The governor's visit to DAR School Tuesday was a good one. It highlighted a pretty special program where the DAR ag program sells lettuce to the school CNP program as part of the Farm to Table initiative.Â
A swarm of school officials, politicians and media were there for the event and they got to see just a little bit of one of Marshall County's very special schools, DAR.Â
But I got a little something extra that few of those other folks got. I actually got to eat the school lunch, the very same type lunch that was served to the governor and to the school kids too for that matter.Â
It helps to know people and the person who made it happen was Grant Councilwoman Janice Jones-Bailey.Â
We've known each other forever, going back to my first tour-of-duty covering the Grant Council more than 20 years ago.Â
No one in the group was eating lunch. Janice approached me and said, "Want to eat lunch, Anthony?"
"No one else is eating, Janice, can we do that?" I asked.Â
"You can if you're with me," she said.Â
Her nephew Isaac is in elementary school at DAR and I got the impression Janice has eaten quite a few meals with him in the lunchroom over the years. Isaac actually joined us when his class came to lunch.
The meal consisted of country fried steak and gravy, mashed potatoes, a wheat roll, green beans, fruit and a salad made with lettuce grown on campus by the ag department.Â
I despised school lunches when I was a kid and went through 12 years of school brown-bagging it. I've had several occasions as an adult to eat school lunches both in the Guntersville and county systems and I've rarely had a bad one. I'm not sure if school lunch has improved, my tastes have changed or both.Â
"This is actually one of the best lunches we serve," a lunchroom employee told me of the country fried steak.Â
I skipped the mashed potatoes. I try to watch my carbs and I burned mine on the wheat roll instead. The salad with the homemade ranch dressing was a delight. The steak patty was very tender. It was all really good.Â
"It needs a little salt," Janice said as we compared notes on the meal. She was right. It did. In a nod to health, salt packets are no longer available at the lunchroom checkout. But there was pepper and it provided some seasoning.Â
I was told it was National School Lunch week. I tip my fork to the hard-working employees in our local school lunchrooms. They serve thousands upon thousands of meals every day. For a lot of kids, it's the best meal they will get all day. The lunchroom workers do noble, important work.Â
The meal I had from them this week was quite tasty.Â
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