On Common Ground - Winter 2016: Healthy Communities

the farms to make sure they’re safe, and setting farmers up for billing. But the goodwill with teachers and the community is so huge. The teachers finally want to eat with us because of all the local food.”

Growing pains

Clear across the country in Washington, Ellen Gray has also encountered challenges as she’s worked to expand servings of local products in local schools. The executive director of the Washington Sustainable Food & Farming Network in Mount Vernon recounts how in 2008, local schools got $1.5 million to purchase Washington-grown fruits and vegetables to nourish kids and support the state’s farmers. Imagine her surprise when she found her fourth-grade daughter’s healthy snack — bullet-ized carrots — labeled “processed and distributed in Sacramento, Calif.” Gray learned the carrots were actually grown in her state but trucked out of state for processing and packaging before being trucked back to land in kids’ backpacks. From that realization came a new project called Fresh Food in Schools, intended to build relationships between farmers and school food service directors.

As with Martin’s program, there’s been a learning curve. “A lot of schools didn’t know how to cook — it had been just opening bags, warming food up, and serving it,” she says. “There’s a huge need to do staff training. We’ve also had horror stories of stoves so old it takes five hours to boil a huge pot of water. And when we first started, nobody had salad bars. We recognized there were infrastructure limitations.” However, the result is that working with 20 school districts and three part-time food coordinators, the program has increased schools’ purchasing of Wash-ington-grown fruits and vegetables by more than

$1 million.

What does Gray say to those who complain about do-gooders taking over school lunch programs? “Healthy food is a nonpartisan issue, and food-to-school programs are a very good economic business,” she argues. “They help local farmers stay economically viable and help kids get access to healthier food, which we hope will decrease the burden on our health care system.