A culinary sabotage

story by Sydney Shain ≫

On March 8, the Eudora High School culinary program, led by Chef Lowe, represented EHS at the Kansas Prostart Invitational culinary competition at Wichita State University. Overall, the culinary team placed higher than half of the schools to compete that day. There was a management team as well, which placed sixth out of ten teams total. Two students worked on edible centerpieces as another separate event, and placed fourth and fifth out of nine teams.

Students tried out for positions on the competition team, and started working hard to practice their individual contributions that were to be presented to the judges on competition day far in advance.

“The week before, we showed up every day at 6:30 a.m.,” said Sydney Elmer, Jr. “Most of us practiced on our own for our own parts of our meal during class instead of doing our regular classwork. It was quite a bit.”

Preparation was key, as the conditions to work in at this specific competition are very different than the full kitchen the culinary class is used to working in every day at school.

“We had to use camp stoves,” said Chef Lowe. “We’re not allowed to use anything electric, anything battery powered. We bring everything from ingredients to equipment. You have to bring it all.”

However, our school culinary team faced more than the usual amount of setbacks and difficulties at this last competition.

“We did have some bad luck,” said Lowe. “We had an issue with someone stealing our ingredients.”

At the competition, teams are required to check in their ingredients for the recipes on their pre-constructed menus the day before the competition. The EHS culinary team did this, and found the next day that a suspiciously specific list of ingredients were missing from the check-in area.

“Every single ingredient for our sponge cake and our sweet potato puree were missing,” said Elmer. “Every single ingredient. There were wet and dry ingredients, which were in separate places, so they had to have gone through and looked for them to take them.”

Eudora has done fairly well during the competition in the past, but there are schools who consistently get first and second place each year who weren’t targeted.

“I don’t know why they would pick us,” said Elmer. “I don’t know if they felt threatened, or maybe we were making the same thing? There was another team that did sponge cake, which was some of our ingredients that got stolen.” This could mean that the other school wanted to affect their performance by taking the ingredients, while the school would still have their own to use that were measured out precisely for the perfect recipe.

Elmer was frustrated by the theft of the ingredients, and not knowing who took them made it even worse.

“We have no idea which school. It could have been one of the schools that placed, which is upsetting. We were sabotaged, and I feel like if they did that, they shouldn’t have placed. But there was no proof so nothing could be done.”

Even with these setbacks, the judges were impressed with the way the situation was handled by the team.

“General comments from all three sections were, ‘very professional and polite. Students are well informed and reflect the drive to succeed,’” said Lowe.

“We did our comments back from the judges,” said Elmer. “I looked at those and they told us that we handled it really well and were professional about everything. We tried to keep our emotions under control, even though we were super upset, we tried to stay professional, and they said we did a really good job of that.”