By Michelle Mascarenhas
El Caminate
January 2004
Once upon a time (and still in many parts of the world), we can imagine that farmers would come into the local town or village to sell their fresh produce enabling schools cooks to procure what they needed from the surrounding farms. Today, though we in this country have made important strides to ensure that every child has access to a meal at lunchtime no matter whether their parents can afford it, the food that is being served is often not as healthy as it could be.
This is due to a complex web of forces that includes corporations that benefit from commodity programs and other subsidies. Federal policy has created a system of overproduction of certain farm products which are then dumped into schools and free food programs. Public schools receive less funding than they need to provide strong education in a healthy environment. And junk food and fast food corporations have entered many schools through vending machines, snack bars, on-campus advertising, and television commercials interspersed in “news” programs given to teachers.
You can see the result in many cafeterias across the country. Fruit and vegetables that are not appealing to youth or adults, main courses that try to mimic fast food or are actually produced by fast food companies, and an abundance of dairy even in schools with a high population of children who are lactose-intolerant. As students get older, many stop buying the school lunch. Often, high school students with free or reduced-price eligibility do not eat the meal they are eligible for. In response, almost half of the elementary schools and a majority of secondary schools in the country have brought in brand name fast food and junk food into vending machines, student stores, school snack bars, and the school cafeteria.[1]
But this doesn’t model healthy eating. School should be a place where children and young people are introduced to healthy options in the context of nutrition education that makes those choices look even more appealing.
No child wants to eat overcooked vegetables. But get a child working in a garden and watch their parents gasp as they eat beets, greens, or other vegetables they wouldn’t have touched if they hadn’t tended them. In fact, the California Department of Education found that children who garden and eat what they grow eat more fruits and vegetables than those who don’t garden.[2]
It makes sense. Children learn by doing. Meeting a farmer and picking crops fresh from the earth, planting seeds and tending young seedlings as they grow, or selecting from a salad bar stocked with locally grown produce all provide ways for children to dig into nutrition education.
At the same time, farm to school programs can provide crucial sales to family farms that are disappearing at an alarming rate.[3] Once it is paved over, it will be virtually impossible to return it to productive agricultural use in the near future. Productive agricultural and wild lands are our children’s heritage. Supporting local family farms that work to steward land for agriculture and natural habitat is vital to sustaining our communities.
In response to the dual problems of child nutrition and loss of family farms, I worked with others at the Center for Food and Justice in Los Angeles in partnership with the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District to start the Farmers’ Market Salad Bar in 1997.
The district had salad bars in many of the schools but most students had stopped choosing the salad bar option. When we conducted a focus group with the children, they said “the lettuce is brown” or “the apples are yucky.” On the hot meal line where students did not have a choice, we saw whole nectarines, picked too early so they would travel well, thrown directly in the trash from the lunch tray. So we knew the youngsters paid attention to freshness, taste, and quality.
In the fall of 1997, the fruits and vegetables in McKinley Elementary School’s salad bar were replaced by seasonal items grown by regional farmers and prepared on site each morning. Students took tours of the farmers’ market and featured items grown in their garden on the salad bar, learning about where their food comes from. Much of the locally-grown produce featured in the salad bar was organic and students got important lessons on such topics as the value of bugs in a healthy environment.
Participation in the district’s salad bar tripled when farmers’ market produce was introduced. One student featured on the local news said, “I love the salad bar because it’s healthy for your body.”
Through grants from the Nutrition Network, a joint federal and state program, the district hired one staff member to coordinate the program and new employees at each cafeteria to prepare the fresh fruits and vegetables each day.
In 1998, the district began expanding the Farmers’ Market Salad Bar program to the other schools with high proportions of low-income children. The middle school students who had gone through the elementary schools with a Farmers’ Market Salad Bar asked for a meeting with the food service director and requested that a salad bar be installed in their cafeteria. Inspired by the students’ enthusiasm for the program, the Food and Nutrition Services Director sped up the schedule and granted their wishes. By 2001, the district had expanded the program to all fifteen schools in the district.
The district has since purchased a cooking cart for each school, providing an opportunity for chefs to come into the classroom and conduct cooking demonstrations. The program now includes trips to farms and to the farmers’ market, and many schools grow a large percentage of the lettuce for the salad bar in their own school gardens. And participation has remained high even after more than five years since the first salad bar was launched.
The two Food and Nutrition Services staff, Rodney Taylor and Tracie Thomas who helped initiate and expand the program made the Farmers’ Market program the centerpiece of a comprehensive strategy to improve student nutrition. They even began taking the junk food out of the high schools once the Farmers’ Market program had been institutionalized.
And they found that even though preparing fresh fruits and vegetables daily was more labor-intensive and required more staff, their budget actually improved because more students were participating and the cost of the fruits and vegetables and other salad bar ingredients was lower than that of ready-made hot meal items.
Today, there are more than 325 districts around the country that buy from local farmers reaching half a million children. Each has developed a model that is unique to their own growing seasons, farmer population, and student demographics. Programs involve purchasing from local farmers; curricula that includes growing, seasonality, and health; school gardens; and farm tours and/or farmer in the classroom activities.
The National Farm to School Program, based at the Center for Food and Justice at Occidental College in Los Angeles in collaboration with the Community Food Security Coalition, conducts research, evaluation, training, and technical assistance to help further this approach.
Parents, teachers, food services staff, farmers, and students are key to developing the strategies that will work best in each local district. You can start by finding out more about the current school lunch program and reaching out to other concerned community members.
· Involve students early on so that they feel ownership of the project, be it a school garden or a farm to school program. Conduct focus groups with them, take them on field trips to local farms or farmers’ markets, and consider helping them form a student nutrition advisory committee.
· Many school districts have welcomed collaboration with community members to improve the food service program. So try to involve the district food service director and other staff early on.
· Talk to farmers at the farmers’ markets or other gatherings to find out if they could supply produce to the local schools.
· Find out which parent and teacher organizations might be willing to help support the effort by conducting outreach to parents and teachers.
· Look at other models that have worked and share them as positive examples of how communities have made farm to school programs work. For more resources or technical assistance, see www.farmtoschool.org
Communities do have the resources to solve complex problems like the alarming rise in childhood obesity and the loss of farmland. With creative and committed community members across the country are contributing to a renewal of hope and of mutual support -- of each other as well as to the land.
Action Alert: Funds
for Farm to Cafeteria Programs
This year, Congress will reauthorize the Child Nutrition Act providing a valuable opportunity to get school food service staff the tools they need to develop innovative strategies such as farm to school. Legislation in both the House and Senate has been introduced to create a new program: "Assistance to Farm to Cafeteria Projects".
If enacted, school districts or non-profit organizations would be eligible for one-time grants of up to $100,000 to upgrade cold storage, preparation, and serving facilities (such as buying more refrigeration or salad bars). Funds could also be used for initial labor costs for setting up systems to purchase from local farms, planning seasonal menus based on regional products, or training staff. Districts could even utilize the funds for hands-on nutrition education linking local agriculture to healthy diets through school gardens, visits to local farms, and field trips to farmers' markets.
Contact your US Senators and Representative to educate them about farm to school programs. For more information, see www.foodsecurity.org
[1] U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , School Health Policies and Programs Study (SHPPS), 2000.
Daft, Lynn; Arcos, Alyssa; Hallawell, Ann; Root, Cherie; and Westfall, Donald, School Food Purchase Study Final Report, October 1998. (http://www.fns.usda.gov/oane/MENU/Published/CNP/FILES/SFPS-Execsum.pdf)
[2] California
Department of Health Services, California Department of Education, and the
California Public Health Foundation, The
California Children’s 5 A Day Power Play! Campaign: Evaluation Study of
Activities in the School Channel. April 1996.
[3] According to the National Farm to School Program, the U.S. is losing 2 acres of farmland to development every minute. www.farmtoschool.org
[4] Mascarenhas, Michelle and Gottlieb Robert, The Farmers Market Salad Bar: Assessing the First Three Years of the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District Program, 2000. Go to www.uepi.oxy.edu/cfj and click on Publications and Resources.