North Hall High School Nutrition Manager Debbie Peck and her lunch ladies have a shiny golden trophy on display in the cafeteria.

They didn’t win it by running fast, jumping high or scoring the championship goal. The ladies won the respect of teenagers who voted them North Hall High’s most inspiring unsung heroes for this year’s Trojan Renaissance Hero Award.

“They voted us their heros because they said lunch is their favorite part of the day,” Peck said. “It means a whole lot coming from high school students. ... You never know how you impress them day by day.”

Peck, who has been cooking and serving food in the North Hall High cafeteria for 30 years, is retiring on Oct. 30 on her 60th birthday.

She will say goodbye to the nearly 600 students she serves breakfast or lunch, and to the 250 pounds of chicken she keeps stocked in the cafeteria freezer and the two cases of pudding that are always on hand.

“Sometimes I get excited about it and then I get sad. When you’ve done something for 30 years, it’s hard to let go,” she said.

To help make the memories last, Peck will take home with her the ballots students cast that explain why the lunch ladies are their heroes. She expects that when she misses the line of students parading through the cafeteria mid-day, she can celebrate the effect she had by reading their notes.

“They inspire me to serve people,” wrote 11th-grader Amber Youngblood of the lunch ladies.

“They fill my day with joy every day by serving me lunch with a smile,” wrote 12th-grader Nick Puckett.

Peck said she does her best to put the friendliest ladies on the serving line and the most outgoing lunch lady at the cash register where the most contact is made with students. She even knows who to assign the task of baking biscuits in the morning to ensure students get the tastiest breakfast possible.

“I make sure that the food we serve is something I’d want to eat,” she said. “Once they get something bad, it’s hard to get them back in here. Our students are our customers and we want to please them because without them, we won’t have a job.”

Peck said Asian chicken, spicy chicken and chicken nuggets with french fries always draw a big lunch crowd. Tasty gravy biscuits at breakfast could be the reason there’s 100 more students eating breakfast at school this year than last, she said.

The nutrition manager said a lot has changed in the school’s cafeteria since 1979.

“When I first started, we’d open up nine cans of green beans and put it on their plate whether they wanted it or not,” she said.

Now students can take ’em or leave ’em.

As for that big fryer she once manned?

“They took my fryer away from me,” she said. “(The nutrition director) said I didn’t need that fryer.”

The fryer, along with whole milk, are a thing of the past at the school cafeteria. According to federal nutritional guidelines, each day students are offered 2 to 3 ounces of protein, five to seven different fruits or vegetables and a variety of milk: chocolate, vanilla, strawberry, skim and 1 percent.

Peck said although it was hard to part with her fryer and whole milk, she thinks the changes are positive.

While there were many highlights in her 30 year cooking career, Peck said an incident with lemon pudding takes the cake. One morning she put the pudding in the industrial-size mixer and didn’t realize it had different speeds. Before she knew it, the kitchen was covered in pudding.

“I had lemon pudding on the ceiling, on the floor, on everybody that was around me. It went flying up everywhere, it was terrible,” she said. “I like to never have gotten it off the ceiling.”

While Peck will retire her apron at North Hall High School at the end of this month, she will continue cooking Wednesday suppers at St. Paul United Methodist Church. She said she will miss the school staff and the nutrition workers she calls “her ladies.”

“And I’ll miss the students on the line saying, ‘Hey Mrs. Peck.’ I certainly will,” she said.