WISCONSIN HOMEGROWN LUNCH
Linking the Land with the Lunchroom

by Doug Wubben, Project Coordinator, Wisconsin
Homegrown Lunch

The importance of addressing the eating habits of our young people is clear. The number of overweight children has doubled in the last 25 years (one in five children are now overweight), and obese children are now developing diseases, such as type II diabetes, which used to occur only in adults. With only one in ten children ages six to eleven eating the recommended daily servings of fruits and vegetables (now seven servings), our work is clearly laid out before us.

Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch, like many other “farm-to-school” projects around the country, is working to bring farm-fresh foods to students through the classroom and the lunchroom. By providing high quality, locally produced fruits and vegetables to schools we can instill healthy-eating habits in students while providing crucial support to our family farms.

Mouths-on education
Since children learn best by doing, our approach has been to create hands-on (and mouths-on) activities for them to wrap their senses around. Classroom and lunchroom tastings, farmer-led classroom activities, school garden experiences, and field trips to farms give students an opportunity to re-educate their palates and connect to the source of their food.

One lesson learned in working with young people’s palates is that patience and repetition are necessary ingredients in creating healthy eating habits in children. Another lesson learned is that context makes a tremendous difference. When “Farmer Barb” ends her “vegetable harvest game” with first graders by enthusiastically presenting them with samples of carrot, daikon radish, and kohlrabi, you’d be hard pressed to find any leftovers afterwards. On the other hand, presenting a new item on the plastic-wrapped tray during the 20 minute, minimally supervised lunch period when thoughts of recess compete with hungry stomachs is a more challenging prospect.

Now, how about that lunch?
Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch learned early on in its work with the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) Food Service just how challenging it would be to incorporate fresh, locally-produced foods into the school lunches. These challenges include the structure of federal subsidies for commodity foods, seasonality, and the understandable demand for convenient foods during school lunch preparation. MMSD provides school lunches for all 43 schools through one centralized kitchen facility. The scale on which they operate has developed into a ‘pre-pack’ system where lunches are assembled into packages, chilled, and trucked to each school the next morning where the ‘hot pack’ is re-heated in the school’s oven and then served to students. It is simply amazing how this facility and the staff that run it are able to create and deliver 15,000 meals each school day to all the schools in the district (and with only $0.68/meal to work with for the food).

Despite the challenges involved with changing lunches, we’ve worked in conjunction with the MMSD food service to create a couple new menus that were served to our pilot schools. One of these, a chicken-vegetable fajita wrap with a sweet potato muffin and an apple was offered district-wide to 6,500 elementary students last November. For this one meal the food service took on the extra work of shredding 100 pounds of spinach, cabbage, carrots, and turnips for the vegetable mix and cooking, peeling, and mashing over 400 pounds of sweet potatoes to use in the muffins. No small task for a food service operating on a very tight budget, and by the end of last year it became clear we wouldn’t be able to include local foods into the lunches unless they could be delivered ‘food service ready’ (shredded, mashed, etc…).

This was a problem since there was no one providing the kind fresh-cut produce that we needed for the schools. Fortunately, right about this same time Willy Street Co-op’s Production Kitchen was being built and we discussed the possibility of the new kitchen facility prepping vegetables for school lunches. In the spirit of community service and partnerships that the Co-op is well known for, a partnership with WHL was formed and since opening in April the kitchen has sold the school district shredded carrot, cooked sweet potato, and diced rhubarb for muffins and salad mix for our pilot school picnics.

The coming school year
There’s plenty of work to be done as we evaluate the economics and capacity of the Co-op’s kitchen to provide products to the school food service. This will necessarily be a slow, deliberate process that will hopefully prove fruitful down the road. In the meantime keep an eye on the fall school menu for our Wisconsin Harvest muffins (recipe in the WHL Spring 2005 newsletter at www.reapfoodgroup.org/farmtoschool), and perhaps a few other items to be offered district-wide.

In addition to the work with the school lunch, WHL will be moving three other initiatives forward during the new school year. 1) A “fresh vegetable classroom snack program” will be piloted at a handful of schools; 2) A Local Food school PTO fundraiser that supports local businesses while raising money for school PTOs will be piloted; and 3) Creating a ‘Farm-to-School’ resource packet as one way to expand the reach of the educational programming we’ve created to other schools in the district.

Creating food system change where young people have access to healthy food choices and are encouraged to try new foods takes a broad community effort. Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is fortunate to have many excellent partners in this work. In addition to the Madison school food service, they include the Willy Street Co-op, Dane County Extension Nutrition Educators, the Attic Angel Association, our farmer-educators, Friends of Troy Gardens, Whole Foods, and all the supportive teachers, parents, and volunteers who support us and assist with implementing the project.

For more information
Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch is a joint project of the REAP Food Group and the UW Center for Integrated Agricultural Systems (CIAS). For more information, to find out how to get involved, or to make a financial contribution please visit www.reapfoodgroup.org/farmtoschool or contact Doug Wubben, Project Coordinator at 608-263-6064, dwubben@wisc.edu.