Lunch

Home economics students in teacher Roberta Stagliano's cooking class at Beck Middle School, Cherry Hill, open "Planet Beck," where they cook and serve lunch. The menu included heart-healthy foods such as soup, turkey sandwiches, and chicken over rice. Everything was made from scratch. Waitress Alison Gordon (left), 13, leaves her order with chefs (from left) Sam Desai, 13; Melissa Bedell, 14; Erynne Brown, 13, and Jen Moon, 13.

The first thing Bartram High School junior Alethea China did Thursday morning in her third-year English class was pull out her lunch. As teacher Richard Adelman discussed how the students could improve their essays on family folklore, China arranged on her desk the ham and cheese sandwich, pretzels and juice she brought from home. With one hand she held the food, and with the other, she took notes. Adelman talked on, oblivious to her eating. His lunch, too, was sitting out on his desk.

Michael Eith is an academic all-star who packs his day with honors classes. This semester, he is taking Latin, history, English, algebra, chemistry, gym, health and psychology. During breaks and after school, he slips down to the music room and plays a few tunes on the trombone. But there is one thing the 15-year-old Eith hasn't done during his first two years at West Deptford High School: eat lunch in the school cafeteria. Eith, like many other highly motivated students across the region, has bagged lunch in order to cram extra courses into his school day, a trend administrators say is on the rise.

The Pennsylvania Public Utility Commission has run afoul over a free chicken dinner from Peco Energy Co. The PUC this week agreed to pick up the $3,000 tab for a catered lunch that Peco ordered Oct. 14 to recognize 105 commission staffers who helped reduce a backlog of customer complaints. The commission's Bureau of Consumer Services initially accepted Peco's lunch offer to mark the end of a six-month campaign to eliminate a backlog of 13,547 informal complaints. About 20 percent of the complaints were aimed at Peco, the state's largest utility.

Here's Jack Albertine's one-step diet. Leave Washington. He spent five years here as a corporate lobbyist. When he had something to tell government officials or Capitol Hill staffers or to discuss with associates, he did it over lunch. That's just the way it's done here. Open mouth, open ears. "Virtually every day I was in Washington I had a business luncheon," Albertine said. "Lunches are a very, very important part of business in Washington. " Now he's a corporate executive in Chicago.

When the Commissary closed in early 1994, after years of providing trendy edibles and helping to shape the city's food renaissance, it left a huge culinary void that was disproportionate to its physical size. Where would you be able to get a fast yet stylish Commissary-like lunch and superb baked goods? Where would we find the likes of the next Commissary Killer Chocolate Cake? Some answers seem lodged in Beyond Measure, the stylish new food-court-like cafeteria that opened this summer at the old Commissary's Sansom Street address.

The customers of the Wissahickon High School cafeteria aren't pleased, and Monday night they let the management know about it. But the complaints of 11th graders who showed up at the school board meeting Monday night did nothing to change plans for a 33 percent increase in the cost of lunch at the cafeteria next school year. They also did nothing to sway the district into changing its policy of not allowing students to leave campus for lunch. The school board and administration left students who are unhappy with the cafeteria's fare with one age-old option: "brown-bag" it. The school district's proposed budget for the 1989-1990 school year calls for the price of cafeteria lunches to rise from $1.15 to $1.50.

Jay Shoemaker loves pretzels so much that he eats three or four a day. But not yesterday. "I walked around for about 10 minutes in the City Hall area without finding a pretzel stand," Shoemaker said. "I ended up buying a corned beef sandwich, but what I really wanted was a pretzel. Philadelphia without pretzels is kind of sad. " No vendors, no pretzels. So the armies of Center City office workers went hungry or went elsewhere as sidewalk vendors staged a lunch-hour strike to protest a vending reform bill being considered by City Council.

Members of the House who ignited criticism over their unpaid Capitol lunch bills are not alone: Senators and groups that they sponsor have run up $42,000 in delinquent tabs for meals and banquets. They have owed $42,000 for more than 90 days, according to the office of the Architect of the Capitol, which oversees tax-subsidized Senate restaurants and catering operations. An additional $28,000 is between 30 and 90 days overdue. The unidentified senators and groups also owe an additional $163,000, but that is for bills within the last 30 days, said William Raines, administrative assistant in the architect's office.

As construction workers knelt to put the finishing touches on a concrete sidewalk yesterday on the east side of 15th Street, south of Chestnut, the building manager of the corner property stood anxiously waiting for the mix to set. A section completed last week at a side entrance to the Packard Building already had tire marks on it. Chris Derasmo had seen it with his own eyes. "I said, 'Yo! This cement isn't even dry yet,' " Derasmo said, shaking his head. "These are the kind of problems we are having.