Hot Stuff

MAT-SU — Like the fallen warrior for which the Mat-Su Borough School District nutrition center is named, the staff at the Kurtis Arcala Nutrition Services Center is dedicated.

The district’s nutrition services once housed its kitchens and storage at Iditarod Elementary School. Population growth throughout the Mat-Su Valley, the state’s fastest growing area, pushed the program to outgrow the elementary school’s modest facility.

“We needed a larger area to work and more and more convenient refrigerator and freezer space,” the district’s Nutrition Services supervisor Cindy Reilly said.

When the nutrition center opened for the second semester of the 2006-2007 school year, it had 16,000 hungry students cook for. By the end of its first semester of operation, the new district kitchens had prepared 900,000 hot and cold breakfasts and lunches.

“This year, we would like to reach the 2 million mark,” said Karen Lanners, assistant supervisor.

The Nutrition Center has the capacity to turn out 50,000 meals a day, Lanners said. But for now the daily total is about 8,000 meals delivered to 34 schools.

Except for schools in the northern reaches of the school district, most of the schools the center serves receive meals the same day the meals are eaten.

Nutrition center staff takes pride in the facility. It is their baby — their rather large baby. The nutrition center is all stainless steel and outsized appliances. The food is delivered by tractor trailer. Two semis will deliver pallets of food for the first six weeks of the school year.

“And that is just the tip of the iceberg,” Reilly said.

Each year the center turns tons of dry, refrigerated and frozen ingredients into nutritious, tasty school lunches. And it does it like any large-scale food provider.

“We are about a $5 million business,” Reilly said.

Of the 95 people employed by Nutritional Services, 25 work in the center.

The kitchen has ovens that can bake and rotate trays of cookies stacked 6 feet high and a huge specialized cooler that can bring hot food from 130 degrees to 41 degrees, the danger zone for spoilage, in the shortest time possible.

The new center is full of state-of-the-art equipment with 100-gallon soup pots and a dishwasher that leaves entire 6-foot racks of lunch trays sanitized.

The refrigerators and freezers have motorized doors large enough to admit forklifts. These come in handy when center employee Greg LeWalter has to transfer pallets of food from waiting semi trucks to the giant freezer’s warehouse-sized racks.

Bakers working at the center will make most of the district’s hamburger buns this year.

“This is like grandma’s kitchen,” Lanners said. “With a full-service bakery we can buy less and less pre-made food.”

The nutrition center buys locally grown food when it can, mostly potatoes and carrots. Lanners said she sees Nutrition Services as a vital part of a student’s learning experience.

“The kids come in hungry,” she said. “Good food helps kids stay focused. It is hard to concentrate when you’re hungry.”

The Nutrition Center also prepares condiments for students to dip, spread or drizzle on their well-balanced meals.

To help cut the total fat content of meals, assistant Nutrition Services supervisor Diane Russo substitutes gallons of mayonnaise in the center’s popular ranch dressing dip with nonfat yogurt.

“And the kids couldn’t tell the difference,” Russo said.

If a parent is concerned that their student is not eating a well balance diet at school, they can request a printout of what their kids have purchased from the lunch counter.

Nutrition Services also helps low income students get the nutrition they need to stay focused in class. Last year, the center provided free and reduced breakfasts and lunches to about 5,000 students last year.