Sustainable Food Laboratory

Representatives from 17 of the largest school districts in North America, as well as from business, government and 15 prominent NGO's, gathered in Austin Texas for two days, June 19-20, to develop a coordinated network to improve school meals called the Urban School Meals Institute. In all, providers to 3.8 million children were represented, or about 10 percent of the country. This meeting built on an earlier exploratory meeting in May where 14 school districts came together and expressed the desire to form a mutually supportive network.

Toni Liquori, a professor at Teachers College at Columbia University and an activist in health and school food nutrition for many years, spearheaded the effort to bring this network together.

“The goal is to determine opportunities for large-scale school foodservice operations to help harness their buying power toward building regional and national networks and fostering a healthier food system,” Liquori said.

For example, school children throughout New York City this year are reaching for yogurt from a local dairy cooperative instead of the multinational brand they used to have. New York is the third largest dairy producing state in the country but the 1.1 million school children were eating yogurt from out of state (Dannon). This past year, Mitch Levine of Advantage Marketing and Jay Rentschler of Upstate Farms helped to change that. In doing so, they brought business to local family farmers, reduced transportation and in the process also cut costs almost in half.

The details of how the change took place were the subject of a panel discussion at the meeting of the new Urban School Meals Institute.

As a smaller company representing 430 family farms, Upstate Farms was also able to respond to the city executive chefs' request for a healthier product. Jorge Collazo has been asking for a high fructose corn-syrup free product for years. Now he has it.

Changing food items – to make them healthier for children and the planet -- on a scale massive enough to service entire school districts of large metropolitan areas is a unique challenge. Too large to source from individual family farms locally, too small to influence product formulations of large multinational food companies, public school systems face a multi-facetted uphill battle. Federal and state regulations also constrict school administrators as they balance tight budgets, nutrition guidelines, commodity allotments and more.

Though not an initiative of the public school district itself, the much-publicized case of the Organic School Project in Chicago Public Schools was a recent case in point. Greg Christian’s project was celebrated by district officials and advocates alike. It included an organic garden, wellness classes, composting and organic lunches and had been running for two years but shut down last month. Labor agreements prevented his volunteer staff from working with unioinized cafeteria workers to prepare the more labor-intensive food.

The country’s attention is focused on obesity and childhood nutrition and schools are under increasing demands to promote good nutrition and healthy lifestyles but when it comes right down to enacting change, administrators find themselves up against a large set of inter-dependent and deeply entrenched practices and conditions. For example, many schools no longer have working kitchens or enough staff to prepare meals from scratch.

During the Urban School Meals Institute exploratory meetings, participants shared interests and expertise and ultimately identified particular areas of work to start in on.

Participants came with expertise in school food operations, retooling or elimination of a-la-carte, information on bids and contracts, development of ethnic recipes, background on the history of school meals, experience with a “Harvest of the Month” program, experience putting a new central bakery, cook, chill, cold food prep and warehouse facility in place, information on federal policy initiatives that relate to school nutrition, nutrition background and much more.

They came wanting information on successful farm-to-school connections, on the economics of school meals, on attracting a labor force, on “Request for Proposal” language to get around regional purchase restrictions and on processing commodities locally, to name just a few.

Though participants agreed the task before them was daunting, one outcome of the meeting was a specific set of focus areas: 1) to create a functional forum for sharing and developing best practices, 2) to develop economic analyses that take into account supply, demand, regional potential, USDA dietary guidelines, human and environmental costs and other key costs drivers such as labor, health care and energy, 3) to choose a first set of specific food items and improve the sustainable practices of those items all along the supply chain.

The meetings were sponsored by the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, in coordination with the School Nutrition Association and the Alliance for a Healthier Generation, a partnership of the William J. Clinton Foundation and the American Heart Association.