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Farm-to-School 
Wed Sep 01, 2010 at 15:42:18 PM PDT
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A Salad Bar in Every School!
The smells of back-to-school: freshly sharpened pencils, old leather seats of yellow busses, chalk dust, and lettuce? This fall, Whole Foods and Chef Ann Cooper, "The Renegade Lunch Lady," in conjunction with her Food Family Farming Foundation's premier project, The Lunch Box, have implemented a remarkable new program, which will change school lunch-rooms across the nation - The Great American Salad Bar Project. With rates of nutrition-related disease and childhood obesity on the rise, now is the time to start making positive change in the way we feed our children.
The initial phase of the Great American Salad Bar Project will raise enough money, via local Whole Foods Markets, thru in-store and online donations, to grant at least one salad bar a school within fifty miles of the store. That's almost 300 salad bars! Schools that meet the requirements are encouraged to apply on the Great American Salad Bar Project website for review and will be chosen by a simple set of criteria.
A salad bar in a school cafeteria provides a healthy option for students on a daily basis. A typical salad bar will include: fresh multi-colored lettuce, a variety of vegetable "toppings" such as beets, carrots, and jicama, proteins such as chicken, beans, cottage cheese or tofu, whole grains, fresh fruit and healthy salad dressings. One requirement for schools who wish to apply is that they participate in the National School Lunch Program. The National School Lunch Program is a federally funded program that provides low-cost or free meals to children across the country. Children who participate in the National School Lunch Program are often most at-risk for the effects of a poor diet.
School is a sacred space for learning, so why shouldn't this extend into the cafeteria? School meals should not only provide the nourishment children need to excel throughout the school day, but should also serve as a lesson in making life-long wellness choices. Offering salad at lunch helps to provide this lesson and teaches children to include a variety of fresh vegetables, fruit, whole grains and healthy proteins in their diet. The salad bar provides an array of options and allows students to try new items on their own. Often students will make choices from the salad bar and create delicious and colorful dishes to suit their taste.
The facts are simple: this could quite possibly be the first generation of children in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents.
Government statistics show that 4.3 million children aged 10-14 will become overweight or obese in the next 24 months. In addition, it is predicted by the Center for Disease Control that of all children born in the year 2000, one-third will contract diabetes. These outrageous statistics can only be stopped by a massive overhaul of the way our children eat and the Great American Salad Bar Project is one giant step in the right direction.
Take this wonderful opportunity to do something good for yourself and your community. Take a trip to your local Whole Foods, purchase some of the healthy food they offer for yourself and your family, and then donate what you can to the Great American Salad Bar project. Know that with your donation you are participating in an effort to change the future health of our country.
Eat well, use your dollar to vote for healthy food, and help us change the way kids eat across the country for the better.
To donate online or to find out more about the Great American Salad Bar Project please visit our website at: http://www.saladbarproject.org/
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Thu Jul 15, 2010 at 18:56:57 PM PDT
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Today, the House Education and Labor committee passed its bipartisan Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill by a vote of 32-13. For those who are keeping score, there were three Republicans who voted for it.
Some of the biggest news for me are two great new pilot programs established with amendments added yesterday. First, there is an organic foods pilot program that provides $10 million per year between 2011 and 2015 to selected schools with high low-income populations. That was proposed by Lynn Woolsey and Dennis Kucinich and it passed by a roll call vote. My hunch is that the funding is discretionary, which means that the Appropriations committee gets to decide whether to fund the program or not. I'm trying to find the roll call vote to see who voted or and against this but I don't think it's online yet.
Second, Jared Polis proposed a vegan (plant-based) foods pilot program, which passed in a voice vote. Some schools will participate in a program offering kids "plant based protein" (a.k.a. whole grains, nuts, beans, and veggies) and then they will evaluate which foods are superior in cost-effectiveness, marketability to school food authorities, ease of preparation and use, and acceptance by the kids. Yay! Awesome!
Last but hardly least, the bill includes $50 million in funding for Farm to School grants.
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Tue Feb 23, 2010 at 15:18:28 PM PST
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I was recently sent a link to this web site that documents the food sources used by the Dining Services at Middlebury College in Vermont:
http://geography.middlebury.ed...
Note that it requires the free application Google Earth, which I would recommend to anyone who doesn't already have it. It's quite fun to zoom in and out to different farms, facilities, and distribution services in a nonlinear, interactive exploration of their food network. It's a bit dated (2008), but is probably still a good way to get a feel for how diverse and (not completely) local such networks can be.
For a related article, see this discussion of Green Colleges:
http://www.lavidalocavore.org/...
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Thu Jan 28, 2010 at 16:36:11 PM PST
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This reminds me of the quote "It will be a great day when our schools get all the money they need and the air force has to hold a bake sale to buy a bomber." It is cross-posted with permission from the author from Huffington Post.
State of the Union's School Lunch: Nutrition as National Defense and Fiscal Health
by Debra Eschmeyer
Don't make us tighten our belts on child nutrition programs while the girth of the nation grows. The government spends $1 million per soldier in Afghanistan, yet barely spends $1 on the food in a school lunch.
More below...
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Wed Dec 23, 2009 at 08:00:00 AM PST
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The Children's Fruit and Vegetable Act was introduced by Sam Farr with 15 co-sponsors. While the text is not yet online, the bill intends to increase the availability of (you guessed it) fresh fruits and veggies in school cafeterias - including $50 million in mandatory funding for the Farm to School Program. This bill now sits in the rather progressive House Education and Labor Committee and the not-so-progressive Agriculture Committee.
And - as it turns out - that's just one bill of two that provides $50 million in mandatory funding to Farm to School. The other is a soon-to-be-introduced bill by Rep. Rush Holt. Stay tuned and I will post details about these bills here as they become available.
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Thu Aug 13, 2009 at 16:32:19 PM PDT
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I mentioned the passage of HB 2763 in my 2009 Oregon Legislative Session wrap-up a few weeks back, and now that it's all signed by Governor Kulongoski and tucked away, The Portland Tribune has a piece up today on what this bill means and how it will work -
Last year, [Multnomah County Sustainability Manager Kat] West discovered that public agencies in Oregon had not made a great effort to buy local goods, primarily because they were not supposed to. What they were supposed to do was find and accept the lowest responsive bid. If the prison system can get apples cheaper from New Zealand than from Hood River, those were the apples prison purchasing staff were supposed to buy.
[...]
So, working with the Portland / Multnomah Food Policy Council, a citizens advisory panel, West last year decided to take on the state purchasing code. The result was House Bill 2763, which takes effect in January.
The law allows public purchasing agencies to give preference to local food products if the price difference is as much as 10%, or in some cases slightly more, over the lowest bidder from outside of Oregon. The bill, however, does not actually require agencies to do so... and the article goes on to mention that since no extra state funds will be allocated (for now) towards these purchases, we still have a ways to go on this issue. Hopefully we can touch it up a bit, right along with again fighting for Oregon Farm-to-School (which unfortunately failed to pass again this year) in the next legislative session.
We've got friends in Salem, and we're close. Rep. Brian Clem (D-Salem), who introduced HB 2800, the Oregon Farm-to-School bill, also tried earlier this year to introduce a companion bill to require local purchasing, but his attempts there met resistance from the Oregon Department of Administrative Services.
The Oregon Legislature will meet for a short session early in 2010, and one thing Salem Democrats will be pushing for is a move to annual sessions, as opposed to the current every other year (odd-numbered years) legislative sessions. Oregon is currently one of only six states whose legislatures do not meet annually. Here's to hoping they succeed there, for many reasons...
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Fri Apr 17, 2009 at 00:47:45 AM PDT
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( - promoted by JayinPortland)
Joshua Segall may be the first ever Farmers' Market Candidate for Congress. He runs a program called Homegrown Alabama that focuses on getting schools to buy their food from farmers.
Joshua was defeated in his first attempt to unseat Bush-Republican Representative Mike Rogers last fall. But this week the rematch was announced.
"It's time for a new direction. I am a fiscal conservative who will work to create and attract 21st Century jobs to east Alabama so that hardworking people can get ahead," said Segall.
"Alabama is suffering under irresponsible policies that bail out greedy executives who created this mess and leave hardworking Alabama families holding the bag. Rogers supported the Wall Street bailout, but did nothing for Main Street Alabama. He voted to send Alabama jobs overseas, when what we needed was a plan to create good jobs at home. It's time to stand up to special interest politics and put Alabama families first once again," said Segall.
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Fri Mar 20, 2009 at 06:00:00 AM PDT
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The number one story yesterday was the new White House garden. The Washington Post gets credit for the best pun, referring to the garden as a shovel-ready project. It will be an 1100 square foot garden on the south lawn with 55 kinds of vegetables. Best of all, school children (and all 4 members of the Obama family) will participate in gardening.
I can't help but get swept up in the excitement over the symbolism of the garden as well as the publicity it will bring to gardening and to eating fresh, local food. However, with Obama's position as the most powerful man in the world, I'd like to see him do more. Five years ago, Congress authorized a National Farm to School Program - but failed to fund it. Five years have gone by with no change. Now a major piece of child nutrition legislation is going through Congress so the timing is perfect. With his garden, Obama will bring change to the few lucky youngsters from Bancroft Elementary, but what about the rest of the nation?
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Mon Dec 29, 2008 at 19:27:18 PM PST
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As the clock ticks closer to 2009, it also brings us closer to a MAJOR piece of child nutrition legislation. Of course, in the post-depression era in which many of our federal nutrition programs were first created, "nutrition" basically meant making sure people had enough to eat and that they weren't malnourished. In other words, "nutrition programs" are generally hunger programs. In this context, nutrition programs often aren't controversial - especially when someone besides the hungry are benefiting from them (i.e. agribusiness). Naturally, Conservatives hate anything that resembles a "handout" so it's no surprise when they try to reduce the budgets for these nutrition programs... but on the other hand, they love corporate welfare and they don't mind the aspect of nutrition programs that basically subsidizes agribusiness.
Nowadays we have another problem to deal with as well: obesity. This is a harder sell, politically. For one thing, telling kids to eat less of anything - or making sure that they actually DO eat less - will cut into somebody's profits and most of those somebodies are rich and powerful (i.e. Coca Cola, Grocery Manufacturers of America, McDonalds, National Cattleman's Beef Assocation). Second of all, healthy food costs more than junk, and that means using taxpayer dollars to fund child nutrition programs with more than the absolute bare minimum amount to keep kids from starving. Add to that the issue that schools are already cash-strapped and usually the lunch program is a lower budgetary priority for them than teaching reading and math... in fact, sometimes the lunchroom is seen as an area to make money for the school. It's a difficult argument to make that schools should put more money into food if it means taking it out of education.
I've got a few ideas on specific things we can ask our legislators for when they write the Child Nutrition Reauthorization bill, listed below.
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Thu Oct 30, 2008 at 04:01:07 AM PDT
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Great article up this morning in The Lake Oswego Review covering the Riverdale School District's meal program -
The 527-student Riverdale School District easily began a new lunch program a year and a half ago since they are not under the USDA's National School Lunch Program, a federally funded meal program, so that they can offer made-from-scratch, organic, local food.
and also brings up some of the obstacles currently facing districts who participate in USDA school meal programs in implementing their own lunch programs featuring more fresh local and seasonal foods. It's a bit encouraging that changes are (slowly...) coming along at the federal level, and really encouraging that many states and local districts are taking an active role in promoting farm-to-school programs at home...
More below the fold...
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