Traditionally, R&I’s July 15 issue focuses on the culinary side of the Top 400 chains, the ranking of which appears in the July 1 issue. Several of this issue’s articles—including The Ten-Minute Manager and the “Setting the Table” food feature—address chains’ delicate and difficult menu-planning challenge when food costs are spiraling (never downward) and consumers are increasingly chary in their spending. Providing guests with quality and value at a reasonable return is no simple task now.

While we were reporting and writing those articles, I received an e-mail from Al Muhlnickel that cast the cost/value discussion in a different light. Muhlnickel, foodservice director for Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) City School District, told me about a lunch he recently organized at Poughkeepsie High School. His goal, he said, was to provide the students a meal that would be nutritious, fun and, most of all, special. The event was dubbed Pastabilities.

He had called Diane Sterling, director of Poughkeepsie’s Culinary Training Institute, and they arranged for the four members of the culinary school’s graduating class and Chef Instructor Jay Stricker to use the lunch as a real-world training exercise. The culinary students did prep work in the high school kitchen the day before the lunch—aided by the high school’s dozen foodservice staff members—and returned the following morning to pull it all together, including the baking of 65 apple pies.

Muhlnickel is used to working on a tight budget: His daily food-cost ceiling is $1.28 per tray. To ensure that the Pastabilities lunch would be affordable for the students, he marshaled a variety of USDA commodity foods, including ground beef, rotini pasta, spaghetti sauce, fajita chicken and apple slices. When it was lunchtime, students chose from hearty meat sauce, roasted-red-pepper marinara sauce or primavera vegetable-Alfredo sauce to top their pasta. Accompaniments included chicken Caesar salad, garlic breadsticks, milk and, of course, a slice of freshly baked apple pie.

Three hundred students paid $1.75 for the lunch; faculty and staff were charged $4.50. The school district provided special plates, bowls and napkins, and the Poughkeepsie High School cafeteria was decorated in the red, white and green of the Italian flag. Pastabilities was the first event of its kind at the school, and the kids loved it. “Students are still coming up to me, telling me their lunch was awesome and asking when we’re going to do it again,” Muhlnickel says. He hopes to develop a sequel in November.

During his nearly 30-year-career, Muhlnickel has worked in the military, college, restaurant and, for the past seven years, school sectors of foodservice. He has enjoyed all of the stops, but he says nothing compares with seeing children every day “and knowing that you’ve had an impact on their lives by giving them great food.”

The $600-billion-plus foodservice industry encompasses a startling diversity of venues, styles and audiences, from Per Se to Poughkeepsie City School District. What unites these segments, making them equal parts of the hospitality business, is foodservice professionals’ shared, simple dedication to providing something special. Every day is an opportunity to make a positive impact, if only briefly, on people’s lives.