An Extra Dime For Every Lunch

July 29, 2016

It might sound like peanuts, but a 10-cent-per-meal program to get local foods into school lunches stands to bring major benefits to the region’s farmers and students

More local food will be on the menu at schools this fall since the state expanded a Traverse City-based program that adds up to 10 additional cents per lunch to provide local fruits and vegetables in school lunches.

Launched in 2013 by Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities and its partners to promote the farm-to-school movement in the northwest lower Michigan region, the program’s success recently caught the eye of a legislator who wanted to expand it.

One dime per meal might sound like peanuts, but it can have a drastic impact on the quality of food and on the local farm economy, said Diane Conners, a Groundwork senior policy specialist. Consider that the amount spent on food for each school lunch is just $1.20, and that of that amount, roughly 20 or 30 cents goes toward fruits and vegetables. That means a 10-cent increase to each meal’s fruit and vegetable budget boosts that budget by 33 to 50 percent — offering a tasty opportunity for school, farmers, and students.

“This has provided enough funding for [schools] that they now will try things like the romanesco and kale,” Conners said. “They’ll do taste tests with the kids and see if they like it, where they might not have taken that risk before.”

KIDS BUYING KALE CHIPS

If you are 50 or 40, or even 30 years old, you probably wouldn’t recognize a modern school cafeteria meal.

“I mean, we hear that all the time: ‘I never got anything like this. This is amazing what you guys serve,’” said Tom Freitas, food service director at Traverse City Area Public Schools.

Freitas arrived at TCAPS four years ago from a school district in Ohio, where he met kids who had never eaten fresh versions of some common foods.

“They’d take a bite of a peach, and they’d wonder what that thing inside was,” Freitas said.

“That same thing would happen here if you didn’t have this program.”

In many cases, the good eating habits acquired by the student spreads to the parents, who often learn of foods they haven’t tried; the schools also help parents who might be unfamiliar with, say, parsnips, learn how to prepare them.

“The children have a lot to do with the purchasing of groceries. When they go in, and they say, ‘Hey mom, I want the kale chips at home,’ they actually start to change the diets of the adults by bringing the fresh fruits and vegetables in because they like to eat them,” Freitus said.

There’s an education component too; the farm-to-school program at TCAPS incorporates workers from FoodCorp workers, a spinoff of AmeriCorps. The young advocates help to develop lessons that use local foods as teaching tools.

The Traverse Bay Area Intermediate School District partners with Groundwork in administering the AmeriCorp program. Catherine Meyer-Looze, a TBAISD instructional specialist, said curriculum can be designed around local food by teaching nutrition in science class or through calculating recipes in math class or by talking about the state’s agricultural history in social studies.

IT’S GOING TO BE A WHIRLWIND

The impetus for the 10-cent-per-meal program came from the Michigan Good Food Charter, a collaboration of the Michigan State University Center for Regional Food Systems, the Food Bank Council of Michigan, and the Michigan Food Policy Council, which, beginning in 2009, looked at how to improve the state’s food system as a whole.

The collaboration inspired Groundwork to raise money for a local program, which, once it got going, caught the eye of Sen. Darwin Booher (R-Evart), who proposed the legislation that passed in June.

“Being a farmer, I said, ‘Why can’t we just do this, use the local farmers?” Booher said. “It’s great for our children to have these kind of fresh foods and vegetables coming right from our local farmers.”

Booher’s legislation appropriates up to $250,000; schools in 10 northern Lower Michigan counties and 13 western Michigan counties can now apply for grants.

One drawback: The legislation didn’t leave a lot of time for all of the paperwork schools need to complete to apply — everything has to happen before the start of the 2016-2017 school year.

“It’s going to be sort of a whirlwind,” Conners said. “It will be a quick turnaround time for food service directors to apply for funding, and then an advisory council from the Michigan Department of Education will review the applications and determine who can be part of the pilot program.”

In addition to improving the fruit and vegetable options for students, Conners said the 10-cent-per-meal program helps farmers because it ensures a steady market; the promise of state grant money makes it unlikely the schools will cut the local matching funds.

“It has helped farmers know that schools are serious about this,” Conners said. “Farmers for so long were just cut out of serving schools. So when farmers heard that schools were interested in buying local, that was a big deal.”

A POTATO FOR EVERY CHILD

The local food revolution started at TCAPS long before the 10-cent-per-meal program arrived.

Conners began promoting farm-toschool a dozen years ago. She and Groundwork (then called the Michigan Land Use Institute) started by bringing farmers to Traverse City’s Central Grade School.

“We had one farmer a week in October come in to have their products served in the lunch room, and then they would be out in the school garden at recess to meet the kids,” Conners said.

The program was a hit. By letting the kids interact with the farmer, it spurred their interest and prompted some to try foods they otherwise would have avoided.

“We had a great experience. Like with Jim Bardenhagen, a potato farmer from Leelanau County,” Conners said. “Jim’s potatoes were served in the potato bar as a hot entree alternative that day to pizza … And twice as many kids as usual picked the alternative hot entree over pizza.”

For Conners, having a locally grown vegetable (even if it was a potato) beat out pizza (even if it was just some of the kids) was a win. Word spread, and farm-to-school events spread to other TCAPS cafeterias.

Bardenhagen recalls meeting with the kids and taking a bite out of a raw potato for their amusement. He said the farm-to-school experiment started slowly, but it’s become a big part of the region’s farm economy.

“It was kind of just a trial to see how it would work and see if the school would allow it to happen,” he said. “We didn’t move a lot of product at the time, but it was an opening to the future. It kind of opened the door.”

MILLIONS OF DOLLAR OF POTENTIAL

Northwest lower Michigan’s economy already has benefited from the farm-to-school push and the 10-cent-per-meal program.

Conners said the program opens up a deceptively large market to farmers.

“Schools don’t have as much money to spend as a four-star restaurant on ingredients, but they’re often the biggest restaurant in the region,” she said. “They can be a stable market for farmers, as long as the farmers know that they’re really serious about it.”

The new state pilot will provide a match of up to 10 cents a meal for schools buying Michigan-grown fruits and vegetables for an average of three meals a week in fall, two meals a week in winter, and one meal a week in spring.

Even at that amount, Conners said the program could have a massive impact on the development of food businesses around the state.

There were 128 million lunches served in schools during the 2015–2016 school year. If the program were expanded statewide, it would mean $10,240,000 spent on local food. If it were expanded to every school day, more than twice that amount would be spent on local food.

Kelly Lively, policy and outreach partner at Traverse City’s Cherry Capital Foods, a local and Michigan foods distributor, said the expansion of the 10-centper-meal program throughout northwestern Michigan is exciting.

“It’s a chunk of the state where there’s a lot of agriculture, so it will be interesting to see how it moves,” Lively said. “It could be a game changer.”

LOCAL FOOD AND SNOW DAYS

Conners targeted TCAPS for farm-toschool programs around the same time that a new dietician began work at the district, one determined to make the menu more nutritious.

“We decided as a district, and as a department, we would pursue more fruits and vegetables, some more whole grains,” said Jodi Jocks, who has been TCAP’s dietician for 11 years. “We did it slowly, so it wasn’t the shock to the system that some of the other schools have had.”

Jocks and Conners’ missions have been complementary.

Jocks said the effort to introduce more local food goes hand-in-hand with the move toward better nutrition. She said the 10-cent-per-meal program has helped a lot.

“It kind of offsets the cost of local,” Jocks said. “It’s kind of like when you go to the farmers market — it costs more than what you would pay at the grocery store.”

Local also means the food spends less time on the road, which reduces its carbon footprint, is fresher, and tastes better when served than food trucked in from long distances over many days.

There is another surprising advantage that comes from the 10-cent program. It helps cafeteria budgets overcome the jolt that comes from too many snow days.

Snow days strain cafeterias’ budgets because a school day means the loss of a day’s sales. The cafeteria doesn’t get reimbursed for the money kids would have spent on food, and schools don’t receive funds for free and reduced lunches.

“Your food is your inventory, so you’ve bought that food, and you plan to have it on your menu,” Jocks said. “If you have a snow day, you don’t serve that food. In the world of food and education, people don’t think of it like that, but you have to do something with that food that you’ve bought.”

Frietas hopes to see the 10-cent per meal program spread through the state.

“I’d like to think it’s going to be nonpartisan because it’s going to help all voters of Michigan,” he said. “It’s a win-win for everybody — for the economy, for the farmers, for the students, for the schools.”

NOT YOUR TYPICAL LUNCH LADY

Boyne Falls Public School plans to apply for the 10-cent-per-meal program. The school has been dedicated to local food for four years, since the district hired a trained chef to run its cafeteria.

“I’m not your typical lunch lady — I worked in fine dining for almost 20 years,” said Nathan Bates, food service director at Boyne Falls. Bates is a culinary school grad who decided to make a change when he heard the district wanted someone who could integrate local foods into cafeteria fare.

“I was just at a point in my life where I was done with restaurants,” he said. “So I did it, and it’s changed my life, and it’s great.”

Bates said the district is committed to local food and to applying for any grant money that’s available to improve the nutrition for students. In four years he’s already added lots of fruits and vegetables to the salad bar. Next school year, with the 10-cent-per-meal funds, Bates hopes to start purchasing local proteins.

“These are things that schools typically can’t afford,” he said. “We can with farm-toschool money. We’re going to spend it directly on the food.”

Bates works with local farms like Spirit of Walloon Farms, whose farmer he texts back and forth with each Sunday to determine what’s available and what he could use.

“Pea shoots were huge this winter,” Bates said. “They love them.”

The difference between school cafeteria lunches today and decades ago is “night and day,” he said. “There’s a lot more focus on the healthy eating” — a phenomenon in part due to federal nutrition guidelines enacted in 2011. “The macaroni and cheese of 20 years ago, you can’t even serve it. It’s just not OK.”