As an addendum to JL’s post below, Corby Kummer’s dispatch in the July/August Atlantic (not yet online, sorry) is well worth a read for anyone interested in this stuff. Kummer profiles Tony Geraci, the food-service director for the public schools in Baltimore, who’s made an effort to combat obesity and improve student nutrition by stocking vending machines with healthy box lunches and relying on local producers whenever possible. What’s more, and contrary to the experience of some of his less resourceful colleagues, he’s found that that latter measure actually saves his schools money:

[Geraci] found farmers who would sell him, and deliver, all the peaches they could grow – for less than he would pay for commodity peaches packed in corn syrup. Even commodity apples are more expensive than small one for local farms. (Small potatoes, too, Dorothy Brayley, of Kids First, in Rhode Island, told me – as long as they’re white, unlike “chic” red ones.)

Shortly after he arrived, Geraci found a long-disused city-owned orphanage on 33 acres, hired a farm manager, and turned it into an organic farm run by schoolchildren. The project keeps growing, and Geraci keeps finding money to fund it – and to build a central system for the school system’s 80,000 students. “You have to hustle,” he says.

Other food directors aren’t taking no for an answer either, and are quietly making real progress. Jean Ronnei uses a central kitchen to make from-scratch meals for the 40,000 students in the St. Paul, Minnesota, school system, and has removed á la carte junk food. Her program runs in the black, and her success was part of a large analysis by economists at the University of Minnesota that came to a contrarian conclusion: “Healthier school meals are possible without higher government spending to fund nutrition education programs or increased reimbursement rates [emphasis mine – JS].” Labor costs may go up, but only initially – and food costs, as Geraci has proven with local food, go down.

Or at least they sometimes will, and of course the externalities associated with industrial agriculture and the transportation of food across long distances are nothing to scoff at. What’s more, if you take seriously the many ways in which school lunches are inescapably part of a student’s education (which they remain even if a student isn’t involved in growing or preparing the food), the case for making this part of the curriculum one in which, at the very least, students aren’t miseducated about the matters in question, seems to follow quite immediately. Obviously the right approach to these issues is going to vary from place to place, but there is, once again, very little reason to insist that healthy and wholesome food is the sort of thing our country can’t afford.

     Filed under: education, food