What is farm to school? Why is it important? I’m a Farm to School coach, new to the field, and sometimes it's tempting to explain my job with the short fragment, “I help connect local agriculture with local schools.” But that doesn’t capture the radical, existentially crucial work that is done under the Farm to School umbrella. October is Farm to School month, so it’s a good time to review, “what is this Farm to School movement?”
To find out the answer, I attended a webinar on careers in the US food system. My ears perked up when I heard a young woman say, “my high school cafeteria was doing Farm to School before that was a national movement.” Did Farm to School influence her decision to work in Indiana’s State Department of Agriculture? Rachel, the young woman, generously told me about her journey from Farm to School student to professional Food Distribution Manager. The main star of the story was Becky Landes, the Food Service Director at Manchester Community Schools in Indiana. Becky has been buying her beef and vegetables directly from local farmers for 20 years now. A pioneer of the movement, she says she does it for two reasons.
First, she lives in a rural, agricultural community in northern Indiana. The school is surrounded by farms, tall corn and short soybeans. Kids from these farms go to Becky’s school and eat the entrees she cooks up 180 days of the year. She feeds the kids and she is also helping those families' businesses thrive. “In a rural and farming community, when we support each other it helps us survive as a community,” Becky reflected. Thinking back to covid shut-downs, she could drive down the street to pick up meat and veggies when global supply chains stumbled to a halt. Keeping local farms in business means that these families can continue to serve our communities. Community means you help each other survive and grow. And who wouldn’t want help with that?
Second, in keeping with a key tenet of the Farm to School movement, Becky sees the cafeteria as a classroom. Here, you’ll find clanging trays and shouts of kids finally letting loose after spending half the day “keeping a lid on it.” Quietly, in the background, the foundations for a lifetime of eating habits are forming, unnoticed by most. Chicken nuggets and pizza are great. But have you tried asparagus? Believe it or not, kids who balked at these “funny looking green beans” are now requesting she serves more asparagus. Exposing our kids to new foods does them a favor by giving them options. Becky offers the option of fruit-infused water. When kids ask what this is, it gives an opening to explain that, “this is a way to flavor water without adding a bunch of sugar to it.” This is new information. They can make different choices in the future with what they learn today.
Last but not least, “if we can feed kids good food that they will eat, they will be more ready to sit in a classroom and learn.” If the food tastes good (and fresh food tastes really good), then a kid will be more likely to eat it. Anyone who has hurriedly chomped on a few bites of energy bar or cookie, hoping it would get them through the shift they’re running late for, knows that you’ll probably be feeling crabby and hungry soon. I know this from repeated, repeated experiences. (I am, unfortunately, one of those people who tends to run late.) So give the kids good food so they can study well and be less crabby!
One student who benefitted from Becky’s locally sourced lunches is Rachel Brandenburg, now a Food Distribution Manager at the Indiana State Department of Agriculture. Rachel fondly remembers the local-beef burgers and salad bar sparkling with heaped four-season spring mix and veggies. She piled the fresh lettuce, brightly colored peppers, and crisp carrots onto her plate. She recalls that the food was really good, and she didn’t realize other schools’ cafeteria food didn’t stimulate one’s appetite quite as well.
In addition to enjoying her school cafeteria’s food (a claim that not many students can make), Rachel wrote a paper on Farm to School local purchasing in her senior year. In her environmental science class, students explored the connections between local farmers, food, and climate change. A connection that existed just a few hundred feet from her classroom was Becky Landes, her Food Service Director. Becky didn’t put up posters advertising that her food was local but, says Rachel, “I think that speaks to her genuine commitment to buying local food because she doesn't need it to be this big showy thing. She just needs to support the farms; the food is better and it lasts longer… it's the right thing to do.”
Even though she works in local food today, at first Rachel didn’t stick around to her local roots. As most young people, she set out on a journey to carve her own identity, independent of her rural, agricultural background. “I thought people saw rural as being backwards” she reflects, “and I didn’t want people to think I was backwards.” So, she moved to the city and studied international economics. She planned to move to Germany. However, in college, Rachel was exposed to professors who encouraged her to see how her hometown community fit into the bigger picture. Using maps and sociology, Rachel investigated how rural communities like her own were impacted by commercial agriculture land use and climate change.
Once she realized that the cultural story of her community was shaped by food systems, her own narrative shifted and she was in awe of the countless worlds that overlapped around food. These food systems impact her community’s health, mental health, economy, and social networks. “Since our food system is so large scale, agriculture is like two different industries now,” Rachel observes. Farming is now split into “huge scale beef from Brazil, but on the other hand you have 100 acre farms that are still participating in direct-to-purchaser models with farmers markets or even with Farm to School.” Similarly, Farm to School programs like ours in southern Vermont help strengthen the ties between the school staff, students, and local farms so that both our students and our local businesses can grow stronger and more resilient.
After over 10 years apart, Rachel and Becky have been reunited. They have a working relationship now within Indiana food systems. In her role with the Indiana State Department of Agriculture, Rachel asks Becky a lot about school regulations on food nutrition, and which local farm products may be a good fit for school cafeterias. “Becky is directly helping me in understanding market connections and how to get local food into schools because she is an expert.” She helps advise on “how we can better support Food Service Directors to continue purchasing locally.” Another way Becky supports the Farm to School movement in Indiana is by telling her story to legislators so they can continue to support FTS program efforts. Reflecting on her high school lunches, Rachel says, “Becky got me thinking about local food and where it comes from. She did such a good job, I didn't even know people wouldn’t prefer things to be sourced locally.”
The work of Food Service Directors and the Farm to School teams that support them help keep the fire lit in the Farm to School movement so we can all have healthier kids, communities, and economies.
- Adelaide Petrov-Yoo