school food

by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Rhys Powell gave up his Wall Street finance career to follow his entrepreneurial muse and to serve the community by doing something good, something right, and something that just plain needed doing.  He developed a business plan and, in 2005, took the plunge, starting Red Rabbit, a unique school catering service delivering healthy food to independent and charter schools in New York City.  The Red Rabbit mission is to provide school children with nutritious, well-balanced meals and, while so doing, foster in them healthy relationships with food that will serve them well throughout their lives.

Rhys started small, with a business plan that focused on parents’ as customers.  Rhys planned to prepare and deliver individual, healthy school lunches that were made to parents’ specifications and, as might be required, with regard to individual kids’ allergies and dietetic restrictions.  Rhys found that a tough proposition and re-focused his business plan on schools, particularly small, independent and charter schools.  Red Rabbit now prepares about 1,300 meals per day, including about 600 lunches, for kids at 14 schools, of which 12 are private and two are NYC charter.

 by Edwin Yowell, Slow Food NYC

The New York City Department of Education’s SchoolFood serves about 860,000 meals (including about 180,000 breakfasts) to over 1,000,000 students daily.  To achieve this mind-boggling feat, they manage more than 6,000 employees working in about 1,400 schools.

It’s a big job.  The Department of Education welcomes a little help now and then. 

On Friday, October 30, 2009, the Department of Education (DOE) initiated the Culinary Partners Forum, inviting individuals from organizations committed to helping SchoolFood provide healthier and more appetizing school breakfast and lunch.

by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions 

Watching a swarm of inner city teens crunch golden delicious apples like they were candy and crowd in front of trays of quesadillas loaded with Swiss chard and apples was, well – pretty darn amazing! 

by Kerry Truman, Eating Liberally 

A bountiful, beautiful food garden in every school? Yes, it's a dream, but so was the White House kitchen garden, and Alice Water's Edible Schoolyard before it. Thanks to a terrific new guide to starting school gardens, Growing School and Youth Gardens in New York City, the vision of edible schoolyards in every community is that much closer to a reality.

The excellent edible endeavors of Michelle Obama and Alice Waters have inspired school gardens to spring up all over the country. But there are hundreds of unsung horticultural heroes who've been working for years, even decades, to get kids excited about learning how to sow, harvest, and cook fresh, homegrown fruits and veggies.

One such hero is FSNYC's own Leslie Boden, who labored long and hard in collaboration with GreenThumb to compile this fantastic, comprehensive resource for anyone who's interested in starting a school garden. Growing School and Youth Gardens in New York City is a thoughtfully written guide with clear, helpful tips on everything you need to know and extensive listings that instruct you on where to find all the tools--both literally and figuratively--that you need to get your school growing.

And though the guide was compiled with our own region in mind, it's a goldmine of useful links to resources that would be helpful to schools nationwide. The guide provides extensive descriptions of each resource that's listed, making it easy to pinpoint the sites that will be most relevant for your particular space and project. Cheers to Boden and the many folks who did all the digging to produce this invaluable resource.

Posted by Lynn Fredericks, FamilyCook Productions 

When the issue of making a healthy school lunch available to public school children comes up this fall for congressional reauthorization of the USDA legislation known as Child Nutrition, a more grassroots ‘citizens’ campaign has also been unleashed by Slow Food USA.

Posted by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

Cars and fast food are partners in crime when it comes to undermining America's health. Our favorite mode of transportation deprives us of exercise, while our dependence on quick, cheap convenience foods cheats us of nutrients. We reportedly eat nearly a quarter of our meals in our cars, a practice that baffles folks in countries where taking time out to share a real meal with friends and family is still the norm.

But our landscape is changing, literally, and I found evidence of a nascent rebellion against our car-centric cuisine in a rather ironic place: the grounds that surround Automotive High School in Brooklyn. I first noticed squash vines growing outside the auditorium at this vocational high school in Williamsburg back in June when I attended a screening there of No Impact Man hosted by Rooftop Films.

I was intrigued, but had no idea that Automotive High School's edible landscaping was inspired by the school's participation in Slow Food NYC's Harvest Time program, whose mission is to create "a meaningful relationship between young people and their food and the environment by providing hands-on experiences, community engagement, and the enjoyment of good, healthful food."

Posted by Christina Grace, NYS Dept of Agriculture & Markets, and Billy Doherty, NYC Depart of Education, SchoolFood

What is Garden to School Café?
Garden to School Café is a pilot program of NYC Department of Education, SchoolFood and NYS Department of Agriculture & Markets in collaboration with Cornell Cooperative Extension; GreenThumb; Added Value; and more than 20 community-based organizations.  The goal is to connect school gardening and school lunch menus through seasonal harvest events and supporting educational activities.

Objectives of the Garden to School Café Pilot
•    Increase student’s healthful eating by promoting consumption of plant-based menu items and connecting kids to local   food and farming
•    Connect school gardening with SchoolFood’s broad-based efforts to source more local foods
•    Build awareness of the benefits of school gardening
•    Demonstrate the learning opportunity of integrating school gardening and school lunch.

Pilot Participants
In the spring, twenty schools were recruited to participate in the pilot program.  Participation in the Garden to Café pilot project required that schools and partner community-based organizations meet basic criteria.  Schools were chosen through an open competitive application process. 

Participation in the program required: 
•    An established garden or farm
•    An established children/youth gardening program
•    Liability insurance for community gardens or urban farms
•    Safe soil demonstrated through soil test results or proof of new soil from a safe source.