SCHOOL CAFETERIAS EMBRACE LOCAL FOOD (Part 1)

  • Many schools are finding that food that comes from cans... (Photo by Davide Guglielmo)

More and more schools, universities and other institutions with cafeterias are by-passing processed foods from multi-national corporations. Instead, they’re buying food from local farmers. Advocates say locally-grown fruits and vegetables are fresher. They say the food tastes better, and they’re finding kids sometimes ask for apples and tomatoes instead of candy and chips. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Grant reports:

Transcript

More and more schools, universities, and other institutions with cafeterias are bypassing the processed foods from multi-national corporations. Instead, they’re buying food from local farmers. Advocates say locally-grown fruits and vegetables are fresher. They say the food tastes better. And they’re finding kids sometimes ask for apples and tomatoes instead of candy and chips. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Julie Grant reports:


(Sound of cafeteria)


In this cafeteria, there are displays on the wall asking, “What is local food?” and answering, “Foods grown and raised where you are.” Well, that makes sense, but there’s more.


“Then when you get into the lines…”


Sociology professor Howard Sacks is director of Kenyon College.


“We have these menus that talk about all the things that are being served here and it tells exactly where they come from. So the pasta alfredo with tomato and basil features noodles produced by Mrs. Miller’s noodles in Fredericksburg, Ohio, and the cream is by the Broughton Dairy in Marietta, Ohio. As you can see this is about thirty lines long and it shows about thirty different local producers.”


As recently as the late 1990’s, only a handful of colleges and universities had programs to buy locally-produced foods for their cafeterias. Today, more than two hundred are looking for local farmers for their produce, dairy, and meat products. Most of those schools, such as Kenyon, Yale University, and the University of Wisconsin among the nation’s most expensive and elite.


But even some struggling public school districts are making it a priority to buy local foods. Ray Denniston is Food Services director of the Johnson City School District in the Catskills region of New York. He says a few years ago they served produce that had been shipped from California or Mexico, or they just opened cans.


“So your fruits and vegetables, kids weren’t taking them; it wasn’t a quality item. I’m not going to say we didn’t worry about it, but it got less attention then the other items on the trays. And now that’s changed. So, instead of getting a canned green bean, which I might as well put sawdust out there as far as nutrients, instead of that, now we would have fresh broccoli.”


Denniston used to sit in his office and look at price quotes from food distributors. Now he visits farms and negotiates the best prices for local products he can find in season. He says the change started with a few tomatoes.


“When I first met with Frank, the farmer, he stopped down and dropped off just some tomatoes. And the staff had some, we had some in the cooler and we brought some out and we cut them and there was a taste thing, and they said, ‘Don’t ever get any others but his.’ I mean, they were just so much sweeter, juicier, wonderful tomatoes and then it just kept going.”


Then came the rich green colored broccoli. It was a big change from what they offered their kids before.


Other schools say students love the taste of milk from local farms that don’t give their cows antibiotics. Johnson says cafeteria workers are excited by the fresher vegetables and meats. They like talking with the students about the food, and they like cooking again. Many schools don’t even have kitchens anymore; they only have heating trays for pre-packaged foods.


Deb Bruns is with the California Department of Education. She says those heated meals often don’t taste very good and she says they send the wrong message to kids.


“…that lunch is a time to grab something processed and hurry through it and get out to recess, and it doesn’t matter what we tell them in the classroom about nutrition if we’re not modeling that in their dining experience then we’re just missing such an opportunity to really teach them where their food comes from.”


Many schools start these programs because of nutrition and obesity concerns. By serving fresh, local food, the nutrition lessons continue when the kids line up in the cafeteria. Some schools say prices from local farms are actually lower then national distributors, but they often end up spending more money on fruits and vegetables. That’s because – believe it or not – kids are eating more broccoli, apples, and tomatoes.


For the GLRC, I’m Julie Grant.

Related Links

Obsessing Over Vegetable Gardens

  • Many gardeners feel that there's nothing as satisfying as growing and eating your own vegetables. (Photo by Daniel Wildman)

Not as many people are planting vegetable gardens these days… but the few who do are really passionate about it. And it’s not just because they swear their own vegetables taste better than anything you can get at a store. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explores the obsessions of vegetable gardeners:

Transcript

Not as many people are planting vegetable gardens these days… but the few who do
are really passionate about it, and it’s not just because they swear their own
vegetables taste better than anything you can get at a store. The Great Lakes
Radio Consortium’s Rebecca Williams explores the obsessions of vegetable
gardeners:


In Connie Bank’s former life, she recruited attorneys and engineers. She’d be
on the phone until ten every night. She’d spend entire weekends with clients.
She calls herself a true Type A – working at full speed, making a lot of money,
until she just had enough of it all.


Now vegetable gardening is her whole life.


“You’re controlling a tiny little nourishing world of your own, where the rest
of our world is sort of crazy, politics are crazy, the world is going nuts… it’s
America, it’s fast fast fast fast fast. This vegetable gardening thing is a way to take a
deep breath, slow yourself down, and just watch the garden grow.”


But Bank admits she’s still intense. She throws herself into gardening. She
says if the little plastic labels say to plant things twelve inches apart, she gets
impatient and packs them in six inches apart.


People like Connie Bank are sort of rare. A survey by the National Gardening
Association found that not a lot of people are into vegetable gardening these
days. Compared to five years ago, seven million fewer households are growing
vegetables. You have to weed and water every day and fend off the squirrels.
Most Americans would rather plant flowers or just not bother with any of it.


So these days, instead of recruiting professionals, Connie Bank’s trying to
recruit as many new gardeners as she can. She teaches classes to people on
their lunch breaks. Today, she’s going after daycare kids.


(Sound of watering)


BANK: “Who here likes vegetables? What kind do you like?”


KIDS: “Watermelon! Oranges! Strawberries!”


BANK: “Okay, that’s good you guys, except those are fruits.”


KIDS: “Corn on the cob is good!”


A lot of serious vegetable gardeners got their first taste of it as kids.


(Sound of trowel digging)


Earl Shaffer farmed as a kid in Indiana, and when he left at 17 he swore he’d
never grow anything again. But Earl says twenty years later, his wife Marie
tempted him back into the garden. Today, they’re tending to their lettuce,
tomatoes and zucchini. He says their house is too big for just the two of them
now, but he can’t move and leave his garden behind.


“As you get older, I think some of the things that were a part of your youth
kind of return in importance in some way. I was very fond of my grandparents,
especially my grandmother, and gardening was part of her life, I think that also made it
important to me to return to it.”


Shaffer says farming did give him a feel for growing things, but like everyone
else, he still has to read the plant labels. He says we’re losing the
knowledge of how to live off the land.


For gardeners, growing even just a couple tomato plants can feel like
reconnecting to our farming roots. Ashley Miller curated an exhibit on
vegetable garden history at Cornell University. She says the motives for these
gardens have changed a lot over the last three centuries. Sometimes people have
gardened to make money, sometimes they’ve grown food to support a war effort,
and sometimes people have just done it as a challenging hobby, but there’s one
major thread.


“Growing vegetables is as close as we can get to a seasonal ritual.
There is something primal about putting a seed in the soil and tending it, and
harvesting it and eating it.”


A lot of gardeners agree that growing vegetables is a sensual experience. They
talk about the way the scent of tomato plants fills the whole yard, or the
blue-green color of baby broccoli. Gardener Lee Criss says she can’t wait to
get into her yard in the spring and get her bare hands in the dirt.


“I don’t garden with gloves because I need to feel what the soil feels like, the
texture. You use senses in gardening that you don’t in most everything else
that you do. You feel things, you smell. It’s a different way of sensing the
world around you, I think.”


It’s hard to walk away from these people’s backyards and shake off their
enthusiasm. Every single gardener I talked to told me to call them when I
started my own garden. And if they think you’re considering gardening at all,
watch out: they’ll fill your head with visions of their juiciest cherry
tomatoes, they’ll try to fill your car with seedlings, anything to get you
hooked.


For the GLRC, I’m Rebecca Williams.

Related Links

Urban Vegetable Farm Takes Root in Brownfield

  • Just outside the Greensgrow compound (photo by Brad Linder)

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of a gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a small
farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial neighborhood:

Transcript

A farm is a strange thing to see in the middle of an gritty, urban area.
But the Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Brad Linder recently visited a
small farm on what used to be a polluted site in an industrial
neighborhood:


One of the first things you notice about this one-acre plot in
Philadelphia is how out of place the farm looks. About a block away is a
busy interstate highway that jams up with rush hour traffic twice a day.


The farm itself is surrounded by rowhouses, a steel galvanizing plant, and
an auto detail shop.


Chino Rosatto runs the auto shop. About 8 years ago, he first met his new
neighbors – a small group of farmers.


”It was weird at first, you don’t see no farm in the city.”


But Rosatto says he got used to the farm started by Mary Seton Corboy
pretty quickly.


“It was an empty lot. Nothing there. Just fenced up, and that was it. She
came up, did something with it.”


Before it was an empty lot, this city block was a steel plant. In 1988
the building was demolished, and the EPA declared the site hazardous.


It was cleaned up, but Rosatto says it was nothing but concrete slabs
until Mary Seton Corboy and her small group of volunteers came and started
the farm they call Greensgrow.


Corboy moved to Philadelphia from the suburbs nearly a decade ago. With a
background as a chef, she’d always been concerned about how hard it was to
find fresh produce. So she decided to grow it herself.


“The question that just kept coming up over and over again was, is there
any reason why you have to be in a rural area to grow food, given the fact
that the market for the food, the largest market for the food, is in the
urban area?”


Corboy says usually food travels an average of 1500 miles from its source
to wind up on most Americans plates. And she says when it comes to flavor
– nothing is more important than how fresh the food is.


“If you eat strawberries that are commercially available,
you have no taste recognition of something that people 40 years ago would
say is a strawberry, because of the refrigeration, because of the way they
are picked underripe, because of the things they are sprayed with to give
them a longer shelf life.”


Corboy says her first choice for a farm wouldn’t have been an abandoned
industrial site. But the rent was cheaper than it would be at almost any
other spot in the city.


And even though the EPA and scientists from Penn State University
confirmed that there were no toxic chemicals left, Corboy doesn’t plant
anything edible in the ground.


She grows some plants in greenhouses. Others are planted in raised soil
beds. And she grows lettuce in PVC pipes that deliver nutrients to the
plants without any soil at all.


Corboy still regularly sends plant samples out for testing. The results?


“At one point Penn State sent us back a report, we talked to
them on the phone about it, and they said your stuff is actually cleaner
than stuff that we’ve seen grown on farms. Go figure that. We feel very, very comfortable
with the produce that we grow. Because, you know, I’ve been living on it
myself for 8 years.”


And restaurant owners say they’re happy to buy some of the freshest
produce available.


Judy Wicks is owner the White Dog Cafe, a Philadelphia
restaurant that specializes in locally grown foods and meat from animals
raised in humane conditions. She’s been a loyal Greensgrow customer for 8
years.


“As soon as we heard about Greensgrow, we were really excited
about the idea of supporting an urban farm on a brownfield – what a
dream! To you know, take an unsightly, unused block, and turn it into a
farm. It’s just a really exciting concept.”


Wicks says she’s never had a concern about the quality of the food,
because of the care taken to prevent it from touching the soil.


In addition to its restaurant business, Greensgrow sells fruit and
vegetables to Philadelphia residents at a farmer’s market twice a week.
The farm also operates one of the only nurseries in the city, which begins
selling plants this spring.


Mary Seton Corboy says running the farm has taught her a lot about food,
the environment, and waste. She says she doesn’t look at empty lots the
same way anymore. She’s learned to squeeze fruits, vegetables and flowers
out of every space of this city block. And she sees value in the things
other people throw out.


On a recent night Corboy was driving home with her farm manager Beth Kean,
and they spotted a pile of trash beside a building.


“But what they had dumped were all these pallets. And Beth
was with me in the car, and we both turned and looked at them and went,
Look at those pallets! Let’s come back and get them, they’re in great
shape!”


Urban farming is tough. Corboy originally had lofty goals for her farm.
Greensgrow was going to be a pilot project, something she’d expand to
include 10 farms throughout Philadelphia.


8 years later, Greensgrow is still anchored on its original one-acre site.
But by keeping her costs low and selling to loyal customers, Corboy sold
200-thousand dollars worth of produce last year. That was enough to make
2004 the farm’s first profitable year.


For the GLRC, I’m Brad Linder.

Related Links

Nature’s Complete Food Source

Just in case you’re ever stranded in the wilderness, it’s good to know
how to forage for food. But many people are learning that you don’t
have to be in dire circumstances—nor do you even have to leave home—to
go scouting out a free meal. In fact, one of nature’s most complete
food sources may be right underfoot. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s
Wendy Nelson reports:

Nature’s Complete Food Source

Just in case you’re ever stranded in the wilderness, it’s good to know how to forage for food. But many people are learning that you don’t have to be in dire circumstances-nor do you even have to leave home-to go scouting out a free meal. In fact, one of nature’s most complete food sources may be right underfoot. The Great Lakes Radio Consortium’s Wendy Nelson reports: