Farm to School, Yolo County
This year, Yolo County is seeing the beginnings of a grassroots effort supporting local food, farm, and nutrition awareness in its school systems through the Farm to School program.Pioneer Elementary School in Davis opened the district’s first school salad bar in April. Dubbed “Crunch Lunch“, it provides an alternative to the traditional hot lunch by using fresh fruits and vegetables bought directly from local growers. The local produce is combined with a variety of meats, cheeses, beans, nuts, seeds and local artesian breads to give school children a wide choice of fresh food options. The salad bar has been enormously popular with the kids, disproving a commonly held assumption that they don‚t like vegetables.
Crunch Lunch is one of the final stages of a holistic educational pilot project initiated in Davis by the Davis Educational Foundation. With support from CAFF, the project aims to integrate nutrition, agriculture, environment, community and health education into the school curriculum. This is achieved through school gardens, nutrition education around the salad bar, cooking activities, recycling and composting programs, and farm visits. These programs give kids the opportunity to identify the role that farmers and agriculture play in their daily lives, their environment, and their communities, and to make healthy choices about nutrition and lifestyle.
Approximately 40 members of the Winters community began discussing the possibility of starting a program of their own in March. This show of support was incentive enough for Toni Martin, Food Service Director of Winters Joint Unified Schools, to seek grant money with the help of the Winters LEAF (Linking Education, Agriculture and Food Services) committee and begin planning for a salad bar in one Winters school this fall. Additionally, Mary Kay Korn, a Winters parent and 4-H leader, is working on a school garden program at the elementary level, while Wolfskill Continuation High School is moving ahead with an enormously successful integrated school farm curriculum.
Farm to School programs here and around the country are important steps toward healthy kids and stronger local agricultural systems. Davis‚ Crunch Lunch served approximately 200 meals a day, and each child ate an average of three servings of fruits and vegetables per meal. The food costs for just the produce was about $350 a week, money that went directly into farmers‚pockets. For now the market is small and only benefits a few farmers. If the program can be expanded to all the schools in the district, however, the numbers will start looking more meaningful. If expanded to all of Yolo County, it would have a significant impact on local farms‚ vitality.
Farm to School in Yolo County has a ways to go before it can be considered an integral part of our educational system, but for now kids are starting to make the connections linking food, farms, nutrition, and community health, and they say ″ Crunch Lunch Rocks!″
for more information, please contact Sacramento Valley Regional Coordinator, karrie Stevens, at (530) 756-8518 ext. 14 or e-mail karrie@caff.org.
