courtesy photo
Hazen Union students who prepared food at the community dinner at the United Church of Hardwick, were (left to right) Jaimey Farrand, Madison Draper, Victor Barrientos, Ginger Bowley, Lucas Hall, Xander Bingham, Ira Karp, Lizzy Considine and Cheyenne Winckler, substitute teacher.
by Lucas Hall and Ginger Bowley, Community Journalists
HARDWICK – We are students in a class at Hazen Union called “Recipe for Human Connection” which is based on connecting and cooking with your peers. On Thursday, January 18, Ginger and I helped with the community lunch for part of our class. We spent most of the day at the United Church here in Hardwick preparing the food.
The lunch crew was made up of students, a few adults from Hazen Union, and volunteers from the community. We all made minestrone soup and cornbread along with various desserts, which we cooked for about four hours. Each dish had a group of students preparing it with adults helping with each dish when needed.
After we finished cooking we set up the tables and prepared to serve and host and set all the food out last. We started serving lunch at about noon. People who attended, mainly senior citizens, were very polite and it was a working, low-stress environment.
When we finished serving food we spoke to some community members and asked them to rate the meal between one and 10 based on how much they liked the meal. Generally, people rated it at a nine out of 10 based on how it tasted, with one being “horrible” and ten being “excellent”, and they liked the meal.
Marc Considine, a local science teacher at Hazen, said “I’m mad I cannot have more because I’m full.” Ava Renaud a student at Hazen said “I’m surprised by how good the food is, I did not expect it to be this good.”
Reeve Basom, one of the main organizers who run the “Recipe for Human Connection” class, said “Today’s servers were incredibly gracious, professional, worked well together as a team and it was a big crowd so they were actually on their feet for a while cause the line just kept coming, so I was proud of them.”
Overall we believe that this community lunch was very successful considering this was seen as one of the biggest community lunches in a long time and it was an opportunity with students to connect with members of the community. We both enjoyed the experience and would do it again when we get a chance.
