Snack is a program, not a line item.

We feed 230 kids a day across six sites, which is not a snack cart, it is a small food operation. The kitchen table program is the part where kids learn to run it: planning, budgeting, prepping, cooking, serving, and cleaning up after 230 people.

What kids learn

• Knife skills, starting with a plastic lettuce knife and working up to a chef's knife under supervision.
• A food budget: $2.14 per kid per day, and what you can actually put on a plate for that.
• Basic food chemistry — why bread rises, why onions brown, why acid wakes things up.
• Batch cooking, storage, labeling, and the difference between 'expired' and 'unsafe.'
• How to serve someone who is allergic, diabetic, or just does not like it.

The menu

Snack rotates on a four-week cycle: fruit and yogurt; bean and cheese quesadillas; rice and lentils; soup and bread. Everything is nut-free, most of it is vegetarian, and all of it is made at the Hawthorne kitchen and delivered to sites in cambros by Deb the van. Kids on the kitchen team write the cycle and cost it out, and twice a year their menu goes to the whole program.