, luncheon meat-pineapple kebabs, laulau (made of "federal commodity" canned pork or beef layered with canned spinach in ti-leaf-lined baking pans and a sprinkling of liquid smoke).
Today's favorites are those that most closely resemble fast food.
In the Kapolei High cafeteria, students are asked to rate their lunches on a scale of 1 to 10. Most say 6, but Zachary Kanaka, gives them a 1.5. Why? "Because, get vegetables." What would he like instead? "A Quarter-Pounder with Cheese."
The modern-day cafeteria's competition is, frankly, McDonald's. Managers are caught between parents and administrators demanding better nutrition and the tastes of kids weaned on fast food, who haven't learned to eat their vegetables at home, says Ahn at Kapolei High.
Older students, especially, may opt to simply skip lunch, knowing that they can stop at someplace for a snack on the way home, he says.
Indeed, one after another, the kids in his cafeteria last week said they'd rather be eating at McDonald's, and their parents would pay for it, if only they could get off campus during the day. Add to that school groups selling candy, cookies, sodas and chips on campus to raise money.
"How are you going to compete with that?" Ahn asks.
You compete in part by offering choices: a full lunch or a "wiki" lunch at mid-morning; salads with choice of dressings; in some schools, a sandwich alternative to each day's hot meal.
The DOE's menu-planning committee has assembled a five-week cycle of meals, with schools allowed room to play with the basic ingredients to suit their students' tastes.
On teri-beef-and-bun day last week, for example, the Kapolei managers had three different meals planned. The elementary kids would get a teri-beef patty over rice; the middle schoolers, sliced beef with teriyaki sauce and, again, rice; at the high school, roast beef and brown gravy (with onions and perhaps mushrooms snuck into the gravy to provide some vegetables). And rice.
About those vegetables. Broccoli is a fairly successful offering -- meaning less of it gets thrown away than with other vegetables. Older kids will go for tossed greens, if they can pick their own dressings. Younger ones like carrot sticks and dips.
Ahn tried making fried saimin with chop-suey mix, but the kids hated the bean sprouts and the onions. He now uses cabbage. "It's very mild, easier to take."
Most schools are offering fruits and vegetables on "choice bars," allowing the kids who do eat them to make their picks, while cutting waste among those who don't.
Kitano, a member of the menu-planning committee, says the sheer amount of food purchased by the DOE gives it some buying clout in seeking out lower-fat, lower-sodium products. He was able, for example, to get a manufacturer to produce saimin noodles with a lower sodium content.
But, in the you-can't-win-for-losing department, the kids noticed the difference, Ahn says, and asked for a saltier broth.
So, really -- was the Cafeteria Lady mean? "You need to yell a little," says Pacita Cabbab, Cafeteria Lady at Kahuku High School since the mid-'50s.
"I even get complaints from my own adult workers that I talk too loud sometimes. ... You have to be firm or else the kids will run circles around you."
The Kapolei guys remember being treated kindly in their old school cafeterias. Of course, they showed an early propensity for the job and used to volunteer for cafeteria duty.
Ogawa insists he was a nice guy once he joined the adults in the cafeteria. "I used to all the time give kids extra cookies, tell them, 'Here, stick it in your pocket.' "
Take a bite
By the numbers: School cafeterias serve more than 150,000 lunches every day, a total of more than 24 million in fiscal year 1999.
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Alan Ogawa says this salad is always popular with kids at Kapolei Elementary School. He likes to let it marinate two days, "but sometimes the kids can't wait, yeah?" From the lunchroom
For adults, he says, the vinegar can be replaced with a half sake-half rice vinegar mix. The sauce may be reused.
Combine all ingredients except vegetables. Bring to a boil, then cool at room temperature until just warm.Pat's Namasu
1 cup shoyu
1 cup white vinegar
3/4 to 1 cup sugar
1 teaspoon sesame oil
Chile pepper to taste, optional
7-8 cucumbers, in chunks or thinly sliced or 1 medium cabbage, slicedIf using cucumbers, sprinkle with salt and let sit for 30 minutes to draw out moisture. Rinse.
Pour warm sauce over cucumbers or cabbage and marinate at least overnight.
Nutritional information unavailable.
Pacita Cabbab has been feeding children in Kahuku since 1956, the year she signed on as cafeteria manager at the high school. Four decades dishing
it up in KahukuBy Betty Shimabukuro
Star-BulletinBut she's been in the Kahuku system since 1940, when she entered kindergarten at Kahuku Elementary. Except for a couple years in cooking school and a brief maternity leave, she's been on one of these windward campuses ever since. She's been through more principals than she can remember.
Even now, at age 65, she has no plans to go anywhere else.
Cabbab is one of the veterans of the food-service system in Hawaii's public schools -- both as an eater and a server -- and if anyone's qualified to comment on the changes over the years, it's her.
"When I was in high school, we fought to work in the cafeteria -- and it was 8 o'clock to 2:30. We used to not just serve, but also clean vegetables, butter bread, wash pots and pans, and mop, too. ... Now these kids, they don't even wipe the tables!"
Still, things have gotten easier in the cafeteria, Cabbab says. Convenience foods such as premade hamburger patties make quick work of dishes that once were quite labor-intensive.
Beef stew in the old days, for example, involved a day of cutting and cleaning vegetables, peeling potatoes and browning pans and pans of meat. Students helped. "I used to dread beef stew," she says.
Nowadays vegetables come prepped and go into the steam kettles for quick cooking. Mashed potatoes are instant. No sweat.
Also on the menus of the 50s and 60s: Corned beef and cabbage, chow fun, tuna casserole and everybody's favorite -- Spanish rice. It contained hamburger meat, celery, onion, crushed tomatoes and Cabbab's own special touch -- hot dogs. The dish was a favorite of the kids for years, she says.
But in those days, kids were easier to please. "They weren't as picky as they are now."
Cabbab started with just two workers feeding 800 kids. Now she supervises 18 and feeds 1,800-plus students at Kahuku elementary, middle and high schools, and at Sunset Elementary, too.
She doesn't cook in her off hours. Never has. Her mother cooked at home years ago, and now her daughter does the duty. Her daughter, by the way, represents generation No. 2 at Kahuku: She's a teacher in the elementary school.
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