Words by Jennifer Justus | Photos by Houston Cofield
Portaits featured in this story were taken at Peabody High School and Trenton Elementary School in Trenton, Tennessee.
November 4, 2025
Granny won me over with the government cheese. As a child, maybe 4 or 5 years old, when I’d visit her on occasional Sundays in Blue Ridge, Georgia, she’d slice me off a little treat — an orange rectangle from a brown cardboard box in the refrigerator. We would sit around her kitchen table, where she held court with my aunts by telling stories and making plans for canning vegetables. Sometimes the aunts smoked cigarettes, which they’d quickly stamp out when my preacher-grandfather came around the corner. Nevermind that my snack was processed and inexpensive, a generic type of Velveeta. In those days at Granny’s, sitting with my cheese and the grown-ups in our rural mountain town, I might as well have been tasting Camembert on the banks of the Seine.
Nevermind, too, the Mason jars of homemade soup on her shelves, a kaleidoscope of summer’s bounty — tomatoes, okra, corn — put up and waiting to take the chill off colder days. Nevermind the freshly baked pound cakes under Tupperware domes like trophies, which she kept atop the washing machine, also in the kitchen, or the biscuits she could whip up with nary a measuring device or recipe. I would learn to appreciate all those later. As a kid, the cheese wowed me.
My mother tried to explain that it was a commodity provided by government funding for the school cafeteria where my grandmother worked. “Maybe you shouldn’t mention the cheese,” Mom said recently, when I told her about writing this story. She has a good point. Folks don’t like to hear the words processed and school food in the same sentence. And Mom wouldn’t want people to think Granny was somehow taking advantage of the system. But don’t worry, Mom. The cheese is part of the point. I want people to know how Granny believed in wasting nothing, in sharing everything. In cooking from scratch as often as possible but also making do with every resource provided to her. And, yes, she sometimes had leftover cheese at home, but she also got in trouble for sneaking extra food into the paper sacks of kids without lunch money or even handing food out the back of the lunchroom screen door. “Situational ethics,” my cousin Susie calls it. I’d come to understand all that later. But as a kid, I just knew Granny’s job was cool.
Beulah Culpepper, the writer’s grandmother, was married to Rev. Paul Culpepper and spent her early years at home in the Georgia mountains, taking care of their eight children. At age 43, she began her food service career at Blue Ridge Elementary where, for about three decades, she found a sort of ministry of her own — making sure kids were well fed.
Beulah Culpepper started work as an assistant lunch lady at Blue Ridge Elementary School in 1950 at age 43. That’s after she’d had eight kids of her own, whom she raised by home cooking, pickling, canning, and keeping chickens. She married young, after a rough childhood. My grandparents held a small ceremony on the railroad tracks outside the textile plant where they’d met. My grandfather called her Sunshine. And, for the outsized proportion of his noggin, she called him Fathead. She never learned to drive, and she only had a third-grade education. But when my father, her youngest, started school, she decided she was going with him. “We walked to school together every morning,” Dad told me.
She worked her way to manager at the cafeteria, retiring in the early 1980s. Over the course of her tenure, her education level sometimes couldn’t keep up with her natural-born smarts, so she’d ask for my aunt’s help on the weekends to work out the financial parts of her menus. She became known for her vegetable soups, yeast rolls, and peanut butter cookies.
Mom remembers Granny’s frustration as, over time, guidelines and budgets added complicated layers to the work and hampered the scratch cooking she preferred. The government cheese went into big batches of creamy macaroni served alongside crisp, fried fish and scoops of turnip greens. She’d sneak in bacon grease from home to flavor green beans. Sadly, her own savory cornbread eventually gave way to a quicker and sweeter mix at school. My cousin Margaret remembers a student asking her: “Mrs. Culpepper, is this cornbread — or just bad cake?”
County employees would sometimes join the students for lunch as if she were running a restaurant. “She had a name county-wide for the meals she served,” says Gene Crawford, a columnist for the local newspaper who taught at the school in the 1970s.
Sheila Robinson (age 56; 7 years in the cafeteria; from St. Louis, Missouri)
Dad remembers when the lunchroom was just an old clapboard structure with wooden floors. Students who brought their lunch, often because they couldn’t afford the cafeteria meal, sat on benches along the perimeter. Granny tried to be discreet in making sure those kids had plenty. “What have you got to eat today?” Dad remembers her asking, peeking into their bags and sometimes finding nothing but a leftover biscuit. “She would give them anything she could get her hands on,” he says. She left out extra bowls of grits and gravy or commodity foods for students to share. At least once, the principal scolded her for giving away food for free. “Do I make money for this lunchroom?” she asked him. Yes. “Do I lose money for this lunchroom?” No. “Well, don’t you ever get on to me again for giving those kids food,” my mother remembers Granny recounting. “No kid will ever leave this lunchroom hungry.”
But before we go too far: a warning. If you’re looking for a dreamy, idyllic grandma story where I stand at her elbow and learn recipes, this ain’t it. I somehow don’t have a single recipe from Granny, even if she was the best cook I’ve ever known. But I did learn plenty else from her and felt her love in different ways. I’d sometimes sit with her and her dogs Tico or George while she chewed tobacco and watched Braves games. I remember her feisty attitude, stout build, and strong hands. She would squeeze my upper arms every time I entered her kitchen and compliment me on weight gain (a confusing but comforting message for a teen girl). It took me years to realize how she’d influenced my life as a food writer.
In reflecting on her now, I wanted to check in with modern-day heroes of the school lunch line. Even as it feels like our social safety nets are crumbling, I see in these workers a sharp stewardship of resources, a special sort of hospitality, and — despite government red tape and political divides — a deep commitment to community care.
Lisa Stoneburner (age 61; 8 years in the cafeteria; from Trenton)
Zhanae Box “I like to add my own touch to the recipes.” (age 31; 2 years in the cafeteria; from Jackson, Tennessee)
Stephanie Dillard at Enterprise City Schools in South Alabama likes to sit down for lunch with the kids and hear their thoughts on the food. She’s a longtime board member and newly elected president of the School Nutrition Association, a nonprofit organization of more than 50,000 lunch ladies (and fellas) and others interested in school nutrition. But day to day, you’ll find Dillard filling in for kitchen staff, crunching budget numbers, and working to get fresh, locally grown foods onto kids’ plates. Last year that meant satsumas from a neighboring county to serve with roasted chicken and broccoli. It meant local strawberries and even a special shrimp bowl with the region’s beloved Conecuh sausage.
“The greatest joy is just knowing that we are feeding children healthy meals. So many families rely on us daily,” Dillard says. “I just want to continue to see that all children have equal access to the meals.”
But Dillard is clear about the challenges. “Number one, we need more funding, so we can increase scratch cooking and more farm-to-school programs,” she says. “With the MAHA movement, they’re pushing, obviously, more scratch cooking, and that’s great and grand. I have no problem with less processed foods in schools, but we need the funding to be able to support it.”
To be sure, the stew of school food has long been mixed with politics and money. The National School Lunch Act, which passed in 1946, four years before my grandmother started cafeteria work, had its roots in an ecosystem of competing interests, says Marcus Weaver-Hightower, author of Unpacking School Lunch: Understanding the Hidden Politics of School Food. Over the years, politicians have argued over funding cuts, regulations, and what makes food healthy — along with who gets to set the menu.
Of late, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. seems to champion some of the healthier standards that conservatives once criticized, and partly rolled back, when the same ideas were espoused by then-First Lady Michelle Obama’s Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act campaign. (The opening lines of a 2014 Heritage Foundation article: “Michelle Obama thinks she knows what your children should eat.”)
Kennedy has advocated for healthier school food even as the Trump administration has cut millions in funding that would help make that possible, including eliminating the Local Food for Schools Cooperative Agreement Program and Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grants.
Deloris Morgan “The babies make you feel young.” (age 63; 8 years in the cafeteria; from Trenton)
Caryn Needham “I love seeing the children every day.” (age 44; 4 years in the cafeteria; came to Trenton from California)
Samantha Goyret and Caroline Ideus, co-directors of the Northwest Tennessee Local Food Network, had a statewide farm-to-school plan ready to implement — at least until the funding was cut.
Goyret and Ideus, who produce a guide to local farmers and producers and manage a West Tennessee farmers market, began serving as vital liaisons between farmers and school nutrition directors several years ago. They knew both groups were overworked, with little time to make connections. Goyret and Ideus also helped arrange transportation and delivery. Local farmers earned market values for their products while schools amped up nutrition in ways that appealed to kids. “It’s like, OK, we’re finally finding solutions to these problems,” Goyret says. “Then the government’s like, No, we’re not going to fund you anymore. So, good luck. Just try to figure it out on your own.”
Lisa Seiber-Garland, school nutrition director for the Trenton Special School District in Trenton, Tennessee, says students loved items like local butter lettuce and purple hull peas obtained through a federal grant. She learned that at least one student convinced her mother to visit a nearby farm for the tender leaves she had tasted atop her school burger. “It was so cool,” Seiber-Garland says. “Grants like that provide access for kids to have things they wouldn’t normally have. With that grant, we were also able to provide fresh ground beef. … We’re still doing it, but not to the extent with the grant. It was such a blessing I didn’t want to stop. I told my farmers I will do what I can to still buy. One had planted his strawberries and his watermelons and everything to meet what we needed in the school for that year. And then we lost the grant.”
Goyret confirms that, indeed, seeds had been planted, orders had been placed. “With every administration, there’s always changes,” she says. “But what’s different about this administration is that they are taking away already allocated funds — funds allocated by the Congress. That should be 100 percent illegal.”
But, per usual, school nutrition directors are making do.
Lisa Seiber-Garland “They’re gonna be fed. We'll find a way.” (age 60; 20-plus years in the cafeteria; from Trenton)
Pat Morgan (age 67; 5 years in the cafeteria, from Trenton)
Dillard says the federal funding cuts will hurt local farmers in Alabama, but her state offers rebates when she serves Alabama-grown foods. “They direct us and help me find the farmers that have the ability to grow enough for our district,” she says. “So I’m very lucky in that aspect. As soon as we find something new or new farmers willing to grow for us, we jump on that.”
Likewise, in Tennessee, Seiber-Garland works through a different grant specifically for elementary students to provide snacks of fresh fruit and vegetables paired with nutritional education. “The kids are the joy for sure. Watching them and their excitement when there’s something they really like,” she says, of offering students new tastes as well as standbys like peaches, grapes, berries, pepper strips, and carrots. A student’s mother came up to her at the cafeteria and said, “You’re the reason my daughter likes raspberries.”
In 2022, California became the first of a half dozen or so states to offer free school meals to all students, regardless of family income. Dillard supports free meals for all students with an emphatic, “Yes, yes, yes!” Food should not be based on income, she says: “It should be part of the school day. Your transportation is of no charge to students. School books are no charge to students. School lunch should be of no charge to students. … It’s just the right thing to do.”
Still, most schools must provide a mix of fee-based and subsidized free and reduced-price meals. Some communities with high percentages of families on SNAP and enrolled in Medicaid automatically qualify for the USDA’s Community Eligibility Provision, which authorizes free meals for all students in the district. But, as the “Big Beautiful Bill” slashes both SNAP and Medicaid, it will surely reverberate through school lunchrooms too. “It’s going to be a huge burden for a lot of families,” says Weaver-Hightower. “The number of problems I think [free lunches] would solve is a really long list. There’s paperwork, of course. And there’s the shame and stigma that some kids feel. Why would we do that to little 5-year-olds?”
Janet Roach “The kids — that’s what I love about the job.” (age 63; 9 years in the cafeteria; from Trenton)
Through all of the policy changes, the cafeteria has remained the “heart of our schools,” according to acclaimed chef Alice Waters. In 1995 she founded the Edible Schoolyard Project, an international nonprofit dedicated to promoting organic school gardens, kitchens, and cafeterias. Waters’ new book, A School Food Revolution (October 2025) celebrates this beating heart of public education.
Dan Giusti, formerly head chef at world-renowned Noma, is another prominent advocate for school lunches. He left his prestigious role in 2015 to create Brigaid, a company now working with 40 school districts in eight states along with other institutions such as senior centers and prisons.
His team has adopted the pragmatic approach long espoused by the professionals in those settings. “We don’t say, This is the food you should serve, or, You shouldn’t serve this food,” he explains. “It is their program and it is their community. Who are we to come from the outside to tell them otherwise? So we come in and ask, What are you trying to achieve with your program?”
Giusti loves the puzzle — the dynamics and balance of nutrition and taste preference. “I was talking with a food service director, and she uses the statistic that roughly 70 percent of the calories students eat in her district come from the food in the schools. So you have a real responsibility to make sure that food is nutritious. But at the same point you also need to make sure kids want to eat it. … Kids need to eat. Period.”
Giusti stresses that policies need to be backed up with resources. “It’s amazing to talk about removing processed foods, cooking more from scratch. I have a business based off of that,” he says. “It’s also really hard to do. If we’re going to say to School District XYZ, You can’t use these things anymore, then I hope we’re also going to give them money to buy more equipment and train their staff.”
Furthermore, edicts need to take into account the people who have to implement them, Giusti stresses. “Folks who work in the kitchens get caught in the mix,” he says. “You can feel it on them. They’re just waiting for the next initiative. They’ve maybe been working in these schools for 20, 30 years, and they’ve seen so many initiatives come and go, come and go. They’ve seen people come and go. Superintendents come and go. But they’re still there. Doing this work every day.”
Cherie Kelly (age 48; 9 years in the cafeteria; from Ottawa, Illinois)
Similar to my grandmother, Hope North in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, started work at the cafeteria when her son entered school. She’s been in food service ever since, about 27 years. Long enough to see her grandson attend Murfreesboro City Schools, too.
On a recent summer day, she climbed onto a brightly painted old school bus with the words CHOW BUS across its front. Inside, the seats had been reconfigured into booths with tables. About 50 meals sat in cooler bags: penne pasta with tomato-meat sauce, a side of carrots, fruit cups, and milk. The bus was headed for Chariot Pointe Apartments, the first stop of about five that day.
“We meet people where they are,” says Tori Carr, a school employee who was driving a van that followed the bus, which had been converted into a sort of free book store. Its shelves also carry cleaning supplies, pantry items, and simple toys like glow sticks and coloring pages.
North’s cousin Keith Sneed drives the Chow Bus as well as regular bus routes during the school year. The two make a good team — tough and tender. They run their route every day in the summer heat, bus windows down. North keeps tabs on her people at each stop. She knows their stories and worries. And if they don’t show up for a few days, she’ll be on the case.
They’d hardly parked at their first location, when a young man in a yellow T-shirt approached the bus. Sneed poked his head out the window. “Man, go get a book!” he said. “You ain’t read a book all summer.” The boy couldn’t help but oblige. Book in hand, he got a fist bump from Sneed as he climbed up the steps for a meal.
“It’s not just about the food,” Sneed explained later. “All they want is for you to listen to them.” But, of course, food is important, too. Not all schools can serve summer meals, which leaves many students at risk. And while this school used to have three Chow buses, funded by a USDA grant, they’re now down to one. “If we lose this bus,” Sneed says, “people will be hungry.”
Cathy Hill (age 62; 2 years in the cafeteria; from Humboldt, Tennessee, but moved to Trenton)
Carolyn White “The kids keep me active.” (age 64; 4 years in the cafeteria; came here from California)
Today, my grandmother’s town of Blue Ridge is surrounded by million-dollar vacation homes, its downtown sidewalks lined with art galleries and outfitters selling $6,000 bamboo fly rods. The economic disparity between visitors and full-time residents is vast. Fannin County schools qualify for the Community Eligibility Provision, which allows free meals for all — at least for now.
Martha Williams, who works as director of nutrition and wellness in Fannin County School District, grew up here and originally returned to teach math. But a cafeteria lunch lady inspired Williams to work in school nutrition when she pulled the teacher aside and pointed out a student who seemed disheveled and kept wearing the same clothes. Williams recognized the insights that can be gleaned from the serving line and how the work goes beyond keeping kids fed to providing stability, routine, and community care.
Williams points to another inspiration, GiGi Thomas, 63, who has worked in school food service for more than two decades. These days one of her duties is serving cookies, kept in an ancient warmer that “probably came over on the Mayflower,” Thomas says with a laugh. She hands students freshly baked cookies on napkins. “I see these kids every day,” she says. Some of them like chocolate chip cookies, others prefer sugar cookies. “It tickles them to death that I kind of remember what they get.”
In 2023, her cookies were featured in the high school seniors’ graduation video. “If you don’t have the cookies, those kids are devastated,” Thomas says. “That’s all you wanna do is take care of the kids.”
Over in West Tennessee, Seiber-Garland says she sometimes feels like she has 1,400 kids of her own. If no one shows up for a student on grandparents’ day, she fills in. And she loves running into students outside school, where they’re excited to say, “There’s my lunch lady!” Alumni sometimes share photos of their kids. “They’re so special. Every one of them.”
Over her 22 years in the business, Seiber-Garland has served her mother’s recipe for poppyseed chicken as well as old favorites like chicken tetrazzini and spaghetti. “I’ve always said, I want this to be their cafe. I can’t control what goes on at night. But for two-thirds or three-fourths of the day, I can. And I want them to be fed and happy, well, and blessed. They bless me.”
She tells of a student who kept trying to save her meal to carry home, because she didn’t have anything to eat there. Seiber-Garland and her staff found a way to provide her with a second meal for the evening. “I also had a parent come tell me to not let her child eat. And I’m like, No ma’am. If she asks to eat in my line, I’m gonna feed her.”
Seiber-Garland says there are people who donate every year to help pay off lunch balances that have remained unpaid. Recently, she created a “share table” on a red cart with a donated Yeti cooler that helps teach kids about reducing food waste. It’s where students can leave unopened milks or whole food that they don’t want for their classmates to enjoy. She’s also been known to cover lunches out of her own pocket, and her staff has taken up collections, too. “They’re gonna be fed,” she says. “We’ll find a way.”
I hear in those words the resourcefulness and care of my own grandmother and a guiding phrase she taught my father in standing up for what you believe.
As Granny would say, “You take your part.” ◊
Jennifer Justus is a writer based in Atlanta, Georgia, and St. Petersburg, Florida. She is an editor at Wildsam and author of Nashville Eats (Abrams). Her work has been published in two editions of Cornbread Nation: The Best of Southern Food Writing, a publication of the Southern Foodways Alliance, and she has received national awards from the Society of Features Journalism, Society of Professional Journalists, and the Association of Food Journalists. Jennifer graduated from the University of Tennessee followed by Boston University where she created her own food writing curriculum with courses in journalism and the masters program in gastronomy, which was founded by Julia Child and Jacques Pepin, and focuses on the cultural study of food. She worked for six years as food culture reporter and features writer at The Tennessean newspaper before embarking on a freelance career that led to work in TIME, Rolling Stone Country, Southern Living, Garden & Gun and more. Jennifer is co-founder of the recipe storytelling project Dirty Pages. The project's first exhibit lives in the permanent collection of the Southern Food & Beverage Museum in New Orleans. She was born in the mountains of Blairsville, Georgia near the start of the Appalachian Trail, which might explain her love for soup beans and cornbread.
Houston Cofield is a photographer based in Memphis, Tennessee. His work explores mythology, fiction, and folklore that embody the American South.
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Top Photo: Peggy Davis “I’ve been working here off and on since 1975 — and still here.” (age 69; 50 years in the cafeteria; from Trenton, Tennessee)
