We gathered for trainings, conversation, and immersion in Detroit’s urban farms and gardens. We delved into issues of food justice and inequity, both local and national. We heard from local leaders about their organizations and companies, and the career paths they’ve followed. And, of course, we got our hands dirty on some field trips.

It’s not easy bringing everyone together in person, but these meetings are an important part of the experience for our service members, and they’re critical to helping FoodCorps learn as we grow.

Detroit provided an important backdrop for this event. Like many of the communities we serve, Detroit faces high rates of childhood obesity and food insecurity, economic hardship, and institutionalized inequality. At the same time, Detroit is a place where local solutions to these problems are taking root. Detroit is addressing its challenges through strategic and thoughtful community organizations and leaders who have stepped up to build thriving new communities centered on food and agriculture. We’re proud to be a part of this through partnerships with organizations like the Detroit Black Community Food Security Network––one of our service sites in Detroit, where FoodCorps service member Whitney Smith is spending her year.

While together, we celebrated our accomplishments since August: reaching nearly 55,000 children in 300 schools, giving them opportunities to gain knowledge of what real food is in the classroom, to engage hands-on with fruits and vegetables in school gardens, and to get access to farm-fresh ingredients in their cafeterias. And while our metrics of success this year are strong (13 football fields worth of school gardens! 2,000 volunteers! 230 healthy items added to lunch menus!), our proudest accomplishments come in the form of stories.

That’s why, while in Detroit, we held our first ever “FoodTalks,” an evening of storytelling that we recorded, and can be seen on YouTube. We had a chance to hear from service members in each state about how they see FoodCorps service working in their communities; about students who have taught them as much as they’re teaching; about the people in their lives who inspired them to get involved in food and farming; and about where they see themselves headed after FoodCorps service. Jen Rusciano, another of our FoodCorps service members in Detroit, explained to us how her student, “Jay,” who usually struggled with school, found connection and pride through the small food business he created with his peers.

These are the stories that fuel our service members to keep doing what they do. Each of them could tell a similar story, about a child who fell in love with gardening, about a school food director who was willing to think outside the box.

We hope you’ll take a moment to watch some of these beautiful stories, and maybe feel inspired to start telling your own.

New Service Members

FoodCorps is a nationwide team of leaders that connect kids to real food and help them grow up healthy. Working through the AmeriCorps network, FoodCorps places these leaders in limited-resource communities for a year of public servicein schools around the country teaching kids about healthy food and where it comes from; growing and tending school gardens; and working with food service teams to get high quality local food onto cafeteria trays.

After starting in the fall of 2011 with a class of 50, 2 weeks ago we opened the application process for up to 130 service members to start this fall.  Each year we have been amazed at the caliber of people who apply to be a part of FoodCorps. They are smart, motivated, and above all committed to addressing the way we eat in this country, and the way we feed our children.

They come to us with a variety of experiences, from the classroom to the farm. They come to FoodCorps as community organizers, public health advocates, master gardeners, chefs, and doctors-in-training. During their year with FoodCorps they add new skills and titles like garden educator, taste-test leader, Farm to School mover and shaker, volunteer coordinator, tool-shlepper, cooking instructor….the list goes on.

Want to be a FoodCorps service member? Applications are being accepted through March 24th. Watch our video, then head to our website to learn more!*

Fellows, Edible Schoolyard Project

This past fall we added a new layer to our program: FoodCorps Fellows. They have quickly become essential and none of us are sure how the program ran without them. Fellows are standout graduates of the FoodCorps program who are invited back for an additional year, providing support, guidance, and mentorship to the service teams in their states.

This coming summer, all 15 FoodCorps Fellows will receive world-class training at a special weeklong Edible Schoolyard Academy grounded in Edible Schoolyard Project’s 17 years of experience with food-based learning in schools, and featuring a range of visiting experts. They will then go on to train the service members in their states, sharing this integrated approach to education in the garden, kitchen, lunchroom, and classroom. We are excited to connect our programs, and to help our Fellows learn from experts.

New States

In addition, FoodCorps is excited to expand (pending funding) into three new states: Hawai’i, California and New Jersey. While service sites have not been finalized, the host sites for each state are CAFF/Life Lab (California); The Kohala Center (Hawai’i); Rutgers University Cooperative Extension (New Jersey). This would bring the total states that FoodCorps serves in to 15. We hope to keep growing every year!

*Warning: video contains adorable children

Lady Anne: All men, I hope, live so.

—Richard III, Shakespeare

Frederick Kaufman, journalist, professor, and author of A Short History of the American Stomach, set out to find out why, in an era when we produce so much food (more than twice what we need to feed everyone), people all over the world go hungry. It would seem to be the most basic of questions, and yet…

His new book, Bet the Farm, starts out in a Domino’s pizza factory. In a bit of comic authorial license, he offers up take-out pizza as his honest-to-goodness first guess at the perfect food to feed the masses, but the quotation on the introduction page is from Harvard economist Amartya Sen and it’s a giveaway of his larger intention with this book: “Understanding the causation of hunger…calls for an analysis of the entire economic mechanism.” This was my first indication that I had some hard work ahead of me, i.e., making heads or tails of world economics; i.e., I wouldn’t get to stay in the Domino’s factory for long.

For some of us seeking to understand and address some of the more broken aspects of our food system, when we talk about markets, we usually mean local food distribution solutions like farmers’ markets. Or Detroit’s Eastern Market. Or innovative supermarkets (like People’s Community Market). And while Kaufman does a fine job of trying to explain commodities exchanges, grain futures, and global financial markets, I found myself struggling to wrap my head around it all. “Behind the food lay the politics, behind the politics lay the money, and behind the money lay the markets,” he explains.

The confusion I felt in trying to understand how a financial market can be invented, how people can trade crops that don’t exist just yet (and with “upward bets” no less), and how speculating on these markets can cause price spikes, hunger, and then food riots, resulted in feelings of dislocation and despair.

Food prices are soaring, but many farmers are going broke. How can this be? Well, apparently there are spot prices (what farmers get) and futures prices (what the banks and bankers get).

The UN’s World Food Programme exists to help feed hungry people around the world, and Bill Gates, one of our richest solutionaries, has contributed millions of dollars to their Purchase for Progress plan (that allows smallholders to participate in commodities markets), but people are hungrier than ever. How can this be? In one of the liveliest sections of the book Kaufman takes on Gates in a UN press conference and describes a red-faced and scowling Gates defending his support of the program. It looks like a victory for Kaufman for a second, but then the reader remembers that millions are still starving. I was despondent and I am guessing you will be too.

If you want to be even more confused, listen to Kaufman and investor Jim Rogers go at each other with heartfelt fury in this interview on BBC news: “This is an outrage and bankers need to get out of the business,” Kaufman rails…the people who are making money are the traders…Getting bankers out of the business is only going to help farmers.”

In this interview, and in his book, he comes out in support of commodities markets, for their ability to stabilize food markets and help farmers, but comes down hard on the newer food derivatives invented by banks like Goldman Sachs, in the past 10-12 years. In addition, he offers forth a few simple-sounding solutions, including banning insider trading on the commodities market and establishing grain reserves. I have no idea if these are actually feasible or if anyone is listening.

The proposed solutions calmed my nerves, if only briefly, since they offer a hopeful way out of the maze of markets, and because I actually understand them. At the end of the book, which I read as 2012 came to a close, I tried to hold onto that hope. That even though something as incomprehensible and removed from my daily work—financial markets—are creating impossible conditions, there is meaning (and hope) in connecting people to where their food comes from, in helping guide the conversation around how our food gets to our plates, who benefits, and who suffers in the process.

Mark Bittman, in his January 1 New York Times blog post called to food systems advocates for patience, saying that “failure is a part of progress.” I myself am also pressing myself to hold onto hope. All men, I hope, live so.

When I was in undergrad in the Northeast, around 15 years ago, a degree in “Food Studies” was unheard of.  A campus farm or edible garden was something reserved for agriculture schools or off-campus hippie/granola enclaves. However, the past 5  years have shown a proliferation of opportunities to get trained as farmers, gardeners, food policy makers, and food law practitioners.

On a recent site visit to Portland, Oregon, I met with FoodCorps service site supervisor Caitlin Blethen and her service member Jessica Polledri. Caitlin told me about her local program that trains school garden coordinators. This signaled to me a similar kind of sea change. It indicated that there is a desire out there to be trained in this work, and that there is a (slowly) growing market of jobs being created to do this work. I’ll let Jessica—a graduate of the program– take it from here:

Sometimes, pieces just fall into place. Soon after I moved across the country to Portland, Oregon, I heard about something called the School Garden Coordinator Certificate Training course (SGCCT), a 35-hour course offered by Growing Gardens, a local nonprofit.

I didn’t know something like this existed, and I applied for the course in the hopes that I could climb out of an illustrious past in retail work and unpaid internships. I crossed my fingers, was accepted, and propelled myself into the career track that I didn’t even realize was a career track.

That’s because it’s relatively new: school gardens date back to World War I–when the national school garden program was called, aptly I think, the United States School Garden Army–but have only recently enjoyed a resurgence. Gardens are growing in schoolyards all over the country, a trend that is highlighted by the recent inception of FoodCorps, a national organization dedicated to building and tending school gardens, providing hands-on nutrition education, and bringing high-quality local food into school cafeterias (full disclosure: I am a FoodCorps service member currently serving with Growing Gardens).

For over a decade, Growing Gardens has been steadily building its youth programming but recognized that the need for school gardens was outweighing the organization’s capacity. In an effort to keep the school garden movement blossoming in Portland, they decided to develop and offer the training. Nationwide, there are precious few school garden coordinator training programs: it is possible that Growing Gardens’ SGCCT was, in 2009, the very first.

Growing Gardens’ Youth Grow Manager, Caitlin Blethen, put the course together using her experience working in the field as a garden educator. Over the course’s 35 learning hours, Blethen and a host of guest speakers cover developing a master plan, community organizing, teaching students in a school garden setting, how to connect school garden activities and lessons to the curriculum, and planning a planting calendar, among other topics. To sweeten the deal even more, SGCCT students can opt to receive continuing education credits from Portland State University, an incentive for current teachers and graduate-degree seekers alike.

Though locally directed–speakers include Michelle Markesteyn Ratcliffe, the Oregon Farm to School Program Manager; and there is a special evening class dedicated to understanding the procedures that surround using garden produce in Portland Public Schools cafeterias–the skills taught are universal.

Graduates of the program have gone on to great things: There has been a steady stream of graduates stopping by the Growing Gardens office to peruse our seed library for flowers and vegetables for their new–and thriving–school gardens. Two graduates applied for and received a lucrative grant to get their garden project off the ground. We get constant feedback on how integral certain topics (creating a garden committee, working with school custodial staff, writing mission and vision statements) really were to the graduates’ success. And this particular graduate can ensure you that the course got her exactly where she had hoped to be.

Jessica Polledri is a FoodCorps service member in Portland Oregon, serving under the Oregon Department of Agriculture, with Growing Gardens.

FoodCorps is growing—expanding the number of states we’ll be working in next year and expanding the number of service members who are creating community and creating change. We created FoodCorps with two goals in mind: Addressing a public health crisis and providing a training opportunity for all of growing interest in careers in food and agriculture. Becoming a FoodCorps service member is a way to launch your career in food and farming while helping kids get healthy.

Rachel is one of 50 future food systems leaders who started their terms of service this past August as the first ever class of FoodCorps service members. So far this year, these service members have reached over 20,000 children in 10 states. They are addressing the nation’s painful and costly childhood obesity epidemic using our three recipe ingredient for change: Hands-on nutrition education, growing and tending school gardens, and getting healthy local food onto school cafeteria trays.

Here is what Rachel had to say about her experience this year:

Being the new “garden lady” at a school in small town is cause enough for conversation. Add in the University of Georgia logos that emblazen the coffee thermos I take to school with me every day, and I stick out even more in the sea of Arkansas Razorback gear that comes standard for most of the students and teachers at my school. Serving for FoodCorps has brought me to the town of Marshall, Arkansas, where I spend my days gardening with students from Marshall middle and elementary schools.  The school is a part of the Delta Garden Study, a childhood obesity prevention research project based out of the Arkansas Children’s Hospital Research Institute.

When teaching outside, it is important for me to begin by getting a grasp on what the day will hold. My morning starts with a garden walk-through and a meeting with my garden program specialist to plan what garden work we will tackle with our classes for the day. Rolling with the punches does not even start to describe the level of flexibility you need as a FoodCorps Service Member. Your greenhouse will flood, grasshoppers will eat your newly planted kale seedlings, and snow might cover your leaf lettuces in less than an hour. Overcoming these and other challenges have proven to be learning experiences for me and my students over the course of my service term.

If a tasting is on the agenda, I collect my cooking supplies and ingredients before the start of classes for the day. The sight of students gathered around a folding table helping to prepare braised greens, salad, pesto, or even corn and squash fritters is a common one in our classes. Hands-on nutrition education is just as important as the act of gardening.

After talking with my supervisor about the activities of the day, we head to our first class. When my school became a part of the Delta Garden Study, they agreed to adopt a garden-based science curriculum for their middle school science courses. Between sixth, seventh, and eight grades, I work with eleven classes of students. My supervisor and I work with our science teachers to strike the balance between in class science instruction and the outside garden and nutrition connections.

As the “garden lady,” I try to help my students think about learning in a different way, and I get to see firsthand the need to devote more time in our school day to discussing topics like healthy eating. Thanks to FoodCorps I have the opportunity to be a part of that dialogue on a daily basis. My service has given me the privilege of being a part of my students’ lives. Every time we work together in the garden, whether it is to plant, harvest, cook, or even winterize our greenhouse, we illustrate to students that food–where it comes from and how you cook it–is central to health.

Sitting in my organic chemistry class during undergrad, I never envisioned that I would soon become an expert in hosing off kids’ boots at the end of muddy garden work session, explaining the nutritional benefits of pesto over the din of my food processor, or reinforcing the concept of density by making balsamic vinaigrette. But at the end of every day, I am astounded at how lucky I am to experience alongside my students the wonderment that comes with growing and cooking food.

Recruitment for next year’s class begins this week. You can read more at our Web site: www.foodcorps.org or watch our video (produced by Ian Cheney, co-creator of King Corn) on YouTube here.

Earlier this summer, as I was hauling a bag of farmers market produce home 15 blocks and up four flights of stairs, sweating bullets, cursing my choice to buy a melon (they’re heavy!), I stopped mid-step.

“Does it really have to be this hard?” I asked myself.

My story is particular to me, of course, but all over the country there are people trying to put food on the table and asking themselves “does it really have to be this hard?”

I was living, at the time, in a neighborhood with few supermarkets. The ones within a long walking distance were either very expensive or lacking the seasonal produce I craved. So on weekends I would hike over to the big farmers market. But at the farmers market I always find myself of two minds. In one moment I am buying something and can’t believe how much I get for so little money; the next item I pick up gives me sticker shock. How can both of these things be true?

When people ask me: “Doesn’t the food you eat (some mix of local, sustainable, organic, etc.) cost so much more than “regular” food?” I protest and agree at the same time. When they say “Doesn’t cooking from scratch take a lot of time?” I remember the awesome pasta I cooked the other night that took 7.5 minutes. But also the weekend of foraging I did going from one store to the next.

I live in New York City; I make a living wage; I am not trying to feed a family; I work on these issues for a living. If I find it hard/tiring/expensive sometimes, what must other people feel?

In the spirit of this conundrum, Slow Food USA launched the $5 Challenge last week.

The economy is tanking. We’re all stressed about money and we’re all stressed about time. And yet. Every day there are people all over the country who find a way—despite the challenges of access, affordability, and time–to cook healthy food on a budget. It’s not easy—especially at first—but they’ve developed tips and tricks for stretching their food dollars, and decreasing the amount of time it takes to make a fresh and delicious meal. This campaign seeks to learn from those people, to share their wisdom—and then work together to make eating this way a reality for everyone every day.

So, on September 17, take the challenge: get together with family and friends and cook a “slow food” meal for less than the cost of fast food. Know how? Teach others. Want to learn? This is your chance. You can host a potluck where nothing costs more than $5. You can cook for a crowd and charge $5 at the door. You can cook with your family for less than $5 per person.

Now I recognize that $5 is actually not a small amount of money—but it is the cost of a typical fast food “value meal,” so we figured that was a good starting place for cooking up a meal that reflects your values.

Next week we’ll be rolling out a page where you can share your tips and tricks—and read the ones that other people have submitted. The idea is to embrace this crazy conundrum (the one I call the “It’s easy, it’s hard” conundrum)—to find ways to make eating ”slow” easier, while also acknowledging what makes it hard. Understanding the hard part and how to fix the hard part… is the hard part. And it’s where we’ve all got our work cut out for us.

Let’s start by taking the challenge.

At a compost bin that doubles as a podium, urban farming hero Will Allen faced the inaugural class of 50 FoodCorps service members—sitting together in Milwaukee but about to spin out to ten states around the country–giving them advice for the year of service they have ahead of them.

“There’s a lot of skill and knowledge existing in the communities you’re going into. You’ll bring stuff, and you’ll learn stuff. It’s a two-way street,” he said. “That’s how real sustainability works.”

After three days of training, workshops, presentations and open space discussions, these young men and women spent day four touring Growing Power, studying their systems of composting, year-round growing, aquaponics…and on and on. Learning stuff.

More advice from Allen on how to make the most of the tour of the Growing Power operation: “Don’t look at the plants (they’re green), look at the infrastructure. See how it works. How we use space.” Notebooks out, eyes open, they followed his instructions. They also pet goats (I did, too).

Their work this year will be focused on three pillars: knowledge, engagement and access. That is: delivering hands-on nutrition education, building and tending school gardens, and bringing high-quality local food into public school cafeterias. And while they bring skills—like farming experience and nutrition degrees—this work will largely be brand new for them, and they will be learning as they go.

So what did they learn this week?

Graham Downey will be serving in Mississippi. He told me how he’s learned about the importance of pairing realism with positivity.  That this work—giving youth an enduring relationship with healthy food—is challenging, but that it’s still important, and possible, to be excited about it.

Norris Guscott, who will be working in Massachusetts, has learned about the importance of getting the students’ parents involved in this work.

Jackie Billhymer, headed to Arkansas, is beginning this work understanding the need to engage the larger community and to harness the power of networking.

So, Civil Eaters, help us out here: what do they still need to know? What does it take to do this work effectively?

There’s a scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1991 movie “The Fisher King” in which a man plucks the discarded wire cage from a champagne bottle off a pile of garbage bags as he walks down a New York City street with a woman he is trying to impress.  He fiddles with the wire in his hands as they walk, eventually holding up what looks like a delicate and beautiful little metal chair, fit for a dollhouse. “You can find some pretty amazing things in the trash,” he says to her.  She is smitten.

That transformation of a piece of trash into a thing of beauty transfixed me then, and still does.  When I traveled to Cuba a few weeks ago, on a food sovereignty study trip with Food First, I had the opportunity to be transfixed again and again.

Some of the things I saw there included: the discarded front grill to an old electric fan used as a hanging planter with just three chains and some burlap lining; liquid humus packaged in old Havana rum bottles and sold at a farm supply and consultation site; soda cans at an educational farm center cut to be planters for small succulents; an old cooking oil tin at a community garden turned sideways, sliced open, and planted with herbs; raised beds created with upturned spent liquor bottles; and a chicken coop on a family tobacco farm cobbled together from scrap wood and metal.

Everywhere we turned we saw materials whose natural life was being maximized, extended. I joked to my fellow travelers to watch their water bottles–if it ain’t nailed down, it might become a planter. An image flashed through my mind: the corner deli in New York City (my hometown) where with a sandwich order one is given a stack of 30 napkins and a set of plastic cutlery she’ll never use. What would a resident of Havana think?

This Cuban thrift is sometimes taken to an extreme, reminding me this practice is not done because it’s beautiful or quaint, but because it’s a necessity. Examples include: Styrofoam seedling planter trays are reused and reused, brown with age and crumbling at the edges; a farm carved out of a former trash dump; and earth that was a rainbow of glass and plastic shards, unidentifiable debris, the old shell of a bus—and who knows what else–nestled next to the pig barn.

After the fall of the Eastern Bloc, Cuba was left to figure out how to survive without the influx of food, fuel and other supplies that they had purchased affordably from the Soviet Union until then. The answer turned out to include the practice of a more local and organic agricultural system (fewer inputs, less fuel, more oxen), as well as an overall practice of thrift. In doing this so successfully they made survival possible. As an engineer at the Institute for Research in Tropical Agriculture (INIFAT) told us: “the best thing that could have happened to Cuba was to be forced to use sustainable and organic methods of agriculture.”

As part of this transformation, the government now runs programs that support small farmers and encourage local—and often urban—production. When we met with the PR representative from the Ministry of Agriculture, we had lots of questions about how their theory played out in practice. One person in our group asked “do you encourage people to practice seed saving?”  He responded with a chuckle: “the main concept we teach here in Cuba is saving. I’m not just talking about seeds, I am talking about everything.”

Farmers in general—whether they be in Cuba, the U.S. or elsewhere—are experienced practitioners in reducing and re-using. Financial necessity and deep understanding of the natural environment means that small-scale sustainable farmers must be magicians of a sort, from seed saving to all manner of cost saving and resource saving practices. They, like the character in “The Fisher King,” know how to make something beautiful (and delicious) out of almost nothing.

After all, isn’t the transformation of soil, seed and water into something that feeds and nourishes us—nothing into something—the ultimate expression of this?

For the urban office worker, buying your lunch every day can be a drag. It leaves your palate uninspired, your wallet empty, and your butt growing slowly across your desk chair. It can leave you with a permanent distaste for turkey sandwiches and a fear of deli lines.

Christine Johnson and Joanna Helferich—a public health director and a corporate lawyer respectively—came up with a solution for their lunch blahs.  For the past five years the two college friends have been getting together on Sunday evening and cooking their lunches for the entire week.

I recently joined the two lunch ladies for an evening of chopping and stirring and was totally won over by their low-key but dedicated routine. While the cooking takes a certain amount of focus and coordinated kitchen Twister in a small New York space, it also leaves space for gabbing—and maintaining and deepening a friendship that began over ten years ago.

The meals they make are largely vegetarian, incorporate produce from the local farmers markets, and cost about a quarter of what it used to cost them to buy their lunch every day. The process starts via email during the week with a conversation about what they’re in the mood to cook and eat. After five years, they’ve created a stable of favorites, recipes they’ve co-created and tweaked, and keep in a Google doc.

They also try new things, including the Moroccan lentil stew they were making this evening for the second time. The inspiration was a soup Joanna liked from a NYC chain called Pret-a-Manger; they read the posted ingredient list and made adjustments. Their second dish was an old favorite—classic turkey meatloaf (made with ground turkey from their farmers market) with boiled potatoes and peas (a rare appearance by a frozen vegetable).

What you’ll need to rock it like Christine and Joanna:

1)   five to six covered pyrex dishes a piece (they make six portions for five lunches and one for a dinner)
2)   two to three hours of time on a Sunday night
3)   About $2–$4 per meal
4)   A big enough kitchen for two people to share space and share tasks
5)   A microwave at work in which to heat up your meal

Has it been hard to keep this routine going for so many years? Sometimes, they say, especially when one or the other is traveling a lot. But the benefits—time together, a guaranteed healthy lunch with two to three servings of vegetables, a huge savings of money—far outweigh the hassles. And the experience has shaped them, and their palates. “My lunches used to be very meat-centric,” said Helferich. “Now I actually prefer eating vegetables.”

Moroccan Lentil Stew
2 cups French lentils (scant) – picked over and rinsed
Olive oil for sauteing
3 small-medium onions, chopped
6–8 small-medium carrots, chopped
4 celery stalks, chopped
8 cloves garlic, minced
2 med. turnips, 1/2 inch cubed
1 6oz can tomato paste
1 box container (4 cups) low sodium vegetable broth
4 cups water
2 tsp paprika
2 tsp garam masala
2 tsps cumin
A handful of chopped parsley
1 1/2 tsp sherry vinegar
Salt and pepper

Saute onions, carrots, and celery in olive oil until transparent; add garlic and pepper, cook 1 minute. Add broth and water, lentils, tomato paste, turnips, and spices. Bring to boil, then turn down and cover and simmer 1 to 1.5 hours, until lentils are soft. Taste and add adjust seasonings, add salt, sherry vinegar and parsley. Optional: Use hand blender to blend some of the lentils and vegetables. Makes 6 main course servings.

A version of this post first appeared on Well and Good NYC

There were significant and frustrating compromises made along the way: most recently, the funding of the bill with SNAP money—an aggressive move made initially in the Senate version, but then eventually also adopted by the House—that was likely intended to split the school food advocacy community and thus kill the bill. The school food advocacy community were rightfully outraged at the notion of taking money from hungry kids to….feed hungry kids. We described our somewhat reluctant shift of tactic in an earlier blog post—you can click here to read it.

Ultimately 1,350 organizations ranging from Feeding America to the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition to Slow Food USA joined together in a letter to the House of Representatives urging them to pass the bill before the end of the year. Today, it seems, that pressure finally worked.

It’s an imperfect bill, one that fell short of our hopes, however, it has several important gains within. What’s good about this bill:

More money! While 6 cents doesn’t sound like very much—and is far short of the dollar we campaigned for early on—it represents the first non-inflationary increase ever made. School nutrition directors struggle to get food on trays at the current rate. More money, no matter how little, is essential.

Better nutrition standards. In the past there has been all kinds of food sold on school campuses that is exempt from meeting nutrition guidelines. This bill sets out a plan for improved standards overall as well as requirements for all food—not just food in the lunch line—to meet those standards.

Money for local sourcing. This bill makes mandatory $50 million in funding for a competitive grant program supporting Farm to School programs at USDA. Farm to school programs work to get local food into cafeterias as well as to educate students about how food gets from the farm to their plates, cultivating long-term healthy eating habits.

Access. Includes changes that will make it less bureaucratic and complicated for low-income students to qualify and get registered for free and reduced lunch.

So while it isn’t perfect, we applaud the House for passing a greatly improved child nutrition bill.

Originally posted on The Slow Food USA Blog.