From our kitchen to your plates:

The Roosevelt High School (RHS) Community Meals are a way for friends, family, and other community members to celebrate our aspiring chiefs at Roosevelt. If you would like to know more about what these events look like you can visit the Longfellow Nokomis Messenger website (LongfellowNokomisMessenger.com and read an article I wrote called “High School’s culinary arts program goes beyond the classroom.” While I was writing and researching for that article I had so many questions that I did not have the time to put in it. So in this sequel we will be going deeper into this program, exploring not just the impact, but how they actually make these meals happen.
All community meals are centered around what students are learning in class. The last community meal was about their Native/Indigenous American unit and this upcoming one is highlighting their soup unit. The March 6 offering is the Empty Bowl meal. At this event you will be able to buy bowls from the RHS pottery class to eat out of, as well as donate with QR codes and cash. All proceeds from the Empty Bowl meal will be given to the Minnehaha Food Shelf to help people with food insecurity. There will also be a few speakers from the RHS Zoology and Global Politics classes talking about the effects of food insecurity.
Now if you are anything like me you want to know how this program budgets for these meals. I was lucky enough to talk to one of our program’s leaders Carlyn Shanley about how they budget and where they get these ingredients. The Roosevelt Culinary Arts (RCA) program is in a transitional period, attempting to shift buying produce from large companies to buying the majority of their produce from local businesses and farmers. At the moment they get most of their produce from Costco or Cub. They have already made a big transition from beef to bison, with help from program leader Ben Cuevas-Rengstorf’s family farm. The RCA wants to make the smallest impact they can on our environment. The diagram below shows where they get most of their produce. Over the next few years they want to completely flip so they are barely buying from these big corporations.
Funding is the main obstacle for them. It costs almost double to buy onions from The Good Acre or TC Co-Op Partners Warehouse. And when you need five plus pounds and large quantities of other foods, it really adds up. Each week they send emails out to students’ families showing what their students made and saying they can donate if they choose. They get about $300 each month from their website donations. They also have a Seward Grant this year which rounds up to about $7,000. They also cater school events and do community meals which gives them a little more. The total for a school year is $35,000. So each student per year gets a little less than $100. With this limited budget they will never be able to buy from local markets without sacrificing their students’ learning.
The best way that we can support this program is shining light on it. I talked to Carlyn about what it is like to get ready for these meals. They spend the week leading up to the meal cooking. Every class contributes something to these meals. On the day, they set up folding tables, compostable dishes/silverware, and catering hot plates. At 4:30 p.m. they open the doors and people can start eating. Then for the next two hours, the student volunteers serve food and make sure that they don’t run out. I asked Carlyn if they had ever run out of food and she said no. They normally plan for 200 people, but she hopes they will need to increase that number soon.
For this meal, the RCA program has tried to more outreach. Inviting middle schools, Roosevelt ambassadors, the Minnehaha Food Shelf crew, and, of course, whoever reads and shares this article.
If you would like to attend the Empty Bowl meal it’s on March 6, 2025 from 4:3 to 6:30 p.m. at Roosevelt High School. The address is 4029 S 28th Ave. If you can not attend and would like to donate you can go to rooseveltculinaryarts.org and press the donate button in the top right hand corner.
These students deserve just as much love and attention as every other school program, and I hope that with these two articles that more people help these teenagers learn what they love.