January 10, 2025

School Lunch

Growing up in the Seattle Public Schools system, a common lunch conversation would be that “the pizza tastes like cardboard”. We left the hostel bright and early at 5:30 AM to go see Akshaya Patra, an NGO that prepares school lunches. No matter how tired us GCILers are, everybody is always excited for our activities of the day. When we arrived at Akshaya Patra we adorned our person with PPE which consists of face masks, flip flops and very attractive hair covers (though some might say otherwise). We were given a tour of their operations. Just like the other companies we’ve met, they had unique innovations. One was transporting food to the different stages of cooking using gravity, for example, pipes that drop washed rice immediately into a pot a floor below. They also use agricultural waste as a source of fuel, which I appreciate the reuse of materials. We saw the employees stirring giant pots of food, requiring the strength of their entire body. We ended the tour with lunch consisting of the very food we saw being made in front of our eyes. As we ate our delicious food, GCILers were going over their favorite parts of the company and the tour. Akshaya Patra’s multiple facilities feed 3 million kids (around 2% of kids in India) and are aiming to hit 5 million at the end of the year thanks to new facilities opening up. Operations start at 2:30AM and a lot of hard work and care gets put into their products. After seeing what it takes to mass produce healthy and fresh food for students, maybe the school lunch pizza I grew up with wasn’t too shabby after all. Who am I to critique taste when I like to eat questionable gas station buffalo wings.

By
Amy