By Craig Williams

Every summer of Sandra Taylor's childhood, she traveled 200 miles from Little Rock to Parkdale, Arkansas, where her grandmother spent entire days in the kitchen making fig preserves, homemade biscuits, and pecan treats from the trees in her yard. Young Sandra would watch, mesmerized, as her grandmother transformed simple ingredients into sustenance and love. She couldn't have known then that those summers would shape a calling that would eventually nourish thousands of children in Galesburg, Illinois.

This October marks Sandra's 20th anniversary with Galesburg Community Unit School District #205, where she's one of four cooks preparing roughly 3,500 meals daily from the high school's central kitchen. It's a massive operation—22 kitchen workers strong—that feeds students across the district. But for Sandra, it's never been about the numbers. It's about Kenny and Keyerra, her own children who went through these schools, and every other child who might not get another meal that day.

"I love my job," Sandra says simply, and you can hear the truth of it in her voice. "I think about it all the time—that we're feeding kids who might not have anything to eat at home."

The path from Arkansas to Galesburg wasn't straight. After her grandmother passed away, Sandra's mother decided to move closer to siblings who had settled in the Quad Cities. Uncle Joe Townsell came down and moved the family north, setting in motion a chain of events that would make Sandra integral to her adopted community.

Before joining the schools, Sandra worked second shift as a cook at Rosewood nursing home. But with young children at home—Kenny was 10 and Keyerra just 7—she longed for a schedule that matched theirs. "I wanted to be off the same time my kids were, like Christmas time, the holidays and all that," she explains. When no cook positions were available at the schools, she took a noon aide position on the advice of former Food Service Director, Pam Weber. Within two months, her patience paid off with a cook's position.

Twenty years later, her "kids" have grown into community servants themselves. Kenny, now 30, works security for OSF, while Keyerra, 27, earned her master's degree and serves as a child welfare specialist. "She's a social worker," Sandra says with evident pride. Both still live in Galesburg, testament to the community that helped raise them.

In the high school kitchen, where industrial-sized pots replace her grandmother's cast iron skillets, Sandra and her colleagues prepare mostly scratch-made meals. The favorites haven't changed much over two decades: chicken patties, pizza, spaghetti, and mac and cheese still draw the longest lines. It's comfort food on a grand scale, prepared with the same care her grandmother showed making preserves for family.

"We joke all the time," Sandra says of her kitchen crew, painting a picture of a workplace where laughter seasons the daily grind. Even Matt, the food service director, joins in the banter. After 20 years, these aren't just coworkers—they're family. "Everybody knows everybody," she says of Galesburg itself. "Everybody's like family."

This sense of community extends to her 30-year marriage to Keith Taylor, who works at Pella Corporation. Together they've built a life in this Illinois town that feels worlds away from Arkansas yet somehow carries the same small-town values her grandmother embodied.

Sandra understands her role's importance in ways that transcend job descriptions. She's not just preparing 3,500 lunches; she's fueling dreams, enabling learning, and for some students, providing the most reliable meal of their day. "You're nourishing young people at perhaps the most important time of their lives," as I noted during our discussion, giving them "the very fuel they need to go into those classrooms and those gymnasiums and onto those stages and become themselves."

From a little girl watching her grandmother work magic in a Parkdale kitchen to a woman who's spent two decades ensuring no Galesburg student goes hungry, Sandra Taylor embodies the truth that food is love made tangible. Her hands, which once helped pick figs and pecans in Arkansas, now prepare thousands of meals with the same essential ingredient her grandmother taught her to value above all others: care.

"You never know," Sandra reflects on which students might be depending on school meals for their primary nutrition. But after 20 years of showing up, stirring pots, and serving with a smile, one thing is certain: Galesburg's students are nourished in body and spirit because Sandra Taylor learned long ago that feeding people is holy work, whether it's one grandmother's kitchen or one school district's worth of hungry kids.