What School Lunch Could Taste Like
Rogue Valley Farm to School fundraiser at Zi Spice, First Friday, October 2nd
We served it on cafeteria trays. The real ones, with the compartments.
That was the joke, and then about ten minutes in it stopped being a joke, because what was sitting in those compartments was chicken curry and golden saffron rice and chaat and fruit from a Rogue Valley orchard, and everybody in the room was having the same thought at the same time: why isn’t this what school lunch is?
That question is more or less the entire reason Rogue Valley Farm to School exists. They work to get food grown here into the hands of kids who live here, and to teach them where it came from. When they asked if we’d host a fundraiser for them on First Friday, the tray felt like the right way to make the argument without making a speech about it.
What was on the tray
Guests picked a curry — Zi Spice Chicken Curry or Chickpea & Cauliflower Curry and then filled the rest of the compartments:
Golden Saffron Rice
Farm-School Chaat
Seasonal Rogue Valley vegetables
Local orchard fruit
A mini Zi Spice Classic Chocolate Chip Cookie
All of it made from scratch in our kitchen that day.
The part that matters more than the tray
Here’s something that happens in school cafeterias every day and doesn’t get talked about much.
The kid with celiac disease eats separately. Different tray, different food, brought from home, or handed something modified while everyone else gets the thing on the menu. It happens quietly, five days a week, for their entire childhood.
Zi Spice is a one hundred percent dedicated gluten-free kitchen. No gluten comes into the building, so there’s no cross-contamination risk anywhere in what we do. Which meant that at a fundraiser about school lunch, every single person in the room got the same tray. Nobody asked. Nobody was handed an alternative. Nobody sat with something different in front of them.
For most of the room that went completely unnoticed, which is exactly the point.
And because it was First Friday
Terrene poured a wine tasting, and DJ Sparklepants (Danielle Kelly Music) played all evening. Pre-orders saved guests five dollars and told us exactly how much to cook, which meant almost nothing was thrown away at the end of the night; which felt like the right way to run a dinner about food systems.
Thank you
To Rogue Valley Farm to School for letting us be part of it. To Terrene and to Danielle. To the growers whose food was on those trays. And to everyone who turned up, paid for a cafeteria lunch on a Friday night.
Our evenings are becoming nights like this one
We’re turning our evenings over to events; private bookings and ticketed dinners, five nights a week. Birthdays, showers, rehearsal dinners, company holiday parties, and fundraisers like this one.
If you have something you’d like to put in this room, we’d love to hear about it. Email info@zispice.com
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