By Marc
Within the last few days, I have run across several articles about programs that provide local foods for school lunches or programs to teach children about gardening. Programs like these could do wonders in many ways: they provide healthy meals at an important time in a person's development, they teach children where their food comes from, and perhaps could even raise the status of farming as an occupation among today's youth.
Here is a summary of the articles, with locales ranging from Southern California to Iowa to Ghana, Africa.
This week's Los Angeles Times had an article about a new lunch program at a private school (tuition $850 per month) in West Hollywood, California. In School Puts Healthy Eating Lesson on the Menu, Juliet Chung writes:
As parents and educators nationwide grapple with how to combat childhood obesity and improve children's nutrition, a private West Hollywood elementary school has been experimenting with an unusual, upscale solution: Hot lunches from Whole Foods Market.
[…]
Of course, schools hoping to duplicate Fountain Day's partnership do face obstacles.
There's the cost, for starters. The Los Angeles Unified School district, for example, spends about $1 per student lunch at the elementary school level.
Including a discount given by Whole Foods, Rakos said the cost at Fountain Day runs from $2 to $3.50 per student, depending on how much a child eats.
At first glance, this looks like just another example of the widening divide between rich and poor. However, the economic issues are not necessarily so simple. In an interview on the April 29th KCRW Good Food program (starting at 45:17), Moira Beery from the Farm to School program and Center for Food and Justice talked about Compton, California, a low-income district where 100% of the students receive a lunch paid for by funds from the Federal government. The federal subsidies for the lunch program have enabled the district to preserve part of their farm-to-school program (the salad bar) through the most recent budget crisis.
Local Food Programs in California
Although the Fountain Day school program mentioned above isn't about serving local foods per se, the article describes serveral in California:
School districts around the country have responded by axing lucrative soda contracts, booting junk food from campus vending machines and revamping their lunch menus. Some schools, notably the Berkeley middle school adopted by food guru Alice Waters, have begun planting campus gardens and using the harvest in school lunches.
That impulse has taken root locally, too. In the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District, for example, campuses feature farmers market produce in their salads. Los Angeles Leadership Academy, a charter school in Koreatown, boasts a scratch kitchen from which sugar, refined flour and red meat are exiled.
A collaborative of California growers keeps salad bars at public schools from Ventura to Compton stocked with fresh fruit and vegetables. And students at Normandie Avenue Elementary in South Los Angeles hope to use the yield from the vegetable beds and fruit trees they planted in the same way.
Using the Garden as a Classroom
The Berkeley (California) middle school referred to above is the Edible Schoolyard, which
provides urban public school students with a one-acre organic garden and a kitchen classroom. Using food systems as a unifying concept, students learn how to grow, harvest, and prepare nutritious seasonal produce. Experiences in the kitchen and garden foster a better understanding of how the natural world sustains us, and promote the environmental and social well being of our school community.
Berkeley also has The School Lunch Initiative, which "envisions revolutionizing school lunch by making food a central part of the academic curriculum. The Initiative includes gardens, kitchen classrooms, and lunchrooms as contexts for learning."
Think about the valuable academic lessons a child could learn in the
garden: mathematics and project management (planning the garden);
botany (monitoring the plants), the scientific method (monitoring the
progress of the garden), and economics (valuing the harvest). While
preparing for, and cooking the meal, the student could be exposed to
history, world culture, chemistry, and physics.
The latest edition of Edible East Bay has an article about Baia Nicchia, a new company devoted to selling and breeding tomatoes that will thrive in the San Francisco Bay Area (sorry, but full text is not on-line). Developing new hybrids takes a lot of work and a lot of time, so to lighten the load, the company has formed some interesting collaborations with local schools and community gardens. At the ASA Academy in Oakland, the students performed a study of the effect of organic and non-organic fertilizers on tomato seedlings. In Hayward schools, Baia Nicchia is working with the Nutritional Learning Community Project to create "hands-on" classroom exercises that can be used to teach plant genetics (and create some delicious results!).
Local Food Programs in Iowa
In Iowa, institutions like hospitals and schools are starting to buy produce from local farmers, as reported by the Des Moines Register:
Farmers markets have become a fixture in Iowa and other states across the country, giving growers a way to market farm-fresh foods directly to consumers. Now, in small but growing numbers, producers are tapping the food service industry, which serves schools, colleges, nursing homes and hospitals, as well as restaurants and grocery stores. It is a vast market based on seemingly unlimited demand, rather than on Saturday shoppers' whims, say farmers and food industry specialists.
Companies like Sysco Corp., the nation's largest food service distributor, have worked with advocates of locally grown foods to try to help farmers meet the growing consumer demand for locally produced meat, dairy, poultry and horticultural products. Universities, hospitals and other institutions increasingly are buying locally raised foods. Dining services at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Yale University and Brown University, among dozens of others, feature food raised locally.
Preschools and Farms in Ghana
And even farther away, in Ghana, the government and citizens are teaming up to create new preschools in rural areas. To help provide food for the children, Deborah Rich, in Global School Lunch Lessons explains:
Eggplant, dry-land taro and black-eyed peas grow outside the concrete block and wire netting walls of 24 new preschool kitchens in the Ashanti region of Ghana in West Africa.
The plants are hardy and need little more than the wash water from the kitchens and fences to keep out animals. Leaves from the plants serve as greens for the bean and peanut stews that school cooks ladle over banku, a dough made from ground fermented corn.
Because trucking in gas and oil is too expensive, the villagers have planted jatropha tree gardens nearby to grow fuel for the kitchens' three-burner stoves. Some schools are starting orange and guava orchards. The children need more vitamin C to extract sufficient iron from their primarily vegetarian diet.
With gardens, kitchens and orchards, Abenaa Akuamoa-Boateng, Ministry of Health head nutritionist for the Ashanti region in Ghana, is developing a school lunch feeding program to help ensure that recent gains in agricultural productivity improve the health and welfare of children.
Final Thoughts
Ideally, these recent articles describe just a small fraction of the local food and agriculture programs in schools, and that there are many more in the planning stages. I can even see a Food Network series coming out of this concept. Just imagine: America's Top School Lunch Chef, in which the challenge is to make meals within the school budget using plenty of local ingredients. Or, given the phenomenal expense of obesity-caused diseases (in the U.S., diabetes costs $132 billion per year in lost productivity), perhaps our society should be spending a lot more for healthy lunches at schools.
Marc lives in Berkeley, California and writes Mental Masala, a freshly-ground blend of food, history, travel, history, and nature.
Credit for tomato photo: Image from ndrwfgg's Flickr collection, subject to a Creative Commons License.
