All Praise to the Lunch Ladies
November 11, 2025 at 11:59PMJennifer Justus honors the unsung heroes of the school cafeteria—the women who fight to feed America’s children. Using the author’s grandmother’s 50 years of service as a backdrop, Justus explores the growing bureaucratic and funding challenges creeping into the kitchen.
She worked her way to manager at the cafeteria, retiring in the early 1980s. Over the course of her tenure, her education level sometimes couldn’t keep up with her natural-born smarts, so she’d ask for my aunt’s help on the weekends to work out the financial parts of her menus. She became known for her vegetable soups, yeast rolls, and peanut butter cookies.
Mom remembers Granny’s frustration as, over time, guidelines and budgets added complicated layers to the work and hampered the scratch cooking she preferred. The government cheese went into big batches of creamy macaroni served alongside crisp, fried fish and scoops of turnip greens. She’d sneak in bacon grease from home to flavor green beans. Sadly, her own savory cornbread eventually gave way to a quicker and sweeter mix at school. My cousin Margaret remembers a student asking her: “Mrs. Culpepper, is this cornbread — or just bad cake?”
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/11/11/all-praise-to-the-lunch-ladies/
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