Will school lunchrooms be the next rock star venue for chefs?

Dec. 16—Now that it is firmly established in our culture that cooking and being a chef are definitely hyper-cool, is there a chance that the long-unsung and often reviled school food service directors and their chefs have a chance at the kind of stardom that restaurant chefs have achieved? After all, they run the biggest restaurants in every city, sometimes serving the only meals in the day that some children receive.

Will the new, young, school food service directors become the rock stars of the 2020s, changing and leading the way we think about food? Why not? We’ve met some recently who have that effervescent star quality, that glitter in their eyes, that leads one to suspect they can accomplish just about anything they want to, and the main thing they want is to change the food that schoolchildren are offered and the way they are educated about it. How are the directors doing this? By increasing the freshness and flavors of the food they source and prepare.