I am named after my father’s mother, Delta Zenobia Barlow, who was born in the Delta region of Mississippi. When I was about seven years old, we went to visit my father’s relatives, for the first time in my memory, on a plantation in Barlow, Mississippi. I have a few faint memories of that journey: deep, rich, red dirt, a big white house, scattered housing occupied by sharecroppers, and a ramshackle building with a hand-lettered sign that read “The Barlow Store.” The whole plantation scene was strange and wondrous and I was trying my best to make sense of what I was seeing.

But something happened in that store that made an impression on me: an exchange between the shopkeeper and a sharecropper, as my uncle stood silently nearby, that revealed to me in an instant that the price charged to the sharecropper for the goods in the store, advanced against the value of his crop at the end of harvest, was exorbitant, and that the whole exchange, the whole system if you will, was profoundly unfair and exploitive. I can remember a sense of revulsion, of shame, like a body blow — and I remember flushing all the way to my tingling scalp, as my uncle, supposedly an upstanding, church-going, state senator, credentialed the transaction through his silent presence.

The insight that began in that experience, and has been nurtured and reinforced in myriads ways since, is that every intersection in the food system — from planting, growing, harvesting, transporting, processing, packaging and selling to cooking and serving and how we dispose of or recycle waste — is a critical juncture with opportunities to be more creative, wise, and compassionate.

That is why I have committed the past nearly two decades of my life to supporting the transformation of school meals along with taking advantage of the opportunity they provide to teach students about everything from health and nutrition to science to economics and the working conditions of the people who grow and pick their food. It’s why I believe that California Food for California Kids, a new initiative the Center for Ecoliteracy is launching with support from TomKat Charitable Trust, is a smart, vital, and hopeful strategy.

The idea is this: What if California schools — which serve nearly 900 million meals every year — offered students more of the wonderful food that is grown right here in our state? New research, released in a 2012 Center for Ecoliteracy report, suggests that there are significant opportunities to incorporate more of California’s agriculture into school meals — and that means significant opportunities to improve health, education, and the economy.

Are California Kids Eating California Food? Discovering Opportunities for Improving School Meals examines 12 important California crops and purchasing by six school districts in the forefront of food service innovation. Developed by principal investigators Ann M. Evans and Georgeanne Brennan, the report reveals that the bounty of California agriculture creates opportunities that schools have yet to fully realize.
In 2009, for example, while 7.1 billion pounds of lettuce were grown in California, the six surveyed districts (which enroll about one in eight California students) only purchased 700,000 pounds in 2009-2010. While 2.5 billion pounds of strawberries were grown, the surveyed districts only purchased 567,238 pounds. And while 4.78 billion pounds of rice were grown, the districts bought only 298,307 pounds.