$420k grant to enourage kids to eat more veggies

[Guest guest]

http://www.bestofmontereycounty.com/

11/21-28 , the article will not be there permanently

 

I hope this will be an article as an inspiration to

all teachers and parents. Teachers have to put up

with " COKE and PEPSI " and candy machines at school.

The school food is usually disgusting. sunny

 

here's the article: (did you see the picture of the

chubby kid?)

 

School lunches make a change for the fresher

 

| By Traci Hukill | Photos by Randy Tunnell

 

Last week, the students at Fremont Elementary School

in Salinas lined up at a brand new child-sized salad

bar and filled their trays with fresh lettuce,

spinach, applesauce and carrots.

 

Suzanne du Verrier, food service director for the

Alisal Union Elementary School District, says the

salad bar's first day was a booming success.

 

" I'm a little blown away, they're doing so well with

it, " she says. " The first day they probably took more

food than any of them could eat--we knew that might

happen at first--and staff was saying, 'You don't have

to take some of everything!' We're very, very happy. "

 

Why fresh vegetables should be a novelty at a school

in the nation's Salad Bowl is a modern riddle. Some of

the children who heaped lettuce-mix on their trays

last week undoubtedly have relatives who picked the

lettuce. But they have never before been able to eat

locally grown salad at school. Nor have the students

in any other public school in the Salinas Valley or on

the Monterey Peninsula. Such is the disconnect

engendered by an industrial agriculture system.

 

The Fremont Elementary salad bar came about because of

a $420,000 Nutritional Network Grant, available from

the California Department of Agriculture only to

schools with a high percentage of low-income kids--who

are at much higher risk of obesity than children of

more affluent families. (Thirteen percent of Monterey

County's children 12 and younger are classified as

obese, which puts them at risk of heart disease and

diabetes.)

 

Du Verrier is crossing her fingers for approval of a

second grant to do four more salad bars and more

classroom education.

 

" If we can get to them before they go to middle

school, " she says, " we can make a big difference. "

 

Similar changes are afoot in a handful of programs

throughout the nation's school cafeterias.

 

Last year the United States Department of Agriculture

created the Food System Project, with five pilot

programs nationwide, to support schools' direct

purchase of produce from local farmers. Several other

" farm-to-school " programs have gained a foothold in

California, most without benefit of USDA funding.

 

The Santa Monica Municipal Unified School District

buys the produce for all its schools from six local

farmers. Districts in Ventura County and Davis have

pilot projects in place for similar programs. Pajaro

Valley Unified in Santa Cruz County is in the process

of locating local apple farmers to supply fruit to its

schools.

 

In the 16-school Berkeley Unified School District,

food purchasers have taken it one step further, buying

organic produce whenever possible and purchasing

veggies primarily from local farmers. One Berkeley

school, Willard Elementary, even serves lettuce and

carrots from the school garden.

 

Proponents of farm-to-school programs cite several

advantages of buying produce from local farmers.

Typically, nutrition is first on the list. Prevention

of obesity is only one benefit to eating better foods;

recent studies show that children also learn more

readily when they're properly nourished.

 

But instead of providing more and more healthy meals,

schools locally and nationwide have gone from bad to

worse. Coke machines are common in school hallways.

Several schools districts, including Monterey

Peninsula Unified, have established franchises with

fast-food chains, guaranteeing that students will get

too much fat, too much sugar, and not enough that's

fresh and wholesome.

 

To combat this trend, during the last session of the

California legislature, the California Teachers

Association poured considerable time and resources

into advancing Senate Bill 19, originally conceived to

fight the encroachment of fast food and vending

machines in schools. Ultimately the bill was gutted

and, though it passed, it guarantees no funds for the

commendable programs it encourages.

 

Still, the teachers' support of the bill speaks of a

burgeoning awareness among educators of the importance

of good food.

 

The farm-to-schools advocates also point to freshness

as an advantage. Like anyone else, kids will sooner

eat a sweet, crisp apple than a mushy one, and that

makes all the difference in forming kids' ideas about

good food.

 

" Freshness is a quality that we've almost completely

lost the ability to recognize, " says Janet Brown of

the Center for Ecoliteracy in Berkeley, the think-tank

that worked with Berkeley's school district to revamp

its food policy.

 

Brown adds that buying fresh produce from local

farmers is ecologically healthier, too.

 

" As the distance opens up between field and table, "

she says, " all the non-renewables pour in: pesticides,

fungicides, waxes, cold storage, shrink-wrap,

long-distance transport. What we're really subsidizing

is the petroleum industry. "

 

Kathleen Nolan, a nutrition educator for UC

Cooperative Extension, says that farm-fresh produce is

tremendously more healthful than is food from another

time-zone.

 

" A lot of nutrients, especially water-soluble vitamins

like vitamin C, start degrading the minute the plant

is pulled out of the ground, " Nolan says. " So clearly

if you pick a radish out of the ground and eat it

right there, it's the best. "

 

Connecting schools to local farms provides a benefit

to local farmers, too. Reggie Knox of the Community

Alliance with Family Farmers says farm-to-school

programs keep local economies healthy and preserve

rapidly vanishing farmland. " We're trying to build a

local food system and support local entrepreneurship, "

he says.

 

Knox likes the idea of introducing kids to the farmers

who provide the food they eat. " If you have a farmer

come into the classroom with some carrots, anybody

will get excited about that, " he says. " It's basically

a myth that little kids don't eat vegetables. It's how

they're socialized. "

 

Raising the Salad Bar

 

Where schools have planted gardens, they've tapped

into children's need for a connection to living

things. Where they have brought nutrition education

into the classroom, their message has spread

throughout entire communities as children ask parents

to buy grapes and bananas at the grocery store.

 

Christine Moss coordinates one such program: Monterey

County's Project Leaders Encouraging Activity and

Nutrition (Project LEAN), designed to combat the

alarming incidence of obesity in California's

children. Kids here are about 25 percent more likely

to be overweight than kids elsewhere in the United

States.

 

Moss is hopeful about fighting obesity and promoting

good health through new concepts about school

nutrition. When all the elements of a nutrition

curriculum come together, she says, something magical

happens.

 

" That apple in children's hands, when they understand

the process of how it was grown, becomes so much more

than something they leave on the buffet line, " she

says. " It just becomes more meaningful. And of course

it's healthier when it's grown 10 minutes away rather

than trucked in from Idaho. "

 

For du Verrier and her fellow food-service directors

throughout the county, farm-to-school programs have

another very compelling feature: they fortify the

bottom line.

 

" What a lot of people don't realize is school

districts expect food service departments to be

solvent, " she says. " They don't want to put general

fund money into food service, so we have to run like a

business. "

 

Du Verrier manages a $3 million annual budget that

feeds 7,000 kids a day, some of whom eat more than one

meal at school. To help bring in extra money, her

kitchen contracts with county Social Services to feed

200 needy seniors each day.

 

Du Verrier also hopes the big growers in the area will

give the schools a price break.

 

" Here we are in the heart of the Salad Bowl, with

multimillionaires all around, " she says, " and I'm

paying top dollar for produce. Why can't they help the

schools? I'm not asking anyone to give food away, but

why not give it to me at cost? If we get kids to eat

their fruits and veggies and they go home and say,

'Hey Mom, buy this stuff,' isn't that free advertising

for them? "

 

Good fresh food can mean increased sales, and that

could make a real budgetary difference, du Verrier

notes-- especially in high schools.

 

" This is a captive audience, " she says, gesturing at

table of third-graders at Creekside Elementary, where

the kids are eating piroshkis, tater tots, mixed

veggies and pears. " But you know what it's like when

you're a teenager. You're picky, you don't like

anything. "

 

High schools wind up contracting with fast-food

providers like Taco Bell, Pizza Hut and Domino's for

two reasons: the conglomerates sell to school

districts for cheap, and the familiar brands lure

students into eating on campus, so that food service

departments can keep up the " participation " they so

desperately need in order to stay solvent.

 

This is where data from Santa Monica Municipal School

District gets very interesting to people like du

Verrier.

 

Tracie Payton, food purchaser for the school district,

says the Farmer's Market Salad Bar is cheaper than hot

lunches--and it has increased student participation in

school lunches at all the schools.

 

The district primed the pump with assemblies,

classroom presentations and taste-tests soliciting

student opinion, and it worked. The initial interest,

especially at the elementary school level, was

overwhelming.

 

" The moment we introduced the salad bar we saw

participation increase as much as 1700 percent at some

sites, " she says. " The secondary sites were a bit more

challenging. We had to feature a special 'bar week' at

John Adams Middle School just to get the students to

come and try the salad bar, so one day we featured the

'Build Your Own Dessert Bar,' 'Build Your Own Chef

Salad Bar,' 'Try the Salad Bar/Get A Free CD.' We gave

away cassette tapes and even featured the California

Sushi Academy--that was a big hit!! As a result we did

get more students to come in and participate. "

 

A Growing Trend

 

At John Steinbeck Elementary School in Salinas,

students from kindergarten through fifth grade can go

to the Growing Science Center and play in the dirt.

Different classes have plots on which to grow organic

lettuce, carrots, greens, tomatoes and even apples and

grapes. An amphitheater next to the garden provides a

place for teachers to organize classes. Sometimes at

lunch the older kids go there to read.

 

" They absolutely love being outside in the garden

working, " says Gordon Mayfield, a teacher who runs the

garden. " Kids that don't perform well in traditional

classroom settings are sometimes the ones doing

wonderfully in the garden. They have an outlet for

that energy. "

 

When the fruits and vegetables mature, Mayfield says,

the teachers may bring them into the classroom and

prepare a salad. This, says Department of Education

Nutrition Services Division Director Ann M. Evans, is

an important link in the cycle of nutrition education.

 

 

" Kids learn to care for another form of life and learn

to nurture themselves through that, " she says.

 

The combination of school garden, fresh produce and

food education can be a potent one, she says. " There's

a lot of value to a consistent message. If you go to

the trouble to present the food pyramid, and at lunch

they see something recognizable from that, it's

simpler for them to get the message. They know that

what the school is teaching in the classroom verbally

it thinks is important enough to do. That kind of

authenticity of message becomes a hidden curriculum.

You learn it without thinking about it. "

 

Both Evans and Janet Brown maintain that getting kids

to choose healthy food is really only a matter of

exposing them to it and presenting it attractively.

 

" If they start with a seed and raise it themselves and

plant it and continue to tend it, and at some time are

able to pull off that cherry tomato and put it in

their mouth, a light bulb goes on, " Brown says. " And

the next time they walk into a salad bar and see a

cherry tomato, they select it. "

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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