Food, Farms, and Community by Lisa Chase

Author:Lisa Chase
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of New Hampshire Press

Kids who participate in school meal programs get roughly half of their calories each day at school. . . . This is an extraordinary responsibility. But it’s also an opportunity.

Michelle Obama, First Lady of the United States

10 Farm to School

The growing interest in local food systems has led to “farm-to-school” programs, which aim to improve child nutrition while simultaneously enhancing local markets for farmers. These programs generally work on two levels: (1) increasing the use of healthy, locally sourced food in school cafeterias and (2) adopting educational programs that help kids understand and connect to where their food comes from as part of the effort to promote good eating habits.

While it is obvious that many factors beyond the school affect both child nutrition and local food purchasing, schools can have a significant influence on both. The USDA reports that almost 32 million kids consume more than 5 billion lunches during the nine-month school year as part of the national school lunch program, and nearly 13 million kids consume more than 2 billion breakfasts at school. More than two-thirds of these lunches and more than 80 percent of these breakfasts are provided for free or at a reduced price. All this costs the federal government almost $15 billion annually.1

The importance of providing healthy food to schoolchildren is one reason school food programs have been targeted for improvement. Specifically, these programs can use more local foods, including fresh, whole, unprocessed ingredients that have the potential to improve children’s dietary behavior by reducing their consumption of highly processed foods, which are often offered as part of school meals and snacks. Offering healthy food from any location is a good thing; adding the “local” component can facilitate behavior change so that healthy food is actually consumed. “Local” may mean food from as close to the students as their own school garden, or it may come from nearby farms that students have some direct knowledge of or real connections with.

Sources of food that kids can see—their gardens, the farms in their town or state, farmers who come to their classroom—create a platform for learning about agriculture and human nutrition as well as economics, environmental science, marketing, and much more. That learning may take place in the classroom, with a formal curriculum or through ad hoc lessons. It may also happen during field trips or in a hands-on school setting, which can be a garden but might also be a greenhouse, a “grow lab” of lettuce under lights, or a cafeteria that features informational labels and posters, or perhaps a project to measure the volume of food waste that is diverted for composting. Farm-to-school programs are expanding (fig. 10.1), and they are introducing innovations, from “harvest of the month” menu offerings, to videos on the history of farming in town, to “healthy harvest” programs that get kids picking local fruits that will be frozen and later served by their school food service companies. To be most effective, these programs combine a variety of approaches aimed at

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