Affordable lunches for students, community members on the menu at Ohana Cafe

In a church basement on Elbow Drive S.W., Henry Wise Wood Senior High School students stream in and fill up an open room over the lunch hour.

Clustered in groups at tables covered with plastic tablecloths, some are eating pizza, others devour theirown packed lunches at Ohana Community Cafe.

Down a hall, Diane Ward and Cameron Graham serve up enormous slices from eight huge baking sheets. Barbecue chicken is the most popular, although pepperoni can sell out in the first ten minutes.

All the pizzas are created on their own whole wheat crust, and today the dessert is a hefty bowl of cranberry-pear crisp they made when they realized a case of donated granola bars was actually just granola.

"The cafe started six years ago with the vision of providing good, nutritious, affordable food in a safe place for students and community members," says Ward.

It's also a healthier, more social alternative to the strip mall across the street.

In Hawaiian, ohana means "family."

Ward and Graham, who met through a theatre group and wound up cooking in the cafe together, make something different from scratch from Monday to Thursday. Kids are let out early on Fridays.

Wednesday is pizza day. It's $2 per slab, $1 for a drink or dessertor $3.50 for a full meal deal.

They set out a tray of free granola bars beside the water jugs and utensils for anyone who needs an extra energy boost.

They also have a stamp card program: $80 buys lunch every day for an entire semester, which works out to about $1.25 per lunch.

But when kids arrive without money or a stamp card, they still get fed.

"If people are hungry, we feed them regardless of their ability to pay," says Ward, who cheerfully greets every student, often by name.

"There are kids who don't have money, and don't have cards. We just smile and say, 'lunch is on me today.'"

Teachers and guidance counsellors across the street at the high school keep a stash of Ohana coupons to hand out to students they know might need a good homemade meal, and often community members will anonymously purchase a stamp card for a student in need.

In its first year, the cafe averaged about a dozen kids per day. But two years ago, Ward and Graham revamped the menu, and now they see 80 to 130 kids every lunch hour.

It's not just kids who come for lunch. Neighbours often stop by as the kids start heading back for afternoon classes. Some are given extra packaged goods to take home from a small office in the back that they've transformed into a large pantrytheir own little food bank.

Ohana gets support from the Community Kitchen Program of Calgary. On Thursdays, they go "shopping" at Spinz-a-Round, a CommunityKitchen food rescue program that collects produce, bread and other donations from markets, restaurants and retailers to redistribute to agencies in need.

Ward and Graham fill up a van with donated food they know they can use, like canned goods, baking supplies, fresh produce and granola bars.

Food donations

They often get food donations. Earlier in the year, they received so many whole chickens, they spent days roasting and shredding the meat to freeze and make stock for soup. Some of it went on the barbecue chicken pizza.

"You never know what you can get, so you have to be creative," says Ward.

Sometimes it's a matter of sifting through slightly damaged pallets of otherwise perfectly edible food and coming up with something to do with it.

"Flats of cherry tomatoes? Roast them and turn them into pizza sauce," says Graham, who earned his position by imagining all the things that could be done with a random list of pantry ingredients.

"It's a little more manual work. Sometimes I've brought back things I didn't recognize," says Graham.

"We brought home taro root one time. We baked them and called them taro tots, and they were awful."

Another time they wound up with chayote squashan edible gourd that resembles a bumpy bright green pearand enlisted the help of some students to identify it and figure out how to cook it. They cubed and roasted them and they were delicious.

"We want to be a place where people can come and be cared for with no expectation of anything in return," says Ward.

"Well, except picking up their dishes."

When I walked back through the eating area to leave, there was no evidence of the previous lunch rush. No garbage, no food left on tables, all chairs tucked neatly back into place.

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