Panther Lunch Program

Welcome to OMPS Lunch Program! My name is Chef Korrie Garcia! Here is a little bit of information we want you to know about our Lunch Program and what is happening in the Kitchen and behind the scene! It has been my goal to feed our children well, with mostly scratch-made food with high quality ingredients, including organic whenever possible within our budget constraints. I am thankful for the opportunity to be feeding your kiddos, and introducing them to flavors/dishes/textures that they may not have been exposed to before to hopefully expand their culinary horizons. It has also been my goal to prepare these meals in a way that isn’t as wasteful as food service generally is. I like to create as little waste in my personal life as possible and consider it an honor to be able to do that in my professional life as well. I thought it might be interesting to take a look at some of the efforts I have started and to see how far we have come, as well as look forward to other things we can do to continuously be improving.

Some ways we are reducing waste in the Kitchen at Old Mission:

• Making foods from scratch so that excess packaging isn’t being thrown away 
• Composting all of the kitchen scraps and kids’ leftover food 
• Composting any napkins or paper towels from the kitchen and cafeteria
• Saving veggie scraps to make homemade veggie stock for use in our soups 
• Turning any leftover prepped fruit into smoothies, muffins, coffee cake, etc.
• Being conscientious about not producing too much food and wasting, but enough for the kiddosto have seconds if they’re still hungry
• Offering any remaining food to staff 
• Recycling everything that can be recycled 

Some Fun Facts about our waste reduction journey:

• We are saving between 30-40 gallons of food scraps (compost) from ending up in the landfill perweek. By the end of the school year, that will be between 1,080-1,440 gallons saved from ending up in the landfill!
• In comparison, the kitchen is only generating about 1.50 pounds of trash per 5-day week (things that cannot either be recycled or composted). 
• For comparison, the average American will generate about 25 pounds of trash per 5-day week. 

I am happy with how far we have come so far. I know that there is always room for improvement, and that’s exciting, because that means it can only get better from here! In the future our goal is to love to purchase more food locally than we currently do. We love to support local food sources and purchase produce from our local Farmers on Old Mission Peninsula. We would also love to produce and utilize some of our own school-grown food, that is a goal we are working towards. 

Please reach out to me if you are a Local Farmer who would like to work with our school or if you are willing to help us with reaching our goal of producing local produce on campus!