A couple of weeks ago, when my kids brought home their school cafeteria’s lunch menu, I noticed a couple of interesting items. First, the menu now noted the number of calories in every item served, from pizza to carrot sticks. My eight-year-old twin daughter and son and my seven-year old daughter are a bit young to appreciate the idea of measuring the amount of energy food provides; but it’s important to know, and I’m glad the school has introduced the concept.
Even more interesting to me was a short blurb on the menu’s inner page: “Fresh from the farm! Locally grown fruits and vegetables will be featured on the menu from September 13-17, 2010, to promote Maryland Home Grown School Lunch Week. Melons, cherry tomatoes, red and green peppers, lettuce and cucumbers are some of the Maryland agricultural products that will be served in the cafeteria.”
This was an exciting development. While programs on my local NPR affiliate, articles in the Washington Post, and my casual conversations with other parents have shown me there’s lots of interest in Washington, D.C. and its suburbs in local and organic eating, this was the first mention of the subject I’d seen from my children’s school, and I took it as a heartening one.
Brief research led me to our county’s public school webpage, where I learned that the Maryland Farm-to-School Program is “part of recognizing Senate Bill 158, the Jane Lawton Farm-to-School Program created during the 2008 session of the Maryland General Assembly.” (I also learned that this is the program’s third year, which meant I’d somehow missed announcements the previous two years.)
Jane Lawton was a member of the Maryland state legislature who, sadly, died suddenly in 2007, not long after being voted into office. The Farm-to-School program bill, which she had planned to introduce the following year, was passed in her name after her death.
I felt grateful for the Lawton bill, which is clearly a good step toward providing schoolchildren with fresh, local produce. But additionally, I was curious. How could my children’s school — Oakland Terrace Elementary, a K-5 public school with more than 800 students spread over two campuses — pull off serving any special kinds of food? Besides the school’s sheer size, which means that children shuttle in and out of the cafeteria on a strict schedule, county regulations deem that food cannot be cooked from scratch in elementary school kitchens, which limited the cafeteria workers’ options for preparation.
After I’d learned the why of Farm-to-School week, Marla Caplon, director of food and nutrition services for Montgomery County [Maryland] Public Schools, gave me some of the how's. A distributor obtains produce for the county’s schools; at the food service’s request he locates as much local produce as possible. “That's our choice, and the distributor works with us,” said Caplon. “We’re fortunate we have a distributor who will provide us with local produce.” I found myself agreeing wholeheartedly when Caplon listed two reasons to buy local: “One, to support local economy. Two, you get better produce!” Caplon also explained that while one week in mid-September is dedicated to celebrating the Farm-to-Schools program, the distributor is asked to find local foods year-round.
I showed up at the school at lunchtime on the first day of School Lunch Week, beaming goofily at the kitchen workers and firing questions as I collected my veggie burger, milk, and pear. A hurried but friendly woman pointed out that day’s local food — a little cup of cherry tomatoes — and enumerated the other local produce she expected to serve during the week: bell peppers, melon, and lettuce. All of these foods would be served in their natural state, which eliminated the need for cooking.
The gleaming-bright, firm-textured tomatoes were certainly the prettiest part of my lunch, and it was nice to have something fresh and crunchy to complement my burger and fries. Did the kids eat them? As with many kid/vegetable encounters, the results seemed to be hit or miss. Of the comparatively few children I saw with tomatoes on their trays, most did seem to be snacking on the little red globes.
Meghan Petrucci, a para-educator who spends part of her day assisting in the cafeteria, said, “It’s 50-50 which kids will eat a whole piece of fruit and which will throw it away.” But Petrucci said she had observed children eating some of the Farm-to-School produce, particularly the tomatoes, which she thought may have been popular partly because they were served in easy-to-access open cups. (Parents, take note: small kids are more willing to eat foods that they don’t need to wrestle with to open.)
I learned from Marla Caplon that our county’s secondary schools are allowed to prepare food on site, which allows for a greater variety of dishes. She rattled off a mouthwatering list: corn on the cob, steamed zucchini, fresh green beans, tomato and cucumber salad, and “a marinated cucumber and onion salad that has too much zing for the elementary students, but the secondary students love it.” Many of the secondary school students “know nutrition, they’re counting calories,” said Caplon. “You would be amazed at how many students choose the entree salad.”
This brought us back to the subject of the calorie information printed on the school menu, which Caplon called “one positive step we’re making to share this [nutritional] information with the parents and with the school staff.”
I came away from my Farm-to-School research pleased with the program and with my county’s school employees, who despite their full workloads were friendly and forthcoming, and truly seemed to have children’s best interests in mind. I’ll urge my kids to eat the cafeteria’s fresh produce whenever they buy lunch; when I make school lunches I’ll make them as easy to eat as possible; and I’ll look forward to sampling some of that cucumber-and-onion salad when we make it to middle school.
Elizabeth Roca is staff editor for Brain, Child: The Magazine for Thinking Mothers, and her writing has appeared in Brain, Child; The Washington Post; Utne; and other publications. She lives with her family in Maryland, where she often is found jockeying for the last bag of spinach and tasting gelato at the local farmers’ market. Her last post for Simple, Good and Tasty was A Small Sampling of Spots to Get Local and Organic in Washington, DC.
