Acting up

[photo courtesy of Katherine Bryant, DC Farm to School]

Hooray! Lots to celebrate in recent weeks in terms of improving school food -- both in our nation's capital and around the country.

Just yesterday, my favorite president (okay, well, he's in the top three -- Lincoln and FDR are tough acts to follow) signed the Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act, giving more funding to federal school lunch programs, boosting both the variety and the quality of food in schools, and facilitating local farm to school networks and the development of school gardens. It was signed right in the auditorium of nearby Tubman Elementary School, where I've spent the past 4 Wednesday afternoons as a volunteer food educator teaching kids how to make healthy snacks! Too bad I wasn't there for the signing, but it's for the best: there is no way I would've been able to keep myself from hugging the President and First Lady.



But that's not all. Last week, with the help of many, many e mails and phone calls from my fellow DCists, the DC Healthy Schools Act was passed, allowing for similar reforms on a local scale that the Healthy, Hunger-free Kids Act does nationally. Better food at last for DC schoolkids! Thank goodness! You'd think a 6-cents-per-child increase would be no big deal, but it is. I do believe I've mentioned the atrocious food at the public charter school where I used to teach. (It will remain nameless to protect its identity, but really, from what I've heard from teacher friends at other schools in town, the "food" there is comparable to other District schools.) Oh, and mandatory testing of water for lead in school drinking fountains? Yeah, it's about time that was enforced.

This is not to say that the implementation of these important programs comes without a price: SNAP (aka food stamp) programs have taken a cut to fund the former (federal) program, while the welfare program in the District will be curtailed to finance the latter (local) program. Still, I think both pieces of legislation are major victories, if bittersweet ones, along the road to school food reform.

Oh, and speaking of the road to food reform, check out this Washington Post article, hot off the presses. Looks like sustainable food education, production, and distribution in the DC metro area is about to get a little more interesting, come spring....

Farm to school week

You may have heard about Bike to Work Day... National Walk to School Day... International Talk Like a Pirate Day. (Yarrr!) I even recall during my time teaching at a public high school here in DC a couple of years ago a celebration of National Punctuation Day. I love themed days that raise awareness and get people thinking a little differently about their everyday choices (especially if the focus helps to improve the general public's understanding of how to use an apostrophe correctly). Tomorrow marks the beginning of DC Farm to School Week.

Yes, folks, school food reform is so important that it gets a whole week. Having witnessed the slop that passes for food in most public schools these days, I'm surprised nobody has issued a code red food quality alert. (I mean, we already have such a system for air quality and terrorism threats, and yet obesity-related diseases kill far more people each year. Then again, who can take these alerts seriously when we're always at code orange? Maybe I'm a touch grumpy about the transportation security measures that seem to get increasingly more ridiculous. I mean, have you been to the airport in Salt Lake City? Good lord.)

The overall poor quality of school food is a systemic problem, with cafeteria offerings just as abysmal in NYC as they are in DC. It's not just urban schools, either. I didn't have a chance to follow Jamie Oliver's attempts to fix things in rural West Virginia schools -- Ollie and I were somewhere in the Southwestern deserts dodging scorpions, I think -- but I heard it wasn't pretty (though things seemingly ended well). The problem seems to be universal, according to the documentary "Two Angry Moms." I know I've written about the need for better food in schools a few times now, but with initiatives like the first lady's "Chefs Move to Schools" -- love her! -- and the passing of the Healthy Schools Act, we Americans are, at long last, doing something about it.

Now, the outsourcing of school lunches is far from a new concept -- my own former school in Southeast DC trucked in loads of fried, frozen, and otherwise unrecognizable trays of gov't surplus slop to the stoveless cafeteria -- but the approach this time around is very different. With a funding stream designed to encourage more fresh fruits and vegetables and provide cafeteria food lower in sugars, salts, and fats, the Healthy Schools Act has the potential to help public school lunch programs come around an important corner. Revolution Foods and DC Central Kitchen, for example, have both won contracts to privately cater school food at a handful of locations around the District, sourcing some ingredients from local producers and emphasizing seasonality and lots of produce in their menus. These are pilot programs underway that, if successful, could revolutionize the way school food is sourced and prepared.

Want to learn more about improving school food in the District? Check out the goings on this week: http://dcfarmtoschool.org/week/. A number of DC schools will be preparing and serving farm-fresh foods. There will be student-led education booths, farm field trips, and chef demonstrations to help DC area families learn about their local foodshed and get excited about healthy food options. Me, I'll be slicing and handing out local apples at the kick-off event at Thurgood Marshall Academy tomorrow afternoon. (So long as I don't have to use my multi-tool for slicing, nobody should get hurt.)

Hooray for good food in schools!

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