Given all the media attention, you may think that Alice Waters is the only person in Berkeley doing anything to fix school food–and that her Edible Schoolyard Project is the only organization tackling this topic across the country.

But that perception would be wrong. Founded in 1995, the Center for Ecoliteracy has also long championed school food reform and channeled funding in the millions to garden programs, cooking classes, and nutrition-based curriculum in Berkeley public schools.

Along with the Chez Panisse Foundation and Berkeley Unified School District, the Center for Ecoliteracy also implemented the School Lunch Initiative, which kickstarted local, seasonal, and sustainable food for students here and connected the classroom and the cafeteria.

Currently, its Rethinking School Lunch program offers a planning strategy for revamping food service beyond Berkeley to rural and urban areas around the state struggling to improve the eating habits of school children, many of whom are hungry, nutritionally depleted, or hampered by diet-related illnesses such as obesity and diabetes.

Last week, the center introduced school nutrition personnel from around the country to its new cookbook-guide, Cooking with California Foods in K-12 Schools, which played a starring role in a hands-on workshop on creative school lunch menu planning, as part of the national Community Food Security Coalition‘s 15th Annual Conference in downtown Oakland.

On a sunny Sunday afternoon a stuffy, windowless Marriott hotel conference space was packed with about 60 school food folk from both coasts and the country’s center and south, all eagerly drinking the Kool-Aid—sorry, make that freshly squeezed lemon juice with a hint of mint—dispensed by renowned cookbook author, culinary teacher, and food policy consultant Georgeann Brennan and her colleague Ann M. Evans, former Davis mayor, co-founder of that city’s food co-op and farmers’ market, and a long-time advocate of sustainable food systems.

Participants, who left with renewed enthusiasm and ideas to try back at their own schools—along with a free guide and a nifty apron—formed small groups to turn out such salads as zucchini and feta; broccoli, raisin and walnut; tabbouleh; and Asian cabbage and orange with ginger. They also connected with kindred spirits in the school food world while they grated, chopped, and stirred.

Also on hand to talk transforming school food: award-winning Oakland Unified School District Nutrition Services Director Jennifer LeBarre—along with four of that city’s Lunch Ladies who shared stories about the pressing need and formidable barriers to bettering school food, as only those in the frontlines every day can do—and Zenobia Barlow, the Center for Ecoliteracy’s executive director and co-founder.

Barlow isn’t a celebrity chef and she doesn’t own a famous restaurant. Rather, she hails from an anthropology-sustainability-think tank-policy wonk pedigree. And her commitment to improving what children eat at school every day is clear and consistent. “The Center has quietly and steadily worked on improving school food and providing professional development and training to school food personnel for about 15 years,” said Barlow post conference from her office at the David Brower Center. “We helped bring about the changes in school food in Berkeley and we’ve moved on to other schools and districts to facilitate change there too.”

The cookbook is part of this plan. It is based on a simple yet clever 6-5-4 formula that consists of six dishes (salads, soups, pastas, rice bowls, wraps, and pizza toppings), five flavor profiles (African, Asian, European/Mediterranean, Latin American, and Middle Eastern/Indian) and the fresh produce available during the four seasons. The approach was developed in the Davis, Oakland, and Winters school districts over three years.

Funded by TomKat Charitable Trust, the guide’s goal is to help school food service staff find ways to add more fresh, local, healthy foods to school meals (though the downloadable document offers recipes suitable for home cooking too). Some 8,000 guides have been downloaded since August, more than 1,000 have been shipped to school nutrition staff and all 40 copies got snapped up at last week’s workshop, according to Barlow.

Each presenter stressed the importance of integrating California specialty crops—such as walnuts, lettuce, olive oil, strawberries, apricots, figs, citrus and more — into meal programs. “How can we expect our children to understand what food is grown in their area and how it tastes if it’s not on their plate?” asked Evans to a receptive crowd, who also noted California’s long growing season and diverse range of produce not available in most parts of the country.

Attendees from states such as Pennsylvania, Arizona, and Montana raised the challenges they face in sourcing affordable fresh produce at certain times of the year. “California is blessed with great soil and climate and has the capacity to grow for a population far larger than itself,” said Evans. “To share that bounty is great for California farmers and for consumers around the nation. This doesn’t have to supplant local produce in other states, but can compliment it.”

She also noted that schools in as diverse California locations as Davis, Riverside, Ventura, Winters, Santa Cruz, Los Angeles, and Clovis are all early adopters of the 6-5-4 approach to school menus, which allows for substitutions based on availability.

Barlow, who is currently working closely with the Oakland Unified School District, also pointed out the OUSD’s novel approaches to enhancing the edible experience at different sites—like the “Grab and Go” breakfast bags offered at high schools, the grant-sponsored fruit and vegetable snacks for elementary schools, the new supper program recently implemented at some schools, or the more than 20 afterschool farm stands on school grounds in that city, where many children live in food deserts.

“It’s been important to take what we learned in Berkeley and apply it on a larger scale in districts in more urban settings like Oakland, which benefits 40,000 children a year, more than 70 percent of whom are eligible for free or reduced lunch,” Barlow said.

“For some children who are fed five times a day at school, it’s the only place they eat. So we’re applying the best of Berkeley’s school food practices and sharing them with the rest of the state and even the country. This guide is part of the solution to the challenge of reinventing school food.”

Photo courtesy Zenobia Barlow

Originally published on Berkeleyside

This spring on national television, British celebrity chef, restaurateur, and food system revolutionary Jamie Oliver filled a school bus with sugar.* The white stuff poured over seats and out of windows, piling into three foot drifts outside the bus as a handful of school parents looked on, speechless. The sugar represented the total amount in Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) milk every week. “Yeah, I’m trying to make it dramatic!” Oliver shouted, “Because I want people to care!” Oliver was dismayed that more parents weren’t there to witness the stunt. “Maybe coming to LA was a big mistake,” he lamented.

Oliver’s crusade for better school food began in England, where he got £2 billion voted into the budget for cooked from-scratch meals in 2005. Last year he launched Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution in the U.S., accompanied by an ABC television series filmed in small-town West Virginia that went on to win an Emmy for Outstanding Reality TV Program. For this year’s season of Food Revolution Oliver had hoped to film inside cafeterias and a large food processing center in the LAUSD. But he was blocked by the school board, or more specifically, Superintendent Ramon Cortines.

To hear the media tell it Jamie Oliver has had a rough year. In addition, some food activists have been critical of Oliver’s show and methods. But to see 2011 as a failure for Oliver is to miss the point of his mission. It’s not to dominate American television ratings or even to directly influence food policy. Oliver’s mission is to ignite and expand an army of food revolutionaries in the U.S. who will drive change themselves. With the full force of his celebrity and national exposure he continues to be spectacularly effective in recruiting food activists.

Oliver found a way to work around the LAUSD and struck a deal with West Adams Prep, a school run in partnership with LAUSD and educational nonprofit MLA (or Mentor LA). MLA CEO Mike McGalliard brokered a very delicate arrangement through which Oliver could teach, and film, a small cooking class at the school.

Every episode was fraught with conflict over this arrangement, with permits and permission being revoked often at the last moment, much to Oliver’s growing frustration. Eventually he was shut out of even West Adams, though he did still manage to set up a kitchen classroom within walking distance to the school and arranged for Better Homes and Gardens to install a garden at the school–not on film, of course. Meanwhile, at a school board hearing, Ramon Cortines declared that he was the one behind all of Oliver’s setbacks, not the school board. Cortines claimed he wanted to shield his schools from ridicule and controversy; Oliver saw this as belligerent obstruction.

Finally, near the end of the season, Cortines’ term expired and a new Superintendent was elected, John Deasy. An LA Glasnost was ushered in as Deasy met with Jamie Oliver–on Food Revolution and on Jimmy Kimmel–and promised to propose to the board that LAUSD schools drop flavored milk. His proposal passed with only one dissenting vote and as of this month flavored milk is a thing of the past in LA. It helps that the milk contract was up for renewal this summer. Picking a well-timed campaign with an unambiguous goal proved to be a smart gamble–and a sharp strategy.

Alas, this story played out in real time ahead of the plot of Food Revolution as it was broadcast. After letting Food Revolution try the high-profile Tuesday night time slot, ABC put Food Revolution on hold for May Sweeps from April 19-May 24 and then moved the show to Friday nights, where it continued to lead. Meanwhile, the flavored milk victory came (around April 27) while the show was on hiatus, leaving supporters with no show to rally around in celebration.

However, food bloggers like Bettina Elias Siegel of The Lunch Tray began an earnest debate over whether banning flavored milk is really the right thing to do. What if kids stop drinking milk? Is this the best use of our energy? The national food movement fractured over the flavored milk ban, just as it fractured over the 2010 Child Nutrition Bill and the big organic/small organic debate. But for the fans and viewers of Food Revolution the milk victory wasn’t an just an endgame about flavored milk in LA; it was a key motivating win that has encouraged them to remain engaged in the fight with the hope of making similarly profound change happen in their own communities–and maybe someday on a national level.

“Who the hell does this guy think he is?” This is a sentiment I have heard about Oliver from organizers who have long had their noses to the grindstone. Grassroots-level progressives tend to be suspicious of the power of celebrity, of big budgets and corporate sponsorships, and of anything that hints of emotional manipulation. Oliver has been scolded for demanding change of people stuck in the middle, school nutritionists, cafeteria workers, small restaurant owners, instead of taking on Congress or Monsanto. He has been taken to task for glossing over important details, like the hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of funding that backed up the glorious transformation of Santa Barbara school cafeterias featured in an episode.

But Oliver is relevant because he brings the big food fight to a national audience. 7.5 million people viewed the Emmy-winning first season of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution last year. This year’s six-episode season had nearly as many viewers at its peak. Over 700,000 people have signed his Food Revolution petition demanding “better food at school and better health prospects” to be delivered to the U.S. President. And Oliver persuaded 25,000 people to comment on the new USDA school food standards.

The truth is, Jamie Oliver is a showboat, but that’s a powerful asset. His show sometimes sacrificed absolute transparency for the sake of effective storytelling (bloggers and tweeters filled in those missing details anyway). But we need those compelling narratives, visuals, and experiences that dig into Americans’ hopes and fears, our hunger and disgust and pride. Oliver’s hugs and calling people, “my brother,” and constant appeals to emotion are, like it or not, apparently highly effective. We need charisma and connection. And yeah, a bit of celebrity magic doesn’t hurt, either.

Again and again Oliver starts with a cooking lesson, and somehow that lights a fire in an individual, and they begin to see how that food in the pan connects with a larger system that had previously obscured their path to healthy living. This is the mission of the Food Revolution: light a fire under our asses and get us to make change ourselves.

The next chapter in the Food Revolution saga is to deploy Oliver’s Big Rig Teaching Kitchen, a mobile classroom hatched from Oliver’s TED prize wish, where hopefully some 2500 kids throughout southern California will get life-changing cooking classes. Big Rig is operated in partnership with the California Endowment, (whose Building Healthy Communities initiative will provide support for the instructors) and will be working with community organizations throughout the Los Angeles area, starting with Challenger Boys and Girls Club.

Now it’s up to us to capitalize on the momentum and energy of the Food Revolution. How do we connect it with larger battles? How do we keep telling compelling stories? What novel methods can we use to connect with more people? As Jamie Oliver says in the season finale, “We’ve all got to start stirring the pot. And we’ve all got to start expecting more.” Those of us who have already been working in the food movement, on the other hand, already expect much–what we need to do is take a page from Oliver’s book and get more creative and daring in communicating our vision.

*Not actually sugar, but pale sand that resembled sugar.

Watch this year’s episodes of the Food Revolution in LA here.

On May 30, the Republican-controlled House Appropriations Committee voted to cripple the nation’s budding effort to do something about the woeful quality of school food and make America’s kids healthier.

Ignoring the recent bi-partisan mandate to develop new science-based, healthy food standards under the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010, the committee’s bill directs the US Department of Agriculture to ensure that its proposed school food standards will not increase costs to schools.

That would effectively squash the drive to make school food better.

The pending USDA rule to update 15-year old standards, which has generated more than 100,000 supportive public comments, would require schools to cut sodium and fat, provide more whole grains and double the amount fruits and vegetables in the meals they feed to more than 32 million kids every day. Many Republicans say we just can’t afford it—and want to roll back a long-overdue process.

The “increased costs of complying with the proposed rule will be overly burdensome and difficult to manage,” Rep. John Kline (R-Minn.) wrote recently to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack, urging that USDA’s pending standards be rewritten. Kline is chairman of the Education and Workforce Committee.

There is no escaping the fact that serving healthier foods will cost money–at least in the short run–especially for the majority of schools that don’t have the necessary infrastructure, purchasing systems and staffing in place.

But Kline is wrong.

What we can’t afford is the ever-mounting cost of continuing to feed our children the same unhealthy, fattening and disease-causing food. School meals – often high in fat, sodium and refined sugars and skimpy on fresh fruits and vegetables–are contributing to soaring childhood diabetes and obesity rates, impeding kids’ ability to learn and costing the nation billions of dollars in current and future health care costs.

A report last year by the Produce for Better Health Foundation, based mostly on federal data, calculated that the diet-related medical costs of just four serious illnesses–diabetes, cancer, coronary heart disease and stroke–amount to $38 billion a year. Obesity pushes the figure close to the $150 billion mark.

There is substantial other evidence that people whose diets are rich in fruits and vegetables are far less likely to suffer from these health problems, yet less than 1 percent of adolescents get their recommended servings of these healthy foods. With many children consuming as much as half their daily calories at school, strengthening school nutritional standards is the surest way to reduce future health care costs.

This is not “nanny state overreach.” Besides the health benefits, better school food results in better student learning and behavior and greater fitness. A 2007 Department of Defense report found that 25 percent of the applicants rejected for military service were turned down because they were too fat. Twenty-five percent!

In the current ideologically driven budget-cutting mania, however, there seems to be no room  for rational debate about what programs are worth cutting, protecting or even increasing, based on hard data, future benefits and return on investment.

Healthy food investments will pay off

Yes, implementing new school food standards will come at a cost, but some schools are showing they can serve healthier food on limited budgets – and in some cases even reporting higher profits as a result of increased demand for better tasting food.

USDA projects that implementing its proposed draft standards would cost nearly $7 billion. To cover just a small portion of that cost, the 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act authorized spending an additional six cents per meal.

But even if it’s possible to meet the new standards at lower cost, which some say is the case, the broader questions are:

• Despite the difficult fiscal times we’re in, do we really want to rule out spending any new money on healthier food for kids, knowing that it will deliver financial and health dividends in the future?
• Are we willing to have a national conversation about the merits of investing our future? And if we do make an investment, what programs – or “offsets”–should be cut to pay for it?

As the budget process moves to the Senate, lawmakers must do two things:

1. Reaffirm the Act’s forward-thinking school food policies and strongly back USDA’s attempts to write science-based school food standards.
2. Negotiate common sense agreements to slash spending on wasteful programs that yield few public benefits while protecting and even increasing spending that delivers myriad societal benefits and future cost savings.

In an earlier post, we showed how just 2 percent of the cotton subsidies spent in California ($75 million) could pay for doubling the quantity of fruits and vegetables in California schools, with great benefit for kids’ health and farmers’ bottom lines. These upland cotton subsidies, which totaled $200 million in 2009, generated a return of only $85 million in cotton sales for the state. That’s a loss to taxpayers of nearly 60 cents for each dollar spent. In contrast, an Oregon study found that every dollar spent on buying local food for school meals generated $1.87 in new economic activity.

As these examples make clear, there are indeed sensible offsets to pay for better school food–if reason and common sense can trump the influence and money that dictates decision-making in Washington. Simple request, right?

As the Senate works to resolve big-picture deficit reduction issues and considers changes to the 2012 Food and Farm Bill, it must not just slash and burn valuable programs. Senators must rethink policy priorities so that our investments are better aligned with the country’s long-term needs, especially in the nutritional guidelines that will pay off in better health for America’s kids for years to come.

Shifting policies and funding priorities

It won’t solve all the nation’s food-related health problems, but we can boost access to and affordability of healthy foods at school and at home simply by shifting a portion of the public investment in the 2012 Food and Farm Bill away from supporting the raw commodities that yield cheap processed foods (think: corn, soy) and into growing fruits, nuts and vegetables and building the local infrastructure to process and distribute them.

With the slash-and-burn approach to balancing the budget gaining momentum, it is crystal clear that it will take concerted action by of millions of concerned citizens to push members of Congress to craft a smarter, forward-thinking food system. Unless your voice is heard, how will your representative know what policies you believe in?

You can take the first step right now and let Congress know that investing in smarter food and farm policies that promote a cleaner environment and healthier diets for kids is a priority for you, because it offers better health and lower costs over the long term.

Originally published on AgMag

The big news out of California this past week was all about the premiere of Jamie Oliver’s Food Revolution, Season 2. This controversial show, which has plenty of detractors from within the food movement, is nonetheless the most successful effort to bring the food movement into larger public awareness that I’ve seen so far. But the same week a quieter food revolution was rolling along the West Coast: The launch of Nourish California.

As a national audience watched the dramas unfold on Food Revolution I tuned into the Twitter stream where the show was trending. Two things were clear: The show was making a profound emotional impact on viewers and these energized viewers were now clamoring to know how to make change happen in their own communities.  “I want unflavored milk at my school, too!” said one tweet. And like the brilliant evangelist that he is, Jamie has a plain-milk campaign at the ready for his energized base to plug into. But Nourish California is poised to take some of the Food Revolution buzz and direct it toward deeper and broader systems change and they’re focusing their campaign on a key change agent: Youth.

Nourish California is a pilot educational initiative (led by nonprofit organization WorldLink) whose mission is to “increase food literacy and build healthier communities throughout California.” The multimedia program includes a 30-minute special, Nourish: Food + Community, broadcast on PBS (it was shown nationwide in the fall and is being rebroadcast in California through the spring) and available on DVD, 11 short videos, a curriculum guide for grades 6-8 aligned with California state standards, and a library of topic-focused videos for classroom use (there will eventually be 45). All of these materials are free and can be downloaded (or ordered) from the Web site. Nourish will also run workshops at teacher seminars and youth summits around the state.

The goal of Nourish is to open up a conversation about sustainability with teachers and students, as well as administrators, food service workers, school garden coordinators, and health professionals. While there is a clear emphasis on nutrition education, “We’re definitely in the systems side of thinking,” says Nourish Communications Manager Brie Mazurek. And while nutritional education is a critical starting point, the program acknowledges that having the right choices available is also important–which is why a large component of the program focuses on how the entire food system works, from the soil to around the world, and how everything is interrelated.

From this foundation, says Kirk Bergstrom, Executive Director of WorldLink, “Our vision is to build a network of food-literate teachers and students who can directly contribute to the health of their schools and communities.” By teaching students a common language of food literacy (how many teens out there even know what “food system” means?) and an awareness of the different schools of thought within the food movement the program hopes to give youth a stronger voice. And California is just the beginning; as Bergstrom’s team fine-tunes Nourish in California and secures adequate funding they are expanding the program across the nation. “I think the real legacy of [Nourish] is this network that’s forming across the country,” Bergstrom says.

Obviously in a state as diverse as California a program like Nourish would have to find ways to connect with people across different ethnic communities and socioeconomic levels in order to build a strong, inclusive network. It helps that Nourish translated the student handouts into Spanish and that its materials address social justice issues. The program is also partnering with over 50 local organizations and the videos feature a diverse group of experts, including writer Anna Lappé, eco-chef Bryant Terry, and pediatrician Dr. Nadine Burke.

Dr. Burke was recently profiled in the New Yorker for her groundbreaking work with the Bayview Child Health Center. She is on the Nourish advisory board and shows the 30-minute video in her clinic waiting rooms as a conversation starter to get her patients talking about nutrition and where their food comes from. She has also been promoting the program in schools within the Bayview community and has even been working on connecting Nourish with the HMO that she works with.

Will the program have an impact in the severely challenged Bayview community? Will an activated base of youth in the area find the support they need to push meaningful food system change? I suspect it depends partly on how organized and loud those teens become. In the meantime, the Nourish program is providing some structure for youth-led efforts. The curriculum includes a concluding section called “action projects,” which shows students how to organize food projects, and encourages students to report on these projects. This reporting, in turn, can be used to inspire yet more youth while also providing Nourish with mini-case studies so the authors of the program can see how people are using it in their communities.

Bergstrom and his team are hoping this investment in youth, influencing people while they’re still young, will have an exponential, long-term payoff for both individuals and for the country. With an effective program teens internalize lessons and then pass them on to their families as well, creating a ripple effect. “Youth are a great catalyst for social change,” Bergstrom says. “Young people with their passion for issues and their ability to work on these projects can be a powerful means for transformation.”

The successes—and shortcomings—of the Berkeley Unified School District’s revamped school food program received equal billing at yesterday’s premiere screening of short films collectively known as the Lunch Love Community Documentary Project.

On the big screen the audience at Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley were greeted with cinematic images of children contentedly nibbling on fruit, tucking into salad, and choosing produce at a school’s farmers’ market.  But after the viewing, some adults provided a counterpoint to the rosy pictures showcasing Berkeley’s much-lauded School Lunch Initiative.

John Muir 5th grade teacher Stephen Rutherford was hands down the most critical. He talked about long, slow lines for lunch at his elementary school, the challenges for little fingers using swipe cards, the untended salad bar, the rush to eat, the vast amounts of waste, and a tense cafeteria environment.

Some of his concerns echo those raised by parents commenting on a recent Berkeleyside story on Lunch Love Community. “The day-to-day reality of feeding kids doesn’t resemble what you see on this screen,” said Rutherford. “We all had a vision of what school lunch could be and at my school it’s still very sad.”

Joy Moore, a cooking and gardening instructor at Berkeley Technology Academy, a small, alternative to Berkeley High School, said her students often get overlooked on the lunch front.

And a long-simmering resentment—that King Middle School, which houses Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard, the new Dining Commons, and the district’s central kitchen, unfairly receives more resources than other schools—boiled to the surface.

This discontent with the reality of Berkeley’s program reveals just how many obstacles school districts face in trying to improve school nutrition for all its students.

Still, amid the sniping and genuine frustration there was, well, a lot of love for a program that has garnered global high fives for its efforts to improve school food.

BUSD’s executive chef Bonnie Christensen good-naturedly responded to criticisms. She strives, she said, to make school food even and equitable across the district. A career culinary professional who comes from a fine-dining background, Christensen unapologetically admitted that she and her staff face enormous obstacles, including a shoestring budget, to turn out wholesome, tasty food every day. But, she argued, most of the time they do just that.

B-Tech has gotten short shift, she conceded, and she and her staff are working on ways to improve food service there. One real challenge: Equipment brought into the school to enhance meal service has been stolen in the past.

Christensen also acknowledged difficulties in John Muir’s cafeteria, noting that she spent an entire week at the school earlier this year trying to iron out problems. At King, the staff are able to serve lunch in just seven minutes, she said, and added that for a school lunch program to succeed at a site it requires the commitment and cooperation of staff from the top down.

Here’s what everyone seemed to agree on: The program is a vast improvement, if an imperfect one, on what former BUSD nutrition services director Ann Cooper inherited. At the time the lunch menu consisted of chicken nuggets, corn dogs, pizza pockets, and other highly processed fare.

Christensen, herself a BUSD parent, described a program which began with pioneering parents seeking a healthier eating environment for their childrenas a work in progress.

Moore drew knowing laughs from the crowd when she acknowledged that the success of the program came down to relationship building that grew out of years of interminable meetings. (Moore’s advice to others trying to bring about change in school food: serve something to eat at such events and you’ll have taken a first step towards building alliances and creating community.)

Four of the mini films in a series by local filmmakers Sophie Constantinou and Helen De Michiel were shown, including a new segment Feeding the Body Politic, in which former Berkeley School Superintendent Michelle Lawrence, who had dismissed a school food policy as unimplementable nonsense, describes her a-ha moment.

Early in her tenure, a student from Longfellow Middle School died during the summer break from complications related to adult-onset (formerly known as Type II) diabetes, a disease that can often be prevented or controlled through diet and physical activity.

That’s the kind of wake-up call playing itself out in American communities across the country which has helped sparked the current school food revolution. And it’s what motivates someone like Bonnie Christensen, whose work day starts at 4:30 a.m, to get out of bed every morning.

Originally published on Berkeleyside

Photos: Above, Sophie Constantinou. Below, Courtesy Berkeley Unified School District

President Obama, recently speaking to students of his undergraduate alma mater, Columbia University, noted that, “Food at the cafeteria was notoriously bad. I didn’t have a lot of options. We used to joke about what was for lunch that day, and there would be a bunch of nondescript stuff that wasn’t particularly edible.” The next time POTUS is in town, I hope he stops by The Market Café at the University of San Francisco (USF) since cafeteria food has changed a whole lot since back in the day. And it’s not just for students: The Market Café is open to the public.

The  café, according to Resident District Manager Holly Winslow, underwent “an extreme makeover” over the summer break and has been transformed into a light- and wood-filled space (recycled wood from cypress trees in the Presidio), showcasing the bounty of Bay Area farm fresh produce. Known for their well-deserved leadership and vision in promoting socially responsible practices, the café is run by The Bon Appétit Management Company (Bamco), an onsite restaurant company that provides café and catering services to corporations, colleges and universities, and specialty venues. Bamco serves over 400 locations in 29 states (corporate clients include eBay, Oracle, Target, and Yahoo!); USF is one of two dozen universities they work with nationwide.

Serving 8,000 meals a day to hungry college students and faculty, Executive Chef Jon Hall (who cooked previously at Gordon Biersch, Boudin, and MacArthur Park) leads a team of 250 people and overseas a café packed with fresh local, organic food that would make any parent happy to send their kid off to college (if for the good food alone). “Many of these kids grew up eating sustainable food and they have an educated palate,” Winslow said. “They eat with their eyes so we prepare the freshest, most delicious food imaginable.”

The Market Café boasts 12 “stations” with prepared food made from scratch and the weekly menu offers up many healthy, fresh choices, some as lean as 500 calories per meal. The students line up at the classic grill and order dim sum from “Global,” sit at the full-blown “sustainable” sushi bar (which follows Seafood Watch’s principles) and order crepes from the much-loved crepe master, Tito Painsay.

But it might be the 15-foot vegan vegetarian salad bar—featuring organic greens, local produce and fruits, chef-prepared salads and house-baked breads—that takes the cake. Freshmen Taylor Cruz “attacks the salad bar” even though she’s not vegan and loves the healthy alternatives. (Although she admitted to sharing an occasional cookie with fellow freshman Kharina Castillo, who happens to be a big fan of the crepes.) Between hiking the hills in San Francisco near campus and eating well, they’re both mindful of avoiding the freshman fifteen.

“This is their living room and kitchen,” said Winslow, gesturing to the dozens of students eating together. “This is where they break bread, listen to music, relax. And where they get their nourishment to keep studying.” The students are also getting an education in the importance of supporting local farmers and where their food comes from an on-site farmers’ market and events such as the day-long Eat Local Challenge and Low Carbon Diet day.

Students eat well and local farmers benefit from Bamco’s Farm to Fork program, a company-wide initiative to purchase seasonal and regional produce from local farmers within a 150-mile radius. The company now spends tens of millions of dollars each year supporting small local farms. Chef Hall appreciates the freedom to be creative and the access to incredibly flavorful food. He never worries about ordering too much food; the students fly through 10 cases of fresh fruit a day. If the kids want fries or a candy bar, there are some of those, too. Winslow recently brought in The Taco Guys food truck to campus, which was a big hit, and is thinking of bringing in a top-notch frozen yogurt vendor.

Bamco spent a little more than $2.5 million to renovate the café, which brings in roughly $10 million in top line sales per year. To those who might grumble that only private school kids have access to such good food, company Vice President Maisie Greenawalt said, “Everyone should have access to great tasting, nutritious food. Making that a reality requires a food system based on ethics, not simply economics. If the primary goal of food service is to pay as little as possible to feed as many students as possible, we will continue to be stuck in this place where students are fed processed foods that are low priced because they are based on subsidized crops like corn. Institutional leaders need to recognize that food plays a larger role on campus than simply sustenance. Dining halls are gathering places where community is built. And, our society needs to be willing to pay a little more for that.”

The Market Café is located at 2130 Fulton Street at University Center; San Francisco, California 94118

Originally Published on the InsideScoopSF.

We are preparing for the most thoroughly planned meal in America, and it’s not Thanksgiving dinner. It’s school lunch.

Once every five years school meals are put on the Congressional kitchen’s front burner through reauthorization of the Child Nutrition Act. In the process of cooking up this legislation, school meals have been researched, reviewed, rallied for and railed against. And while the resulting stuffed turkey that is the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids’ Act, is not perfect, it’s pretty darn good.

Congress must stick a fork in the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session, get it done and finally serve the kids.

For the last two years, advocates, lobbyists, politicians, and celebrities from Rachael Ray to Michelle Obama have worked to craft a bill that will daily affect the lives of the 31 million children who clamor to the nation’s school cafeterias to quell their grumbling bellies. For this bill to pass, over the next few days we the people must prove to our elected officials that the Child Nutrition Act is a national priority.

This past September marked our country’s first National Childhood Obesity Awareness Month. Yet while one in three U.S. children are obese or overweight, one in four struggle with hunger. The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Economic Research Service (USDA-ERS) reported last week that more than 50 million Americans, including more than 17 million children, are food insecure–meaning they lack consistent access to a nutritious, well-balanced diet.

Simultaneous hunger and obesity may seem like a paradox, but the root cause is the same: lack of access to healthy food. Give children nourishing food in the cafeteria, nutrition education in the classroom, and hands-on learning through school gardens, and a lifetime of healthy eating can take root.

We need to show our support for House passage of the $4.5 billion child nutrition bill that passed the Senate earlier this year. If the bill isn’t on the president’s desk soon, supporters will have to start over in the new Congress. It’s like dropping the turkey in front of all the seated family and friends.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act offers a real chance to improve nutrition for all children. By improving opportunities for healthy meals in and out of school, the bill would take an important step towards addressing both child hunger and obesity.

Unanimously passed by the Senate and supported by more than 1,300 national, state and local organizations, the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act (S. 3307) will:

• Improve school meals;
• Support farmers through Farm to School programs;
• Address skyrocketing obesity rates; and
• Feed more hungry children.

The bill would help reduce hunger and increase children’s access to healthy meals by expanding the after-school supper program nationwide, better connecting eligible children with free school meals, and streamlining the certification process for the Women, Infants, Children (WIC) program.

The bill would strengthen nutrition standards for all foods sold in schools, provide schools with increased resources and training to improve meal quality, and support Farm to School programs and school gardens.

Last week, the House designated October as National Farm to School Month. Now they have a chance to walk the walk, in addition to talking the talk, by passing a bill that will increase access to quality food for school children, foster local farm job growth and generate local economic development. The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act establishes a competitive grant and technical assistance program in the Department of Agriculture to increase the use of local foods from small- and medium-sized farms in schools, with $40 million in mandatory funding.

The competitive grant program would help create more Farm to School programs benefiting kids and communities alike. A recent study from the University of Minnesota found the potential economic benefit of Farm to School to the region ranged from about $20,000 if each school served one locally grown meal a month to up to $430,000 if they bought large amounts from farmers.

Now consider that the fast-food industry spent more than $4.2 billion on marketing & advertising in 2009 alone, according to the Yale’s Rudd Center for Food Policy & Obesity. And our elected officials can’t pass child nutrition legislation that provides almost an equivalent amount in $4.5 billion over 10 years to reduce hunger and provide access to healthy food.

What have you done to help reach the goals of ending child hunger by 2015 and solving childhood obesity in a generation?

Before you pass the turkey, consider helping to pass the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act during the lame-duck session. You and your family can deliver a strong message to Congress to vote yes on this urgently needed legislation, by sending your photo as part of a nationwide photo petition. Go here for details.

A healthy school lunch for our children is something to be truly thankful for this holiday season.

Originally published on Huffington Post

A new compelling documentary tells the complicated story of the federal school lunch program, its origins, challenges, and opportunities, teasing out nuances without leaving viewers in the weeds. Lunch Line, a film by Michael Graziano and Ernie Park, resists taking sides on this divisive topic even while it deals with vampires and wolves.

Vampires and wolves? Early in the film we meet five Tilden Academy students, black teenagers from a Chicago school where 99.8% of the students qualify for free school lunch. The Tilden crew are traveling to Washington DC, where they will compete in the Cooking Up Change contest and create a winning meal that costs $1.00 per serving, meets USDA nutritional standards, and tastes great. When one of the Tilden teens delivers a breathless analysis of the wolves vs. vampires conflict in the Twilight book and movie series, the filmmakers grab this motif and use it to tell the history of the federal school food program.

Wolves are cast as the social reform-minded liberals while vampires play the agriculture-protecting conservatives in a comic book-style illustrated retelling of school food’s origins. In one of the great bi-partisan compromises of American history, “wolf” Senator Jerry Voorhis meets “vampire” Senator Richard Russell to hammer out the 1946 School Lunch Act. The condition of Dixiecrat Russell’s support was that the program be administered by the USDA, an alliance that has proven both detrimental and advantageous. The national school food program is famous among reformers  for suffering a glut of starchy, processed USDA surplus commodities; yet its alliance with the powerful USDA has given the school food program the political clout needed to survive numerous attacks over six decades.

But what to do about the outdated nutritional standards and the program’s role in the obesity epidemic? Is the USDA just dumping subsidies into the school food program? As current and former USDA officials, school food activists, and others debate, the questions become increasingly complex. Meanwhile, we see the non-profit Organic School Project work miracles, bringing fresh organic foods that meet nutritional standards into Chicago public school cafeterias, only to see the program fold for lack of adequate funding.

Lunch Line reaches a climax at this crisis point: there is simply not enough money going into school food to make significant change. But just as some Chicago schools lose the Organic School Project the city responds to demand and transitions more whole foods-based menus. We learn about the national Farm to School program, a healthful collaboration between agriculture and schools. And as the film reaches a conclusion a familiar theme emerges: we achieve victory, or at least something vaguely approximating it, through unlikely alliances and compromise.

The primary focus of Lunch Line is telling the story of American school food. But if the implicit mission of this film is to spur viewers to action, it’s ambiguous as to where those entry points are. We see mostly government officials, bureaucrats, and activists as the main agents of change; more parent activists–especially parents of color–in the film would have made the film more compelling to the people who have the greatest stake in the school food system. Fortunately, the filmmakers are partnering with food organizations for its national screenings, and those alliances, plus a clever worksheet the filmmakers created, could help parents find those points for engagement.

To request a screening of Lunch Line email lunchlinescreening@gmail.com or send a note through the Lunch Line Facebook page. Watch the trailer at http://www.ujifilms.com/lunchline/

School gardens are as old as schools themselves. As Arden Bucklin-Sporer and Rachel Pringle see it, however, their return might just be the key to a modern education. Bucklin-Sporer and Pringle are the executive director and programs manager (respectively) of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance (SFGSA) and authors of the new book How to Grow a School Garden: A Complete Guide for Parents and Teachers. I spoke with them recently about the book, their network, and what it will take to change education—one green schoolyard at a time.

What will readers get from How to Grow a School Garden?

Arden Bucklin-Sporer: It’s a practical guide on how to build and design a garden, grow the community around it, and sustain the project. It’s not about how to grow this or that plant–although we do include anecdotes about what plants work best with kids.

Rachel Pringle: It really brings you step by step through the process; if you’re a parent or a teacher at a school, it shows you how to begin. And then once you have that space, how you sustain that space by creating a program around it–whether it revolves around nutrition or environmental education or outdoor education, or all those things.

What is the school garden landscape like right now?

ABS: Even in this time when resources tend to be shrinking, the green schoolyard landscape is thriving. In San Francisco, that’s largely thanks to Prop A, which provides bond funding to build green schoolyards. We have about 80 school gardens here and the nice thing is that they’re connected through SFGSA, so they can speak with one voice, and we can advocate on behalf of everybody.

RP: And that’s something we’re seeing not just in our city but also in Berkeley, in LA, in Boston, and in Texas; these regional networks are popping up all over. I have a Google alert for school garden, so every day I get a whole list of things that are happening across the country and around the world. But the thinking around school gardens is also really expanding into nutrition, connecting kids with nature, and outdoor education.

There’s this renewed focus on agriculture and on where food comes from and I do think the recession has had a big hand in it. We’re in a society where we’re removed from how things come to be; there’s so much technology and everything just happens for us and it’s incredible, but I think people are really interested in the inner workings.

Especially when they have more time than money.

ABS: Exactly. So instead of looking outwards, more people are looking in their own back yards and in their schoolyards for adventure.

Green School Yards are also places to teach the practices of sustainability. For instance,  we have rain water harvesting in some gardens now, and other ways we incorporate discussions of percolation and ground water–these concepts are really important for kids to get.

You mentioned that these gardens are now often speaking with a unified voice; what is that voice saying?

ABS: We’re letting city and district officials know that we’re here—that this is a movement, and it’s organized. We’re also asking for funding, because green schoolyards are often under-resourced, so we’re looking for clever ways to support these programs.

RP: In general, we’re asking for a shift in the way people think about education. The recent Berkeley study is just the latest of several to show that garden-based learning really enhances traditional learning—math, science, language arts. So we’re asking for a shift in our ideas of what can happen in schools.

Is there a sense that a class that takes place outside the school buildings is peripheral?

ABS: Yes, there’s the idea that outside is for informal learning and inside is for formal learning. But you can do plenty of formal learning outside, and I think it’s more likely that a child who learns outside understands that learning goes on everywhere—rather than just turning it on when you’re in the classroom and off when you leave.

We’re also very concerned with place-based learning and making students aware of how their particular environment and ecology shape the garden. We want our kids to really know where they’re from, because we realize that if they haven’t taken care of or cared about something in their own sphere of influence, they’re less likely to care about broader environmental concerns.

Do you want to speak to some of the challenges people face when establishing a school garden?

ABS: For one, you have to think carefully about how to make it sustainable. Because no one really wants a garden that has fallen into disrepair and is causing problems for the school’s landscaping department. So there are challenges always in understanding what is an institutional garden that will go beyond your kids’ experience at the school and hopefully continue for decades. Resources and money to pay a garden educator are also often a challenge. You don’t have to have that, but it really does make a better program.

RP: Teachers coming out of credential programs and colleges are by and large not coming out with a background in ecology—or a general sense of systems or biology.

So we have all these teachers who are trepidant about incorporating an outdoor classroom into traditional teaching. Ultimately I think the sustainability of these programs relies on getting all teachers more familiar with outdoor classrooms—so you don’t have to hire a garden coordinator or find that extra funding.

We hear a lot about the barriers to entry for young farmers; are school gardens another outlet for young people who want to grow food?

RP: Yes, it melds into the urban agriculture world. And I think that is going to be a more common type of farming–growing food in urban areas and in small spaces. So teaching in a green classroom is kind of a primer for that, and I think there are a number of students looking for jobs like this.  I’ll be curious to see what’s happening ten years from now.

Originally published by CUESA

An ex-Washington Post reporter, who now blogs about school food, recently spent a week embedded in the central kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Northern California.

Ed Bruske’s mission: To find out how one school community manages to cook food from scratch for its students.

What’s going on in Berkeley isn’t news to those of us, myself included, who live in the town and whose child attends a BUSD school.

But, of course, lots of school-food fixers around the country want the inside scoop on how to get real meals into school cafeteria. “I’m so glad Ed did this,” says Ann Cooper, the “renegade lunch lady,” who was brought in to overhaul Berkeley’s school food five years ago. “It’s great when an outsider comes in and reports back, as opposed to singing your own praises.”

Bruske’s the man for the job. Earlier this year, he embarked on a similar reporting project. He wanted to know just what gets dished up for lunch at his daughter’s elementary school in Washington, D.C. So Bruske, a personal chef, detailed his culinary misadventures with school cafeteria food in the nation’s capital in a seven-part series called Tales from a D.C. Kitchen. Not surprisingly, he discovered that the kids ate pre-cooked, processed foods, not unlike the fare the Berkeley school district rejected several years ago.

Many schools–as you probably know unless you’ve been hidden under a pile of commodity chicken nugget boxes lately–typically dish up frozen, industrially manufactured foods. “The joke in school food circles these days is that the most important tool in modern school kitchens has become the box cutter,” writes Bruske in his blog The Slow Cook. All the better to quickly slice through the boxes and plastic wrap to get to the “food-like” products, such as the ubiquitous chicken nuggets and tater tots. Then they’re ready for the microwave and served up on plastic trays in time for lunch.

Bruske’s series ran for a week. His first post focuses on prepping chicken, which in Berkeley means frozen pieces marinated in teriyaki sauce, not those pulverized patties pushed in cafeterias across the country that Jamie Oliver deconstructed for kids on his recent Food Revolution reality TV show, set in Huntington, West Virginia–dubbed the unhealthiest town in the U.S. (The Huntington kids, um, ate them up unlike kids in England, who refused to touch the patties when The Naked Chef conducted the same experiment there.)

The takeaway from Bruske’s initial installment? Making real food requires real labor. Labor takes time and time is money. And even in Berkeley’s much-touted model school food program, which has benefited from the culinary chops of Alice Waters and Ann Cooper — the grand dames of the school food improvement movement — you will still see pizza on the menu at least once and sometimes twice a week. Nachos too. That’s true for all 16 Berkeley schools, even at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, home to the Edible Schoolyard and the state-of-the-art Dining Commons. (In fairness, that’s pizza with a whole-wheat crust, scratch sauce, veggie toppings, and turkey sausage. And the nachos are made with whole foods as well.)

Still, as Bruske notes: “Alice Waters might cringe at the way her food rules have been bent to accommodate juvenile tastes.”

In his second BUSD blog Bruske, who also tends his own urban farm and teaches food appreciation in an after-school program at his daughter’s school, recounts how the activism of Berkeley parents was key to the food revolution that has taken place in a town well-known for political activism. Up until five years ago, Berkeley schools served up corn dogs, canned commodity vegetables, and fruits laden with high fructose corn syrup. This kind of food in a place dubbed the Gourmet Ghetto, home to Alice Waters and her “delicious revolution,” with its focus on fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. Waters toured the cafeterias and reported that they looked like prisons, notes Bruske.

Until the parents protested. It took, of course, much lobbying of school administrators and local politicians, teaming up with advocacy groups like the Center for Ecoliteracy, and educating voters to bring about change and find the money to make it happen. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation granted around “$100,000ish” to bring Cooper in as a consultant to get the job done. As former school superintendent Michelle Lawrence says in this installment, you have to invest in food in the same way you invest in books.

Cooper worked hard to get rid of processed foods and flavored milk, and introduced salad bars, whole grains, and loads of raw vegetables, which find their way into cooked meals.  During Cooper’s tenure — she left a year ago to tackle a similar problem at a school district three times the size of Berkeley in Boulder, Colorado — the Dining Commons was built at Martin Luther King, Jr, Middle School.

It now serves as the central kitchen for the entire district of 16 schools. The Dining Commons looks lovely, and happens to be housed at the same school as the Edible Schoolyard, the kitchen-garden program also started by Waters. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a volunteer in the kitchen there for the past five years.)

In part three, Bruske reveals why it’s so important to have real chefs in school kitchens — and just how rare that is. For BUSD executive chef Bonnie Christensen, who has done stints in some of the best NYC restaurants, and sous chef Joan Gallagher, plating aesthetically-pleasing food for students is an essential part of their culinary craft, writes Bruske. They must also comply with food rules and regulations, work within a tight budget, and meet all the federal nutritional requirements — including all that nonsense about two starches that drove Jamie Oliver crazy in his recent TV series.

In the fourth installment, we learn how Cooper combed the school district budget and was savvy enough to find funds slated for “Meals for Needy,” which should have been going to school food but weren’t. That turned out to be manna from heaven for the Berkeley cooking crew — an extra $879,000 in cash this year, which represents around 24 percent of the entire school food budget, Bruske notes.  Cooper also started providing free school breakfast for all of the 9,100 Berkeley students.  Serving breakfast, Cooper learned, is essentially a cash cow for the school food program; extra revenue from breakfast helps pay for better food at lunch.

There are school breakfast naysayers: Some teachers aren’t too keen about the time it takes away from teaching and the increased mess in the classroom, which can attract unwanted creatures. Some parents grumble that their child now eats two breakfasts. But, as Bruske points out, breakfast in Berkeley is typically a small, fruit muffin or box of whole grain cereal with a low sugar content, plain, organic milk, and fresh fruit.

In his final post on the subject, Bruske works the lunch line and reveals just how hard it is to get middle schoolers to eat their greens and beans. Progress, it seems, happens in small steps, even in a green education paradise like Berkeley. The BUSD kitchen staff work hard to incorporate produce in ways that are attractive to students — they roast veggies rather than steam, (which enhances flavor and appearance), vegetables also show up in pasta sauces, meat loaf, shepherd’s pie, and soup.

An epilogue for the series is here. You can read all the installments in their entirety by visiting The Slow Cook.

So, just how well is the BUSD program doing? The numbers of kids signed up for school lunch hasn’t grown much since the changes were put in place, and participation is essential for keeping costs on track. About a quarter of Berkeley school kids eat the federally-subsidized school meal; nearly 70 percent of the lunches served go to students who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals based on family income.

Most high school students still leave school to forage for food, typically at fast food joints close to campus. But the program isn’t losing money. “It essentially breaks even and we no longer take money from the general fund,” Bonnie Christensen told me. “There isn’t any profit, per se, any money left over after paying for food, labor, and supplies is reinvested in the program. But we are paying our bills and staying in the black. We keep a watchful eye over our expenses on a daily basis. We work within a very tight budget. There is no wiggle room.”

Christensen also told me that training and educating kitchen staff on how to cook from scratch is a constant, time-consuming job. Some really care and feel empowered because they’re learning new skills, she notes. But it can be difficult to get everyone on board and she is largely working with relatively unskilled workers. “Until we as a society value the food service employees and pay them a living wage, then doing this job will continue to be a challenge.”

Still she’s committed to the task. “I do this job with pride — I come in at 4:45 a.m. and leave around 2 p.m. and I’m wiped out by the end of the day. But I do this because I’m a mother as well as a chef, and what could be more important than feeding all our children well?” asks Christensen, whose two children will attend BUSD schools next year.

Of course, Berkeley is a small school system, not beholden to huge food service corporations such as Chartwells, Sodexo, and Aramarck, which have contracts with more than 500 school districts around the country, writes Bruske in his final post from the field.

Is it possible, then, for a large school district, say in Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., to achieve what Berkeley has achieved?

Absolutely, says Cooper. “But it takes systemic change, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires a lot of money — that’s the reality,” she adds. “And you need to get as many students participating in the program — so your labor costs are a lower percentage of your overall costs — and you need your staff to buy in to the program and receive training on cooking with raw ingredients. But we did it in Berkeley, I’m doing it Boulder. It is absolutely possible.”

Could you see this kind of program working in your child’s school? What obstacles do you think you’d face? Do you have questions or comments about Berkeley’s school food program?

Feel free to chime in below.

Photo: Berkeley Unified School District 2007 Nutrition Staff, courtesy BUSD; Alice Waters and students, courtesy Edible Schoolyard; Chef Ann Cooper, courtesy Ann Cooper.

A version of this post originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale