Brenda Zietsman has fallen in love with working as a dinner lady at Culter Primary School, after taking the job eight years ago.
The head dinner lady – or cook in charge – has worked at the primary school in Peterculter since 2017.
She moved here from South Africa, where she had her own catering company.
“I love it,” she says, “I love working with the kids.
“Especially because you get to see the kids every day.
“And you see them from when they’re really teeny tiny little ones in P1.
“Then eventually you see them in P7 and I’m like: ‘Aw, they’re leaving soon!’
“You get to see how their personalities develop and change.”
Culter Primary School kitchen team cook around 300 meals a day
Brenda worked as a secretary when she moved to Scotland, but says “it wasn’t fast-paced enough”.
“I like to be on the go,” she adds. “Sometimes you don’t even have time for a coffee. But every day is a new day, it’s never stagnant or boring.”
The team have around 35 nursery kids to feed in the morning, and 20 in the afternoon.
Plus, there are 250 pupils in the primary school to feed at lunchtime.
This means their small team of five are responsible for nearly 300 meals.
“Some of them, this might be their only hot, nutritious meal for the day,” Brenda says, a look of determination on her face.
“And I want to give them something good.
“Even if we’re short staffed, I don’t want to cut the menu. Even if I run myself ragged, and I need to collapse at the end of the day.
“Getting them fed is what keeps me going.”
The team work off five menus in total: a normal menu, one for nursery and one for primary pupils, a gluten-free menu, a dairy-free menu, a vegan menu. Plus, there are other allergens that they need to consider on top of this.
“All our food is made from scratch,” she adds.
A dinner lady means more than just cooking
While a key part of Brenda’s role involves cooking a nutritious meal for the children, her job, as she sees it, is about much more.
“I know all their names,” says Brenda.
“And I’ll greet them by name when they come in, and they’ll go along the row asking ‘Do you know my name too?'”
Brenda says knowing the names of the pupils “helps them and makes them more comfortable”.
“Primary Ones are obviously the new ones, so you’ve got to learn their names as you go on,” she explains.
“But if you say their name, they look at you. They make eye contact. And they start to come out of their shell.
“I will joke with them sometimes, if we’re dishing something up. I’ll give them a tiny little bit on the plate, and ask, is that enough for you today? And then I give them some more.
“So we joke, and we form a bond with them. And they will come in and tell you they’ve lost their tooth, or they fell and they’ve got a plaster, and they ask me to sign their cast.
“Because they’re so used to you being part of their life, and you’re giving them the nutritious meal that they need.”
‘It’s about bringing them out of their shell too’
Cooking for these pupils, and making their day with her charm and banter, isn’t enough for Brenda.
She also takes it upon herself to encourage the children to develop a healthy relationship with food.
“I try to get them to try new things when they’re eating,” she says.
“If there’s something new, they pick up on it straight away. They’re like: what’s that, why is that there?
“But you’ve just got to convince them.
“I encourage them to try a little spoonful. I say: taste it, if you don’t like it, you can just leave it there, but you might like it.
“And I’ve actually got a roll of stickers up on my shelf, and it says ‘I tried something new today’.”
As well as knowing a lengthy list of dietary requirements off by heart, Brenda also knows many pupils’ likes and dislikes – even how many slices of cucumber one of her pupils prefers to eat.
Brenda says the lack of “filter” of primary school children makes her role pretty amusing at times.
“It’s about bringing them out of their shell too,” she says.
“You get some wild characters, oh my gosh. Some of these kids are hilarious.
“They just say whatever’s on their mind, there’s no filter.
“When you get older you learn to bite your tongue.
“But if they want to say something, they say it.
“They’ll say: You cut your hair, why?”
The Peterculter dinner lady is such a key part of these pupils’ lives that they worry when she has a day off.
“It’s so cute, they’ll notice straight away if you’re not here,” she tells me.
“If I have a day off, the cook says they ask: ‘Where’s Brenda? Are you trying to take her job?’
“I come back and they say ‘Are you back now? You’re not going away again?'”
Conversation