A letter from the NJ Farm To School Director, Beth Feehan

Farm to School is a term that requires explanation. On its face value, it speaks to bringing locally grown foods into schools, enriching the freshness of school meals and introducing real food to students used to processed food. I always say that Farm to School is a three-legged stool: local procurement and food service contracting with an eye toward accountability; the emergence of school garden education and its impact on getting children to eat fruits and vegetables and federal, state and district wide policies created by and for schools. All of these efforts require collaboration on many levels to succeed.

Players in the Farm to School movement include schools, farmers, policy makers, food service companies, produce distributors, food manufacturers and good food advocates. Across the Garden State, grass roots efforts to start school gardens have created a burgeoning network of school garden educators and advocates who are finding ways to fund and sustain school gardens and encourage NJ teachers to use school gardens for all aspects of required curricula. Produce distributors are finding ways to source locally grown produce from regional farms, creating new markets for farmers in this densely populated state. Food service professionals are working to train their employees to rethink what they serve to students and to learn more about fresh produce and how to use it in the cafeteria. State agencies are working together to promote these efforts and show that the strata of collaboration from top to bottom can make a difference in the cultural and economic structure of how we feed our children. And higher education is training the next batch of teachers and advocates in new ways of growing and distributing food and using good food to bring about change in the American diet.

But it hasn’t happened overnight and we’re not yet able to say this work is over. New Jersey is made up of more than 600 independent school districts, each running their own food service program. The variability of each district and thus, each school, is determined by economic, demographic and systemic structures in place that are unique to each. Anyone looking to change what a school is serving for lunch must, at minimum, do the due diligence to see how food is served, who runs the food service and what is available in terms of information and willingness to make changes.

Improving the food that schools serve is not something that can be accomplished without the buy-in from administrators, school boards, principals, teachers, parents and the population in general. However, it isn’t up to the schools alone to figure out ways to make these changes. We cannot stand back and put the onus, once more, on schools to fix what is “wrong” with students today. Food businesses must be held accountable for the food that they make and serve to children. Policy makers need to become informed about the unintended consequences of supporting agriculture policies that support cheap, unhealthy foods. Parents must take responsibility for the education in their homes and know that what they eat is modeled by their children and can have lifelong consequences for their future and health. And yes, schools must find solutions outside the box to look for better food to serve to their students.

What we see across the country is a dialogue that is cutting across all sectors of society. As this dialogue continues to grow around childhood obesity, school meals and nutrition education, there is no doubt that good things can come of such good intentions. The time for us to act is now.

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