Farm to School: USDA supports local foods in schools

The Agriculture Deputy Secretary, Kathleen Merrigan, today announced more than $4.5 million in grants for 68 projects, spanning 37 states and the District of Columbia, to connect school cafeterias with local agricultural producers. “When schools buy food from nearby producers, their purchasing power helps create local jobs and economic benefits, particularly in rural agricultural communities,” Merrigan said. “Evidence also suggests that when kids understand more about where food comes from and how it is produced, they are more likely to make healthy eating choices.”

The first-ever USDA Farm to School grants will help schools respond to the growing demand for locally sourced foods and increase market opportunities for producers and food businesses, including food processors, manufacturers, distributors. Grants will also be used to support agriculture and nutrition education efforts such as school gardens, field trips to local farms, and cooking classes.  The funding will serve more than 3,200 schools and 1.75 million students, nearly half of whom live in rural communities. Projects are diverse, and consider multiple ways to tackle the task. Some award recipients, such as the Lawrence County District in Walnut Ridge, Ark., are using grant funds to coordinate efforts with other school districts to aggregate buying power and attract new producers to the school food service market.

Other funded projects, such as Weld County School District 6 in Greeley, Colo., will expand kitchen facilities to serve local products year-round through processing and freezing techniques. Some schools in New Mexico will receive grant funding to increase the types of products it buys from local vendors. Local cattle farmers already supply the school district with 100 percent locally produced beef; USDA grant funds will be used to develop relationships with local fruit and vegetable producers to serve a full meal using locally sourced products.

This year’s funding also includes:

• Twenty-five programs that create jobs by hiring new farm to school coordinators, with 43 projects supporting and maintaining existing staff. In New Haven, Conn., CitySeed, Inc. will hire a procurement specialist to help New Haven School Food Programs increase the amount of regionally grown produce in the meals of more than 20,900 urban public school students. (Nearly 80 percent of them qualify for free or reduced-cost lunch).
• Thirty-one programs that use food hubs, or partner with mainline distributors. In California, the Community Alliance of Family Farmers will work with a local distributor to create a new line of local produce, making it easier for schools to source products through current distribution channels.
• Forty-four projects that will result in development of new products and menu items. For example, the Lake County Community Development Corporation, in Ronan, Mont., will coordinate with regional lentil farmers to procure protein and fiber rich lentil patties.
• An estimated 47 projects will develop new partnerships by working with and educating farmers and ranchers new to the school food market. For example, the Washington State Department of Agriculture will conduct regional "mobile tours" in which agricultural producers and school food service directors tour the state together, learning about agricultural specialties, identifying opportunities for partnership, and solidifying regional networks.
• Three projects support American Indian communities, including the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in Cloquet, Minn. The reservation will implement a program to improve access to local and traditional foods to increase local economic benefits for producers as well as promote a healthy diet among their youth.
• More than 50 projects support hands-on learning activities, such as field trips to farms and creation of school gardens. The Southwest Georgia Project for Community Education, Inc. will coordinate tours of nearby farms for its 35 school partners, serving nearly 21,000 students.

The Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act of 2010 (HHFKA) amended Section 18 of the Richard B. Russell National School Lunch Act (NSLA) to establish a Farm to School program in order to assist eligible entities, through grants and technical assistance, in implementing farm to school programs that improve access to local foods in eligible schools. Farm to School grants are administered by USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service. The full list of awards granted for fiscal year 2013 is available here.

Farm to School is one component of USDA’s Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food initiative, launched in 2009 to coordinate the Department’s work on local and regional food systems and create new opportunities for farmers, ranchers, consumers and rural communities. An interactive view of USDA programs that support local and regional foods, including farm to school and farm to institution, is available in the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food Compass. The KYF Compass consists of an interactive map of USDA-supported local and regional food projects and an accompanying guide to our programs and results on the ground. In October, the map was expanded and now includes projects from nine other federal agencies.

Green Bronx Machine: Growing Opportunities in NYC

In recent years there has been a growing focus on programs that 'green the ghetto' - trying to make environmental fixes to deprived areas.  While these projects are to be applauded for trying to beautify public space, and for their desire to create more inhabitable neighborhoods - they often come up short in the face of the real, and multifaceted, problem - poverty.  Many new food growing projects are trying to take on multiple goals, with more nuanced plans to attack the various problems presented by the 'ghetto'.  We have seen urban farming projects popping up all over NYC and other large cities, which try at some level to address the economic disparities that lead to the environmental problems, as well as a multiplicity of social problems - Bad health, joblessness, poor education, and a basic lack of opportunities.

All in a days work. Steve, The Graham Windham crew and I behind our second finished wall!

Enter Steve Ritz and and his Green Bronx Machine.  Steve is a teacher in the South Bronx, where he and his kids grow lush gardens for food, greenery -- and jobs.  His unique mix of community greening, education, mentoring, and job opportunity creation is going a long way to addressing the aforementioned problems.  GBM centers around the idea that the greening of America starts with the greening of hearts, minds and wallets rooted in triple bottom line orientations. THe project is dedicated to changing mind-sets and landscapes while harvesting hope and cultivating opportunities inclusively.  The project works to better interconnect the cities neighborhoods, and focuses on creating opportunities for youth of the Bronx.  Steve works with the kids to teach them different methods of community greening, but with an eye for the fact that they need jobs.  Through various partnerships he has been able secure jobs and funding for his students so they can remain focused on developing careers.  His team works to feed themselves, their school and their community - they grow in classrooms and in the Hamptons, they install green roofs and green walls, build greenhouses in Harlem and install turf on Randall,s Island - in short they do it all. Behold the glory and bounty that is Bronx County! 

I spent the last month in Harlem with  Ritz  building vertical growing walls and working to expand his project into new territory - namely Brooklyn.  We worked with the young men from Graham Windham to build growing walls for their center as well as one of our sponsors. It was incredible and inspiring work.  The group that showed up learned a lot and loved it.  Fingers crossed that we'll be able to continue with Graham Windham and expand the Green Machine across all 5 boroughs! 

“Kids should not have to leave their community to live, learn and earn in a better one.”

The Graham Windham crew and I learning to mix growing medium for their centers new growing wall!

“The greening of America starts first with the pocket, then with the heart and then with the mind.”


Here's Josh and George learning how to make a big paycheck in a clean green way - planting ivy for the indoor growing walls in one of our sponsors' houses!

“Black field, brown field, toxic waste field, battlefield — we're proving in the Bronx that you can grow anywhere.”

Steve, TJ, Alex, Alexandra, and Josh with our first finished wall.  Si Se Puede!

To learn more about the Green Bronx Machine, 'like' them on Facebook or click here.

Why the Food and Farm Bill Matters

(The below is a reprint of Siena Crisman: Why Hunger's review on 7.18.12) 

The last week (and in fact months before that) has had food, health and advocacy groups everywhere up in arms and actively supporting, berating, or debating over the 2012 Farm Bill. Often referred to now as the Food and Farm Bill, this piece of legislature passed out of the House Agriculture committee on July 12th, and since then all everyone can concentrate on is how this will be the worst farm bill yet.  I am not inclined to disagree, as a number of the new riders alone give me cause for grief.  However, I think that for the average american there's still very little understanding of how the bill applies to their lives and why they should pay attention or care at all about when and how it passes, and what it says.  Siena Crisman of Why Hunger provided a simple and short, but poignant overview this week of why we should all care about the bill.  I couldn't agree with her more, so I have reproduced it below.

1.            The Erosion of Democracy.

The food system is one of the least democratic parts of our economy. The Food and Farm Bill further consolidates the power of Big Food -- the huge food and farming corporations who make the decisions about what we eat. Average Americans no longer have a say in how our food is grown, where it comes from, what's in it, what's sprayed on it, where it's sold... the list goes on. We've almost entirely been taken out of the equation. The right to good food for all has become the right for a few to profit from food. That doesn't sound like democracy to me.

2.            The food we eat is killing us.

US agriculture policy -- as spelled out in the Food and Farm Bill -- supports this system of overproducing corn and soy, which is then fed to cattle and turned into things like high fructose corn syrup and other additives used in processed foods. The bill doesn't give nearly the same kind of financial support to grow fruits, vegetables, or other nutritious foods. These policies that encourage farming of too much corn and soy result in an abundance of cheap and ubiquitous meat and processed foods. And now we have a public health crisis of obesity, diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related illnesses , because we're all eating so much meat and processed food. For the first time ever, the next generation has a lower life expectancy than its parents - because of the food they're eating! Our farm policy should support healthy food from healthy farms, not the raw ingredients for chemicals that are slowly killing us.

3.            Your fellow Americans.

The biggest portion of Food and Farm Bill spending supports the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program or SNAP, also known as food stamps, which has been a hugely critical safety net for millions of Americans -- as well as one of the best forms of economic stimulus, according to Moody's . The House Agriculture Committee's version of the bill, passed last week, cuts $16.5 billion dollars from SNAP. This translates to a loss of $90 dollars a month from the household budgets of 50,000 American families in the program. Almost half of SNAP participants are kids. Why are we making it harder for struggling parents to feed their children at a time of great economic hardship? SNAP is acting as designed, expanding to meet growing needs during economically difficult times; it will shrink again when the economy improves. Instead of reacting to spikes in SNAP numbers by slashing the program and pulling the safety net from struggling families, the bill should strengthen SNAP -- while we also focus on creating jobs, paying a living wage, and fixing the broken systems that made the economy collapse.

Secret Seed Society: Reaching Kids Through Vegetables

My good friend Amy spoke at my alma mater, LSE, last week.  She spoke about the techniques that industrial food companies are using to market junk food to us and how these tricks have led us into a battle with obesity.  Her project, he Secret Seed Society uses child power, emotional resonance and humans innate thirst for adventure to get people back into growing, cooking and eating.


Secret Seed Society was setup in 2009 and centers on lessons taught through the world of Seed City, where over 40 anthropomorphic vegetable characters live.  The project uses hands on activities and illustrated storybooks to celebrate vegetables and promotes organic, fair trade and local production. 

Here's Amy's engaging talk on how we can reach kids with vegetables: 

Bloomberg' Ban : The Right to Health vs the Right to Consume

Photo Credit Chang W. Lee/ New York Times

May Day and the American Way of Eating: An interview with Tracie McMillan

Note: This Blog has been reposted from Brooklyn Based.  The interview was conducted by Annaliese Griffin.

Tracie McMillan, an investigative journalist who lives in Bed-Stuy, spent several years living and working with the people who plant, pick, stock, sell and cook our food for her eye-opening recent book, The American Way of Eating: Undercover at Walmart, Applebee’s, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table. From the garlic fields of California, to the aisles of a Midwestern Walmart, to the busy kitchen of an Applebee’s in Brooklyn, she took a long hard look at our food system from a variety of angles that few of us ever get to see.

The thing that shocked me most in The American Way of Eating is that we don’t actually grow enough fruits and vegetables. I had NEVER thought about it that way. 


Right? That’s crazy! We actually don’t have as a nation–not just as individuals–we just don’t grow enough fruits and vegetables. We grow plenty of corn and soy, more than we need, but not the stuff that we should be eating so that we’re all basically healthy. That’s nuts! That’s built into all the policies and the investments we’re making in the public sector. There’s ways to change that. And there are ways to do that in a way that engages private enterprise and makes it profitable for private enterprise to grow that kind of stuff instead of endless, endless, endless rows of corn that are going into cattle feed and ethanol.

We’ve had all this great food journalism, from people like Michael Pollan, documenting the fact that we grow too much corn, for feed and fuel and junk food, and as a result we have a surplus of calories. But to think that we actually have a deficit of good calories is another thing altogether.


No wonder, we’re all eating crap, right? We just don’t have enough. I see a tendency toward conspiracy theory, that the big agri-business is sitting there and they’re manipulating everything, and there’s that, and lobbyists and corporate power to be concerned about. But the more that I did this research, it must have seemed perfectly sensible, in the mid-20th century. Food had never been something that could make you sick before–why would it? If you had said, oh, but if you eat this other type of food it will make you sick, that would have seemed like crazy talk in 1940.

What are people not getting about the intersection of diet and poverty and health in this country?
 The problem of people’s diets is much bigger than just access. It’s a lot about time. And anyone who cares about food, if they’re serious about it being more than just a luxury thing, for them to enjoy, if people are really serious about food being a community issue, a social issue, we have to start having a conversation about wages and work life. It’s really hard to pay enough money to buy really healthy food if you’re spending a quarter to a third of your budget on food already, which is what the bottom third of America, by income bracket, already does.



What’s the biggest misconception about the people in that bottom third, and food?

I think the biggest misconception about low-income families and their relationship to food it that they don’t know any better and all they do is eat junk food. There’s this idea that there are all these obese people of color lounging around, eating crappy food and not caring. That is pretty much the opposite of what I found the more I talked to people about how do you make decisions about food. In all the time I’ve been reporting on food and diet, which is eight or nine years now, I’ve met precisely one person who actually said, “I’m just going to eat crappy and I don’t care.” I’ve never had someone say, “I think diabetes is awesome and I want this.”

And this is a little touchy feely, but being poor is really exhausting. It’s really boring. You can’t afford to go and pay for a movie, or for fancy technology. It’s hard. And, eating well is so hard, you have to have the energy and not be too tired to do it. If people are being beaten down by everything else in their lives it’s really unrealistic to expect them to say, “I am going to subsist on these great salads that I make from scratch, every day.”

What makes it so hard to eat healthy? I think that’s hard to fully understand from a particular Brooklyn point of view where we have 10 choices of local, artisan pickles and five choices for granola in front of us, and we can afford to eat that way–or at least make the choice to spend our money that way instead of saving for retirement.


So time, I think, is the biggest obstacle. I keep getting compared to some sort of Soviet, so I’m wary of saying, “Oh, look to Europe.” But, the French spend more money on their food [as a proportion of their income]. They also get five weeks of free vacation every year, plus, free high-quality daycare once your baby is a year old. And they have a slightly shorter work week. That might not seem like a lot if it’s 35 instead of 40 hours, but that’s an extra hour each day–to spend cooking.

Also, vegetables and freshness. And it’s not just low-income neighborhoods; many low-income neighborhoods have ethnic groceries with great produce. If you have crappy produce, it doesn’t taste good. If everything tastes like a winter tomato from Florida, you’re not going to want to eat that because it doesn’t taste good.

How do big stores like Walmart that promise variety and affordability fit into the equation?


We all sort of accept that “Oh, there are food deserts. Maybe we’ll fix them if we bring Walmart into low-income communities.” Well Walmart’s prices aren’t always lower, they have absolutely no reason to charge lower prices, if they don’t have to. There’s research showing that if Walmart has the dominant market share then they don’t really charge lower prices.

At the conclusion The American Way of Eating you suggest that we as a society have a collective responsibility to make sure that the food system is fair. How do we actually do that?
In a lot of different countries there’s more of a mix of public and private involvement in food distribution. So my thinking is, right now we have  a completely privatized system that leaves 23 million Americans without sufficient grocery stores, and we have this huge problem with diet-related disease in the country. So, maybe government could figure out a way to partner with small private enterprise–small producers or small grocers who can’t compete with Walmart and are going to get blown out of the water, because they just can’t structurally develop the transportation and logistics. It’s the distribution and transportation that really makes Walmart competitive.

A lot of it is just mapping, figuring out where the producers are, where there are stores, where distribution centers are housed. You could create a public distribution center, that people couldn’t necessarily use for free, but could go in and use at a really affordable cost and it would be a way to replicate how wholesale community markets used to be. There’s a study I found from the early 20th century and there used to be several hundred wholesale, terminal type markets around the country and they were all funded in part by public dollars. They were in public buildings that had public oversight.

When you’re talking about creating a flexible food distribution system, that has as its goal not just profit, but making sure communities have good food the same way we make sure they have clean water, then I think that’s really important. Given how much money we have to spend on people being sick because of bad diet, maybe we could figure out how to make it not so hard for people to eat well.

Future Faces of the Supermarket - Informing Consumers with Interactive Counters

Supermarkets now offer a dizzying mount of products from across the globe, but details about a products origin, organic and industry standards and/ or the route of transportation are often difficult to discover, if present at all. In recent years, with a increasingly curious and informed consumer population, demand for information about our food is certain to change how we shop for food and our food shopping experience.

Two German interaction design students Benedikt Burgmaier and Fabian Kreuzer have begun addressing some of the issues that are sure to pop up by re-imagine the meat, cheese and fish counter to provide customers with detailed product, origin and recipe information for food items.   Their senior thesis concept visualizes details to make them easily visible for the customer and imagines an interactive counter where customers can point at any item to have the description and price displayed above the product. It also includes interfaces where origin, product type and recipe information can be displayed when customer can lift one of the books on the countertop, information which can be printed by the shop assistant at checkout.

While just a prototype, imagine the further impacts this product could have on consumer choice:  Could it display food miles, farm information, or various certifications for the sustainability-concerned shopper? More importantly, for western populations increasingly concerned with nutrition related diseases (obesity, diabetes, heart issues, etc, and therefore with nutritional/ diet choices, could the counter or related smart phone application display calories, fat, or sodium content for those worried about intake levels?  Could it link to dietary recommendations?    The project presents a thought-provoking look at the future of food shopping and an introduction to innovative ways of including more than just a price-point as a guide to shopping.  The ability of consumers to access many forms of information about a product is sure to influence what we buy in the future, and what we want to see on offer.

Informative cheese, meat and fish counter – a guidance for your purchase from fabian kreuzer on Vimeo.

Animation as Education: Michael Pollan's 'Food Rules'

For the last decade food has become an increasingly talked about political issue, from community meetings to the floor of Congress.  However many of the complexities of our food and our current food system are difficult to digest. Thankfully we have authors like Michael Pollan to simplify issues into bite size pieces.  But now, for those of us who are visual learners, Marija Jacimovic and Benoit Detalle have produced a charming stop-motion film that uses vegetables to visualize Pollan’s “Food Rules” talk (presented at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts (RSA) in 2010). The animation helps to distill and unpack some of Pollan’s key points in an easily comprehendible and engaging 2-minute video. 

Michael Pollan's Food Rules from Marija Jacimovic on Vimeo.

Michael Pollan himself recently went a step further in decoding some of the tricks behind supermarket layouts and how stores are designed to make you buy more in general, but also to buy more high revenue generating and high processed foods.


The food journalist collaborated with Nourish to create 'Supermarket Secrets', a guide to making healthy choices at the supermarket. In the short video, Pollan helps the average shopper navigate the grocery store to find fresh, whole foods and to understand why items are placed where they are.




 For more Nourish videos, click here.

FAO Launches SOLAW Report: Advisements on Agricultural Land and Water

Widespread degradation and deepening scarcity of land and water resources have placed a number of key food production systems around the globe at risk, posing a profound challenge to the task of feeding a world population expected to reach 9 billion people by 2050, according to the new FAO report on the State of the World's Land and Water Resources for Food and Agriculture (SOLAW) published in January 2012.

The report noted that although there was a three-fold increase in food production in the last 50 years, most areas achieving these results relied on “management practices that have degraded the land and water systems upon which food production depends.”  A number of these systems/ areas now face the risk of a “progressive breakdown of their productive capacity under a combination of excessive demographic pressure and unsustainable agriculture use and practices”. Combined with the complications brought on by climate change, these systems at risk may simply not be able to contribute as expected in meeting human demands by 2050.

This risk is now affecting all regions around the globe and, as natural resource bottlenecks are increasingly felt, competition for land and water will become “pervasive” – not only between urban and industrial users, but within the agricultural sector as well– between livestock, staple crops, non-food crop, and biofuel production.  The challenge of providing sufficient food for an ever-more hungry planet, especially in developing countries, where quality land, soil nutrients and water are least abundant has never been more difficult.

“Worldwide, the poorest have the least access to land and water and are locked in a poverty trap of small farms with poor quality soils and high vulnerability to land degradation and climactic uncertainty,” it notes.

Over 40 percent of the world’s degraded lands are found in areas with high poverty rates. However, degradation is a risk across all income groups, 30% of the world’s degraded lands are in areas with moderate levels of poverty while 20% are in areas with low poverty rates.

The report centers on concern for the increasing imbalance between availability and demand for land and water resources at the local and national levels. The number of areas reaching the limits of their production capacity is fast increasing, the report warns. SOLAW also provides for the first time ever a global assessment of the state of the planet’s land resources: 25 percent of the earth’s lands are highly degraded and another 8 percent are moderately degraded, and only10 percent are ranked as “improving.”  Further more, water scarcity is growing and salinization and pollution of groundwater and degradation of water bodies and water-related ecosystems are rising. “Because of the dependence of many key food production systems on groundwater, declining aquifer levels and continued abstraction of non-renewable groundwater present a growing risk to local and global food production,” SOLAW warns.

The report makes the following recommendations:

·         · Improving the efficiency of water use by agriculture. Most irrigation systems across the world perform below their capacity. A combination of improved irrigation scheme management, investment in local knowledge and modern technology, knowledge development and training can increase water-use efficiency

·         · Encourage innovative farming practices such as conservation agriculture, agro-forestry, integrated crop-livestock systems and integrated irrigation-aquaculture systems which hold the promise of expanding production efficiently to address food security and poverty while limiting impacts on ecosystems

·          · Increasing investment in agricultural development. Gross investment requirements between 2007 and 2050 for irrigation water management in developing countries are estimated at almost $1 trillion. Land protection and development, soil conservation and flood control will require around $160 billion worth of investment in the same period

·         · Greater support for ensuring that national policies and institutions are modernized, collaborate together and are better equipped to cope with today’s emerging challenges of water and land resource management.

Throughout the SOLAW report there are multiple examples of successful actions undertaken across the globe that illustrate a multiplicity of available options that are potentially replicable elsewhere. Inevitably stakeholders will need to evaluate trade-offs among a variety of environmental goods and services, but the highly differentiated options highlighted provide a good start for matching options with local experience and knowledge. 

You can read the executive summary here