FOOD FOR THOUGHT

When it comes to food for thought, Hannah Farrow is an expert.

She is one of three cooks at Franklin Elementary School and serves as the school's cafeteria manager.

Farrow and the other cooks regularly cook for about 300 students each school day.

"We never feed less than 275," she said as she and the other cooks prepared lunch one day last week in the small, tidy kitchen.

"We work together," she said of the kitchen staff. "If you don't have that in a kitchen, you have problems," Farrow said.

Farrow has been a school cook in the Cape Girardeau public schools for 18 years. She spent 13 years cooking at Central High School and another two years at Washington Elementary School. She has been at Franklin for four years.

Farrow said school cooking has changed over the years. Most of the food comes ready to cook, although chili and spaghetti are still made from scratch.

The cooks also make cinnamon rolls as a special treat.

Feeding students isn't cheap in school cafeterias where ingredients are measured in pounds. At Franklin Elementary School, for example, some 25 pounds of flour is used in making cinnamon rolls.

The Cape schools spend more than $694,000 a year to operate nine cafeterias.

The district spends nearly $300,000 a year just on lunches. It also serves breakfast at the May Greene and Washington elementary schools.

Serving up everything from hamburgers to pizza requires 39 cooks. The district also has a food service director and a secretary.

The food service is operated with federal, state and local funds. Federal funds provide 51 percent of the district's more than $756,000 in food service revenue. Meal fees paid by students bring in another 32 percent of the revenue.

Some students bring their own lunches. But a majority of students eat school lunches in the elementary grades.

At the L.J. Schultz School, the school cafeteria feeds about 85 percent of the seventh-graders.

That isn't the case at Cape Central High School, where students are allowed to leave the campus for lunch.

"At the high school, we're lucky if we feed 18 or 19 percent because we have an open campus," said Lisa Elfrink, food service director for the school district.

The focus at the Cape schools is on healthy food.

Elfrink said fried foods are out.

"We don't fry anything in the district," she said. Even the french fries are baked.

"We cut down on the amount of butter and salt that we put into our vegetables," Elfrink said.

"Right now, we have a meal pattern that we have to meet: two ounces of meat a day per student per lunch. You have to have a vegetable and a fruit, that is mandated by the federal government," Elfrink said.

New federal guidelines that take effect for the 1996-97 school year will force school districts to cut down on fat.

But Elfrink said the Cape schools are already serving healthy meals and shouldn't have any trouble meeting the new guidelines.

Students, however, will notice some changes in the menu. "We may not be able to serve pizza as often or french fries because those are the items that are really high in fat," Elfrink said.

At Franklin Elementary School, students are more interested in taste than fat content.

"I love their corn dogs," said second-grader Malcolm Boyce as he and his classmates ate lunch in the gymnasium, which serves as the school cafeteria.

Brownies are a big hit too, and so is pizza.

But second-grader Kassie Bellew said the best thing about lunch isn't the food. "The best thing about lunch is going out to recess afterward," she said.