As I entered the gymnasium of Lakeview Union School for Harvest Dinner, students buzzed busily around tables piled with plates of food – quinoa salad, beet and apple salad, pita bread, local Jasper Hill Farm cheese, turkey, squash, corn and mashed potatoes. Many are dishes that these students made themselves in the classroom using local ingredients, and most of the rest was grown in the school garden. A third-grader takes a bite of the pita bread made by the fourth graders and chews thoughtfully. Then he checks a box underneath a smiling face that proclaims, “I liked it!”

My two children are students at Lakeview, a small elementary school of 74 students nestled among the hills in one of northeastern Vermont’s most picturesque small towns, Greensboro. Here, in the heart of a pastoral landscape, you might think that local, farm-fresh foods in the cafeteria are a given. But due to budgetary constraints and other challenges, this hasn’t always been the case. No matter how rich the local food system, it can be difficult to produce quality lunchroom food.

Several years ago, a movement began with students and has grown into a revamping of the school lunch program, with direct-farm purchasing, a school garden, and even a whole-school composting system. It started when two fourth-grade students accompanied Lakeview’s principal, Linda Aiken, to a Vermont Rural Partnership conference and returned with an enthusiastic plan to start a salad bar. With the help of their teacher, they surveyed the students to find out which foods they would want and with food service staff support they set up and began offering it one day a week.

From the salad bar, the idea for a school garden grew – and with it, community interest in the food served at Lakeview. Staff, parents and teachers collaborated to build raised beds for the garden. One student’s grandfather donated his time and machinery to excavate a space for the garden, while another grandparent donated the materials. Ag Day, a biennial celebration of local farmers, launched in the spring of 2006. Farmers bring their animals to the school and children get a chance to experience farming, hands-on.

Alongside the garden, a natural cycle unfolded. The school set up their own worm bin and began composting food scraps. By 2007, the program had expanded, and Lakeview was sending cafeteria scraps to the nearby Highfields Institute in Hardwick, and in return received compost for the garden. Teachers tied the study of composting into science units, and students learned how food that would otherwise be thrown away was transformed into rich nutrients for growing veggies.

The kids loved the garden. My daughter proudly informed me when I had lunch there one day that the zucchini muffins contained zucchinis she had grown, and as I made my way along the salad bar, students pointed out which items came from the garden (most of them!). Dawn Desjardins, Lakeview’s Food Service Director, noticed that the children were much more likely to eat the food that they had grown themselves. She also became an expert at folding vegetable purees into various baked goods and slipping them into soups.

It was in this environment of growing student involvement and enthusiasm that the Farm to School Committee formed in the fall of 2007. I jumped on board. I’m a parent but also a small-scale farmer raising pastured chickens with a personal interest in the farming side as well.

Besides myself, there were other farmers on the committee as well as Lakeview’s principal, the Food Service Director, Jeff Roy, the Maintenance Director (who grew up on a local farm), several parents and three students. We were awarded a competitive grant by the Vermont Department of Agriculture to implement a Farm to School Program. Our objectives were to set up several purchasing arrangements with local farms to buy fresh food in bulk. The foods would be used as ingredients in new recipes that would be taste tested with the students. The most successful recipes would then become part of the food service menu.

With the idea to connect the kids more directly with the origins of their food, the objectives included both a guest farmer coming to the school to talk about what they grow, and field trips to local farms where students would learn more about how the food was grown and even participate in harvesting some produce. Our culminating activity was Harvest Dinner, where the students served dishes they prepared themselves in the classroom, using local foods, including produce from their garden.

The grant funds helped us purchase a refrigerator to store the bulk foods as well as begin construction on a storage shed – a kind of root cellar – for cold storage of root veggies and other produce. Without this infrastructure for storing large quantities of farm-purchased food the project would never have gotten off the ground. It was one of the first logistical hurdles we faced.

The support of food service staff members was key to the program’s success as well. One challenge is that bulk-purchased farm foods require more preparation than packaged foods from a food service distributor. More prep work is required – peeling carrots and potatoes, shredding zucchini, and so on. And there are stringent federal regulations for what foods can go into school lunches and how they must be prepared.

Over the past two years, the school has achieved its grant objectives. Among other successes, farm to school has become integrated into the curriculum, with the kindergarten class experiencing a whole cycle: they grew wheat, harvested and threshed it, ground it and made pizza dough and bread with it. This tied in with a literature unit on the book, The Little Red Hen.

The circle felt completed when parents, students, teachers, staff, farmers and community members joined together to eat locally-grown food for Harvest Dinner last year. The kids were proud to show off what they’d learned, and they felt invested in the dishes that were displayed for taste testing.

That’s not to say there haven’t been some challenges as well. As I mentioned, managing the storage, rotation, and preparation of the foods has been a logistical obstacle to overcome. And the development and coordination of delivery systems, we found, can be particularly difficult. The unknown factors involved in working with bulk-purchased whole foods can cause stress for food service personnel as well. It’s one thing to look at a can of pumpkin puree and see what quantity it provides for a recipe. But how many pumpkins do you need to roast and scoop to generate a certain number of cups of puree? Using farm-fresh food often requires rethinking recipes completely, not just adapting them to fresh ingredients. Yet as much hard work as it is for kitchen staff, they have risen to the challenge.

For farmers, the benefits abound: it’s great to know that you can count on the school to purchase a set quantity of product at specific intervals. It’s also a chance to connect with the community in a new way. Both the school and the farms appreciated the opportunity to keep school lunch funding in the community – there are so many benefits, both tangible and intangible, to exchanging money for goods locally.

Linda Aiken is excited about what’s next for the project. The school is in the process of developing a sustainable plan to continue the initiative now that the grant money is spent. It’s really important to have community and especially parental support, so there’s motivation to continue bringing healthier, locally-sourced lunches to students.

One morning I came out of our house just as Jorge, a young man I knew, shuffled by in baggy pants. He was pouring a bag of Skittles into his mouth.

“Jorge!” I said. “Is that your breakfast?”

He nodded sheepishly. I lived on a busy street where from time to time I ran into Jorge, who had attended elementary school with my daughter, Carly, down the block. That campus housed a number of smaller schools, including Costanoa, a district-run program for students who had fallen behind at the bigger high schools. The morning of his Skittle breakfast, Jorge was a sophomore at Costanoa.

Some months later I ran into his mom. She lived with her family in the apartments down the hill from our house, and over the years I had talked with her often as she walked by with Jorge’s younger siblings.

“How’s Jorge?” I asked.

“He’s doing well,” she said in Spanish. “He’s working in the ROP garden at school, and he loves it so much he wants to apply to the horticulture program at Cabrillo [College].” When Costanoa moved to our campus, they had expanded the Life Lab garden halfway across the playing field. Students on campus labored in the garden and cooked from the bounty.

“He’s looking for space to start a vegetable garden for the family,” she said. Holding a cloth shopping bag, she said she was on her way to the natural food store to buy produce.

Jorge was a senior when I saw the flyer with his name on it. In conjunction with Food What, a food and health program using sustainable agriculture to empower youth, Jorge and his schoolmates were hosting a Harvest Festival at the Life Lab on the UCSC campus. As a member of our district Wellness Committee, I planned on attending the event to help Jamie Smith, our district’s new Director of Food Services, cook farm-fresh pizzas in a wood-burning oven.

It was a clear morning in October when I walked up the hill to the Life Lab garden overlooking the Monterey Bay. High school students were busy setting up stations for the festival, including one for carving pumpkins grown in the garden, one for tasting honey produced by the resident bees, and what turned out to be Jorge’s favorite, a hayride along the hill overlooking the ocean.

I found Frannie, who helps run the garden, stoking a fire in the wood-burning oven, a hive-like structure made of hay and mud. On a table next to the oven were jars of tomato sauce made from the Life Lab’s tomatoes, plus vegetables and herbs from the garden.

By ten when the students arrived, Jamie and Frannie were slinging the pizza dough Jamie had made early that morning, and students were eating slices with pumpkin, chard, onions, peppers, herbs, and even figs, faster than we could make them. The pumpkin tasted so sweet one student asked if it was pineapple.

I tracked Jorge down a week later, when he agreed to talk with me about his experience with Food What and the Agriculture program at Costanoa.

CE: How did you end up at Costanoa?

Jorge: When I went to [a regular high school] I started ditching class because … it felt like my teachers didn’t know how to teach a whole group of people. I felt like I was getting left behind. I stopped going to school, started hanging out with friends. We would all ditch together, eat at Del Pueblo, walk to the park.

The days I showed up at school … I would always feel lost…The principal met with my parents because of my low attendance. I hadn’t even attended a third of the year. He said I had to go to alternative school to make up the credits. My brother, who’s twenty now, was at Costanoa and I wanted to try it.

CE: How did you get involved with Life Lab?

Jorge: At Costanoa I signed up for the Agriculture ROP class. I remember the garden [from elementary school] but it was totally different…I always wanted to work with plants; my dad has been in landscaping for twenty years. But it’s much more fun starting plants from seed, watching them grow, taking them outside and seeing them thrive. I love being outside. It’s my favorite way of learning…I’d rather do heavy work outside than work in the classroom.

When [the director of Food What] Doron came to Cosatnoa, he kept making jokes and throwing apples from his farm to the kids. My friend said, ‘You’re a farmer, you should try that.’ The next thing I know I was working during the spring internships…. after school with other Costanoa kids at UCSC Farm. I remember the chickens and the Venus Flycatchers from [field trips] when I was a kid. But when I came this time, the feeling of being there…it was like a relief. You forget about everything.

CE: Tell me about the garden you started at your grandma’s house.

Jorge: Two inches under the dirt at our apartments is concrete…so my dad put plants in pots. But the manager said no plants in pots. So we took to them to my grandma’s house. She has a huge back yard. I was thinking, ‘Why not start a garden?’ The first year [the plants] didn’t grow because of too much shade from the trees. Then my brother cut down the apple tree in the middle, and the next season I grew all kinds of vegetables.

All the water came from the creek running through her backyard. I planted forty tomato seedlings from [ROP teacher] Lisa Glick all around the border. That made me always want to be there, made me want to keep growing food for my family. I’d rather have my family eating something fresh and homegrown than food that comes from far away and is expensive.

CE: How have you changed since you started the ag program at Costanoa?

Jorge: It made me grow up and think of something to reach for, a goal in life. Before I didn’t even care. I thought, ‘Why finish high school… College is where everything starts happening…’ It’s good I matured early so I could fix those mistakes that happened earlier. High school is where everything starts. I was introduced to so many things in high school.

CE: You’re graduating in the spring. Will you continue the horticulture program at Cabrillo?

Jorge: Last year I took Edible Landscaping [at Cabrillo]. Next year I want to take a bunch of agriculture classes [like] Sustainable Landscaping. Green roofs, solar panel, water catchers, especially here with six-month drought season. I’d like to learn how to install solar panels, or learn how to make them, that would be even better.

CE: How have the ROP class and Food What changed the way you eat?

Jorge: It makes me focus on eating vegetables. After I learned about methane gas and the carbon footprint of cows, I didn’t eat beef for one and a half months. Then I went to a party and there was all this beef and I couldn’t help it. But now I eat less meat than I used to.

CE: Do you still eat Skittles for breakfast?

Jorge: (Laughs) No.

In the thirteen years I had known Jorge, I had watched both him and the life lab garden at his school grow. Now I looked forward to being part of the expansion of the Life Lab at our neighborhood Branciforte Middle School, where federal stimulus dollars would pay for a new playing field that would include a garden large enough to accommodate all the science classes. Because if students were offered Skittles when they were hungry or craving something sweet, they would eat them. But if they were offered farm-fresh pizza with pumpkin that tasted like pineapple, they’d eat that too. And if they were taught about the sustainably grown pumpkin, they would learn how to grow it along with all kinds of other organic produce. They would taste the bounty of their labor and would want their families to taste it. Those students, who might otherwise grow obese from government-issued lunches, who might otherwise drop out of school because they didn’t see the point of sitting in a crowded classroom, would become invested in their own health, and not incidentally, their own future. As a member of the Wellness Committee aiming to change the lunches and nutrition education in our district, I looked forward to being a part of that future.

Photo: Jorge with a goat from Harley Farms