Chef takes reins of D21 food program

She’s a golfer, so it was sweet that she could golf for free—saving the peak-season $250 green fees—plus bring along three guests. “I never had so many friends come visit me as I did when I lived there,” she said.

But after a few years, she was wanting to be warmer, but still in Oregon, and a recruiter for her previous company, Sodexo, came calling.

She ended up in The Dalles, where Sodexo holds the food contract for the school district.

She hopes to boost community involvement in the school food program and is excited about the work ahead of her. “It’s going to be a good year, I think.”

She said, “I think we have a great crew, I think there are a lot of people here that want to do the right thing.”

She also wants to start a new program called “Service with a Smile,” which brings in community members, such as police officers, firefighters, people from the senior center and veterans, to help serve meals.

Ray said people have misconceptions about school food. “Everybody has the misconception that everything is deep fried or it’s just burgers and pizzas,” she said. But there are a lot of offerings, and it’s a process of learning the community, to learn what they like and to be able to give them something healthy.

“Getting healthy options for the kids is important to me, building relationships with the community is important to me,” she said.

Ray wants food to be visually appealing. “You eat with your eyes first,” she said.

She said it’s not unusual for Sodexo to have chefs working as a general manager at school districts. She contacted Sodexo looking for ideas and they put her in touch with four or five of her counterparts in Oregon, all of whom were chefs.

Ray, a Navy brat who moved a lot but graduated from high school in Grants Pass and thus considers herself an Oregonian, first worked for Costco for 17 years, starting there when it only had four stores.

Then she decided to completely change her life, and went to culinary school “before going to culinary school was the thing to do.”

She attended Le Cordon Bleu in Scottsdale, Ariz., and became a chef. She worked for two years in Yellowstone National Park, and when the park closed in winter, she cooked at bow hunter camps. “Stuck up on a mountain, which was great.”

She loves the outdoors and hiking, and she loves to cook and hang out with her mom, who lives with her. “I love to dink around in my garage, I love to woodwork,” she said. “I like to go to Home Depot and just walk through and smell the wood.”

Ray is a foodie, of course, and has enjoyed hitting local restaurants since moving here.

Coming from a military family, her first job with Sodexo in 2007 at Camp Pendleton cooking for Marines was a perfect fit.

She taught Marines how to cook, “although they have their own concept of what cooking is, but it’s good. I love them to death, they’re great people. In reality, my day is nothing compared to what they go through and what they do, and I think they’re just incredible souls.”

She said the Marines eat what every other cafeteria-style place might offer, including pizza, hamburgers, scrambled eggs and bacon.

“Marines eat a lot of tater tot casserole. Marines love tater tots,” she said.

“Their big thing was the time: they had two minutes to go through line,” she said. “It’s amazing how you can feed 1,000 Marines in 30 minutes.”

Everything was timed, not just the Marines getting through the line. The workers serving the food had only so much time to replenish a depleted tray of food, for example. Her work was inspected by the Marine Corps, by Sodexo and by a third-party.

For her first week here, at the end of the school year, she popped into each school. “I like kids, it’s fun to see, they come in with wide eyes and some of them are very talkative, some are not. They’re all very different little human beings, it’s cool.”

She said the high school is a “good group of people.” The news may portray kids as bad these days, but “I went to the high school and I don’t think I’ve ever mat so many polite kids, they’re just good kids.”

She also mixed it up a bit at the high school, having the Chat and Chew staff serve outside one day just for a change of scenery. “I think everybody gets bored with food sometimes, even I do, so it’s nice to be able to do different things.”

She said they fed more students when it was outside than the week prior.

Also new is expanding the food offerings to include a third meal for the summer migrant program, which feeds children up to age 18. Before, it provided breakfast, and lunch and then a snack; now it includes a supper.

Also new is providing sack dinners to older students at two orchards. The program started small, but she hopes to expand it next harvest season. It provided sack meals twice a week at one orchard and twice a week at the other.

The migrant program  served 11,000 meals through the second week of July, she said.

The D21 food program also helps provide free sack lunches at various points around town, including at Thompson Pool, Wahtonka Community School, the Sunrise Estates apartment complex, and the library.

Ray plans to get the word out more about the program next year so it will feed more kids.

Growing up with “the vagabond soul” of a Navy brat, Ray said it was ingrained in her to move about every three years. “But here, I think I’m done, I love it here. I went out to Sandoz Farm the other day and that’s a really cool place, I really enjoyed that. I took my mom down to the river about 7:30 last night and we looked at the pelicans. It was great.”