Homegrown Lunch puts local produce in schools

Heather Stouder and Cris Carusi

While more children face the health consequences of poor diets, Wisconsin farmers are starved for profits. More than 15 percent of American school-age children are overweight, nearly triple the prevalence of two decades ago. Declining prices and marketing opportunities pressure small- and mid-sized farms to get bigger or go out of business.

Sara Tedeschi of the Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems works in the Madison community to build connections between local farms and school cafeterias to improve the circumstances of schoolchildren and farmers.

As coordinator of the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch project, Tedeschi works with the nonprofit Research, Education, Action and Policy on Food Group and Rural Sociology Professor Jack Kloppenburg to put academic discoveries to work in the community. She identifies sources of locally grown food for school events and links farmers with classrooms.

UW-Madison’s national leadership in sustainable agriculture and food systems research helps, she says, adding, "Faculty members I work with are exemplary in their willingness to bring their expertise and resources to community projects."

Like other farm-to-school projects popping up across the nation, Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch benefits children and local farmers by increasing the amount of locally grown, fresh produce served in school lunches. The project involves three Madison elementary schools: Shorewood Hills, Lincoln and Chavez. During October, each school is hosting Harvest Festival meals featuring Wisconsin-grown food prepared by the Madison Metropolitan School District Food Service.

"Local food is an ideal vehicle, both for enhancing school curricula and achieving economic development," says Kloppenburg, who serves as project director. "The Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch project exposes children to healthy food, teaches those children about agriculture and may develop new markets for local farmers."

This school year, Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch will organize farm field trips and classroom presentations linking local agriculture, environmental studies and nutrition. In addition, the project will explore local, state and federal policy options to address the barriers keeping locally grown food out of schools.

Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch builds on seven years of CIAS research on bringing locally grown food into college and university food services. UW–Madison Housing Food Service, which recently began to serve exclusively organic Wisconsin hamburgers, is contacted by universities across the country that want to change their menus.

Forging linkages between local farms and school cafeterias is not an easy task. The Madison school district food service operates out of a centralized kitchen on Pflaum Road, where breakfasts and lunches are compiled and trucked to 44 schools each day.

Operating on a tight budget, the food service minimizes labor costs by purchasing a large quantity of ready-to-serve food from large distributors and the USDA Commodity Foods Program. This makes it difficult to use unprocessed local produce, Tedeschi says. Most of the fresh produce the district serves is likely produced in California or outside the United States. One exception is apples, which are purchased directly from Carandale Farm in nearby Oregon, while they are in season.

Food Service Director Frank Kelly says he would prefer to purchase locally grown food when financially feasible. Farmers selling to the school lunch market need to provide products that are washed, sliced, chopped and bagged, and do not require additional food service labor.

Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is working to address a need for processing facilities. "If we can overcome this constraint," Kloppenburg says, "we should be able to open a substantial market for local farmers."