Toni Liquori spent the first part of her professional career doing what she called “guerilla work” in the school meal reform effort, school by school, pilot by pilot.

But when she won a two million dollar from the W. K. Kellogg Foundation three years ago, they required her to include one portion that was system wide and among her pilots. This opened her up to working with school administrators at the highest levels. “Up until then, I’d never been invited to work within the system,” she said. This lay the groundwork for her fascination with what the Rome city school administrators had been able to accomplish (see the attached paper for a detailed description).

With the introduction of clear purchasing standards and regular monitoring of food service companies, Rome has undergone a revolution in food services. Six years ago, most of the food in Roman school meals was conventionally produced, little was organic, and scant attention was paid to seasonality, variety, and balance between caloric and nutritional content.

Now, organic food comprises 70% of all food served, and has expanded beyond fruits and vegetables to include olive oil, canned tomatoes, cheese, bread, baked products, cereals and legumes, pasta, rice, flour and eggs. Frozen fish fillets have replaced processed fish products, and fair trade chocolate and bananas have been introduced.

Contracting companies also agreed to decrease food miles to decrease pollution, replace plastic knives and forks with silverware and dishwashers, increase recycling by distributing non-utilized foods to facilities that feed the poor, distribute partially-utilized foods to animal shelters and reduce production of waste throughout process. And this is just a partial list.

The change began, under the leadership of Dr. Silvana Sari, largely through the two-pronged lever of contract change with the food companies and proactive monitoring to verify compliance with performance standards.

Liquori was in Paris last December at a meeting to share stories about sustainable food initiatives when she found out about the Rome city school program. The meeting was organized by Sustainable Food Lab member Clive Peckham of Alimenterra and brought together leaders from seven countries, five international organizations and over 20 innovative projects, all gathered under the Sustainable Food Lab's “Food for Health” umbrella.

Two presenters from Rome, Dr. Silvana Sari, Director of School and Education Policy for the City of Rome and Dr. Roberta Sonnino, of Cardiff University, Wales, described the original contracting (tendering) process they use that places value on quality alongside price.

Rome school administrators—instead of automatically awarding contracts to the lowest price—have a point system that helps them award contracts to bidders who’s low price is balanced with things like organic production, bio-dedicated food chains, fair trade, foods with protected denomination of origin (to preserve regional cultural identity), and infrastructural support.

They also use an increased number of monitoring visits—almost ten times the original amount, and initially saw a dramatic rise in the number of fines/sanctions on food companies. Since that initial burst, the number of fines/sanctions has decreased even with a further increase in monitoring visits.

“It was incredible to me how they could change a system in one fell swoop through the contracting,” Liquori said.

School food after all, is a health concern, an agricultural topic and an educational opportunity as well as a municipal responsibility, and Liquori’s strategy had been to involve multiple agencies. Under her School Food Plus Initiative grant, she engaged the city department of health, the state department of agriculture and markets, Teachers College of Columbia, and the city department of education, office of school food. By contrast, Rome did it with contractual steps.

“I got very excited about that because in a lot of this work I ended up feeling like there were no models and here was a model that nobody in this country had tried before.”

Seeing an opportunity to bring change to New York, Liquori brought Dr. Sari and Dr Sonnino to the first ever city-wide conference on school meals (a second one is scheduled for this April), and arranged five other speaking venues for them for that same week, including a meeting with NYC school food service officials.

“It was the first time I’d seen this whole group not being defensive but asking real questions, and I thought that was magnificent,” Liquori said.

This series of meetings has become the basis of a lively Rome-New York information exchange, with New Yorkers going to Italy and Italians returning to New York for further work. Dr. Sonnino will return to New York in March 2007.

The Food Lab has helped organize a Learning Journey to Italy next month that will examine aspects of public food systems in Italy including legislation, production and supply systems, health, education and developing the local food economy. It will focus on the practicalities of establishing the necessary infrastructure, with journey participants meeting key stakeholders in the process from producer-suppliers and cooks to education officials and politicians.

“Focusing on institutions is a concrete way to take the onus off individuals in terms of making right or wrong food choices and put it on institutions which, particularly in poor communities, are or could become big-time assets in addressing public health issues,” Liquori said.

Right now the Food Lab is a helpful arena for her work.

“I find the Food Lab kind of stunning. I don’t exactly understand it but it fits for me. It intrigued me that they were so interested in cities because I am, too—for the scale issue. And I loved that they had connections to places other than the states. I found that fascinating because other countries aren’t bound by the same things we are and it was the differences that I found so helpful.”

Toni Liquori is clearly on a roll with this work, so we’ll let her have the last word.

“Change is really possible,” she says. “You have to do it. You have to get involved.”