The Farm-to-School Movement
By Kate Jackson
Today’s Dietitian
Vol. 7 No. 5 P. 40

Farm-fresh produce in school cafeterias plants a healthy message in kids that good nutrition matters.

It’s a deceptively simple idea. Support local farmers who practice sustainable agriculture and improve children’s nutritional status by supplying school cafeterias with local produce. Take that a step farther and educate school children about food systems and environmental issues, and you have the basis of a farm-to-school program. It’s a concept that’s been embraced by a number of schools and districts in almost one-half of the nation’s states and supported by new federal “Farm to Cafeteria” legislation that will provide start-up funds for these programs.

Food and Justice
Despite this legislation and dedicated grassroots initiatives, many efforts to launch programs are stymied. Lack of awareness, inadequate resources, an absence of infrastructure that permits access to local food, and the pressure on food service departments to control costs form obstacles to the farm-to-school programs. But one organization is trying to turn the tide. A hub of farm-to-school activity is in California, and a spoke of that hub is formed by the Center for Food and Justice, a division of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College in Los Angeles. In collaboration with the Community Food Security Coalition, a national organization headquartered in Venice, Calif., the center is launching the National Farm to School Network—a collection of farmers, food service staff, teachers, parents, advocates, and policy experts—to help overcome those obstacles and encourage the spread of farm-to-school programs across the United States. Its goal is to bolster and extend existing programs and lend a hand to individuals and agencies wishing to create similar programs.

The mission of the Center for Food and Justice, says its director, Maggie Haase, MPH, RD, is to promote fresh food access and a sustainable food system. It’s especially concerned, she adds, with bringing programs to areas where access to fresh, local, healthy food is most limited, so it frequently works within low-income communities and neighborhood schools. The farm-to-school concept, she explains, is the perfect match to that mission because it promotes the organization’s goals of environmental, social, and economic justice and equity in health.

Planting the Seeds
The center’s involvement in this movement was catalyzed back in 1997 when Robert Gottlieb, director of the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, became involved as a parent in an effort to improve the quality of food at his children’s school. Previously, Gottlieb, who was then a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and some of his students had created something called the Market Basket Program, which was the seed for the first California farm-to-school project.

While the Market Basket Program involved access to farm-fresh food by individuals, how, they asked, could you increase fresh food access through institutions? The concept stemmed from their answer: by reorienting a community-supported agriculture (CSA) concept, by which a farmer has a direct relationship with a group of individual subscribers to one in which the farmer has a relationship with an institution such as a school. Then they posed a second question: How do you expand that access to extend to low-income participants at those institutions?

At the same time, Gottlieb’s children were students in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District—a district that had developed a salad bar program that, although initially successful, had declined in popularity because it was conventionally sourced. “It became less appetizing and attractive and didn’t taste as good because it wasn’t fresh and directly sourced, so the lettuce often turned brown,” Gottlieb says. “Both my kids loved going to the farmers’ market with me, so the idea clicked: Why not try this within the schools and start with Santa Monica, which saw itself as a progressive school district willing to try more experimental programs?”

Explains Haase, “Gottlieb was instrumental in promoting the idea that we can make positive changes in the cafeteria by getting the school’s foodservice to source food directly from local farms and incorporate farm produce into the school meal program.” He worked with the foodservice director in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District to promote that idea, and through a series of events, the district agreed to take part in a pilot program. That, she suggests, was the beginning of the farm-to-school movement in California.

Growing Strength
The foodservice director, says Gottlieb, was reluctant at first, but when he saw how excited the kids were about it, he became a convert. “It was characterized as a farmers’ market salad bar, and the farmers’ market became a venue for the farmers participating in the program,” Gottlieb explains.

The program, which also includes farm and farmers’ market tours, gardening projects, physical education, and nutrition education classes, ultimately was put in place in all the district’s schools in 2000. “As a consequence, it became clear that this was a model that was worth developing not only in Santa Monica but as a breakthrough around school food issues,” says Gottlieb. It spurred the Urban and Environmental Policy Institute, through its Center for Food and Justice, to explore these concepts and develop the work it was doing through the Community Food Security Coalition where it set up a farm-to-school committee and networked with people around the country who were exploring in parallel ways some of these ideas, he explains.

This wasn’t the first farm-to-school program, Gottlieb notes. In North Carolina and Florida, farmers, with a boost from the USDA, fostered the concept of farm to school and are still vigorous forces in the movement. There were also rumblings from the community food security perspective about fresh food access that had yet to coalesce into full-fledged programs, explains Gottlieb. What made the Santa Monica program distinct at that point, he adds, was that it was able to provide an entirely alternative meal, and it expanded the ways of thinking about such an approach.

Model Leader
Today, California is a leader in this movement, supported by the efforts of the Center for Food and Justice and its partners. The center helped get funding to start the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District pilot program, says Haase, until it got underway and became institutionalized through the support of the school district and the community. From those beginnings, the center has been working on farm to school and promoting it in other school districts ever since. Since then, the idea has quickly caught on, says Gottlieb.

The movement outside of California is vigorous as well, says Anupama Joshi, program manager of the National Farm to School Program at the Center for Food and Justice. Joshi, who points to the existence of roughly 350 programs in 22 states outside of California, in addition to some 30 programs in California. “There are pockets of the country in which farm to school is very strong,” Joshi says.

For example, she notes, in the midwest region there are pilot programs in Michigan, Minnesota, Illinois, and Wisconsin, and they’re banding to form a regional network—an upper midwest regional farm-to-school network. New York, she adds, has a strong program, as do Florida, Washington, Connecticut, Massachusetts, and North Carolina, where the movement was born and continues to benefit from the close involvement of the state Department of Agriculture.

The center, says Haase, is the lead agency on several farm-to-school grant funded projects. The largest project it’s been involved with—a four-year program funded by the USDA, the National Farm to School Program—just came to an end, she says. Working with eight partners across the country, the center coordinated efforts to promote the farm-to-school approach; perform research, evaluation, and outreach; and provide technical assistance and support. It is also playing the same role as coordinators of the California Farm to School Project, a W.K. Kellogg Foundation-funded program going into its third year with an agenda similar to that of the National Farm to School Program but with a statewide scope.

In addition, the center recently received a grant from the USDA Community Food Projects Competitive Grants Program to provide training and technical assistance nationwide for farm-to-school programs, as well as funding from the California Nutrition Network to develop a series of regional farm-to-school workshops during the next two years and create a demonstration project around Compton Unified School District’s new program. It’s also received a grant from the California Endowment to conduct a farm-to-school demonstration project with the Riverside Unified School District.

The National Farm to School Network
Joshi leads efforts to bring people together to talk about these programs and work on policy, evaluation, and information resources that can help people set up pilot programs in California. Having realized significant gains there, she’s now turning her attention to the National Farm to School Network. Several years ago, the center, supported by the USDA, explored the feasibility of a national program, says Gottlieb. Although that program is coming to an end, it indicated that a national approach is, in fact, feasible, so the center is launching a national farm-to-school network, supported by a Web site packed with resources, and is seeking significant resources for state programs around the country.

The network, says Joshi, plans to strengthen efforts within the states by identifying a state lead person to coordinate each state’s efforts. When individuals or organizations are deeply involved in their own pilot programs, it is often difficult for them to respond to queries, focus on evaluation, and think about policy options that are needed, she explains. “If a local individual or agency can be identified to take the lead and do that sort of work and coordinate statewide farm to school efforts, the Center for Food and Justice and the Community Food Security Coalition will lead the efforts on a national level to support those initiatives at the state or regional level.”

As part of this effort, the center’s Web site (www.farmtoschool.org) offers a wealth of resources that will help existing programs and prove invaluable to individuals who are trying to start new programs. The site provides current information about farm-to-school initiatives in 15 states that can serve as models for other states wishing to develop initiatives. According to Joshi, “Each state page is tailored with a state overview or profile, contact information, program profile, policies, engaged organizations, information on farms and farmers, media coverage, upcoming events, and funding opportunities.”

Getting Involved
While there were dietitians—particularly those in foodservice—involved in the birth of farm-to-school programs, the rise of this phenomenon, Haase explains, has been driven largely by individuals in the sustainable food movement as well as by environmental advocates. Members of the American Dietetic Association’s (ADA’s) Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Practice Group have been staunch supporters, but there’s certainly room for greater involvement by dietitians. Haase has been gathering support among RDs by introducing the subject at nutrition conferences and meetings for dietetic professionals, stressing the importance of including promotion of local food systems in nutrition education. She takes those opportunities to discuss the impact of the environment on nutrition, the influence of consumption of locally grown food on health, and the ways in which dietitians can help raise people’s awareness of these issues and contribute to policymaking that supports sustainable agriculture.

Food systems issues, insists Haase, are typically neglected in nutrition education. “That’s one of the bandwagons I get on when I’m talking to dietitians,” she explains. “Where your food comes from, how it’s grown, what role food system practices play in the health of the environment, and how that impacts our health should all be considered part of a larger spectrum of health and nutrition, yet we really don’t get any exposure to those issues in school.” Haase wasn’t introduced to these important subjects in undergraduate work in nutrition, in her graduate studies in public health nutrition, or in her dietetic internship, and she raises a strong voice in advocating for their long-overdue inclusion within such programs.

Until that time, interested dietitians can gain exposure through networking and becoming involved in volunteer work and becoming active in organized groups such as the ADA’s Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Practice Group and the Society for Nutrition Education’s Sustainable Food Systems Division, which focus on hunger, food systems, or environmental issues and whose members are typically attuned to the problems and programs. Another entry point, she advises, is the Community Food Security Coalition, a nationwide membership-based organization that promotes community food security and works on a broad spectrum of these issues. It offers a listserv that Haase describes as useful in introducing interested individuals to the scope of the movement. Through it, she says, “There’s a constant dialogue going on across the country about issues that relate to hunger and environmental nutrition. Another listserv is offered by the ADA’s Hunger and Environmental Nutrition Practice Group.

Getting Them While They’re Young
Farm-to-school programs offer the obvious benefit of bringing healthier foods to young people and thus reducing their consumption of the typically more available junk foods, which is likely to significantly stem the rising tide of child and adolescent obesity in the United States. But Gottlieb argues that the programs do more than just get fresh foods directly sourced to school cafeterias, pointing to a number of programs that make both the children and the farmers part of the educational process.

“With funding support from the National Farm to School Project, the California State Department of Education has developed a curricular guide called ‘Kids Cook Farm Fresh Food’ that goes beyond teaching standard nutrition to include seasonal recipes, activities, and farm profiles in the curricula. Our argument is that this should be part of a whole school approach,” he says. It’s less about what’s contained in the vending machines than about the message the school is sending out. “It’s a paradigm shift that incorporates and integrates food and health much more directly into the school’s mission and educational purposes,” Gottlieb says.

Children have significant exposure to food at school, yet they generally have little exposure to nutrition and food system issues, agrees Haase. School cafeterias have been a place for kids to eat, she says, not usually a place to teach. “We often don’t use school meals to teach and to set an example for kids. As foodservices strive to support themselves, the money issue has taken precedence over efforts to set a good example and teach kids about food systems, nutrition, the environment, and how they can learn lifelong good eating habits. In this respect, we think farm to school is so important—it’s a way in which we can get to kids very early, start setting an example, start engaging them in a dialogue about food systems and their personal choices, and creating an environment in which they can actually do what dietitians promote every day.”

Getting involved in nutrition in the school arena, she maintains, is a huge opportunity for dietitians to make a difference, not just to provide nutrition education but to change the food environment and influence school policies. “It’s a microcosm in which we can begin to make larger systemic social changes.”

For more information, visit www.farmtoschool.org.

— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Today’s Dietitian.

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