By: Bella Herold

At 6:30am on Tuesday June 1^st, I sat in a van with Andrea Northup, Coordinator of the D.C. Farm to School Network, and her colleague Scott Lewis, Director of Food Services for a school food service provider, mesmerized as the D.C. highway slowly transitioned into a beautiful countryside: rolling hills and lots and lots of green.  Within two hours, we saw plots of farmland, barns, cows, horses, and rows of crops fill the landscape.  We passed a horse-drawn carriage and Mennonite women in long dresses and bonnets going about their day.

By the time we arrived at the produce auction, the open-air marketplace was already filled with yards of fresh fruit and vegetables, hanging plants, carts of melons, lines of herbs and various plant varieties.  Farmers unloaded and stood by the fruits of their labor, jubilant, smiling, and eager to engage in conversation about their crops.  Our mission was to purchase about 200 heads of lettuce for the D.C. Farm to School Network’s upcoming Strawberries and Salad Greens event.  The greens would be served as part of school lunches in cafeterias across the District.

The auctioneer spoke into his microphone, quickly describing each item for sale, how many boxes of it you could buy, and starting bids.  Individuals signaled if they were interested in making a purchase, and, just as quickly as each sale began, it ended and the auctioneer moved onto the next item.  A crowd of people gathered around the products and the auctioneer and we followed him from product to product.  Andrea purchased Romaine, curly leaf, and red leaf lettuce, a few boxes of yellow squash, and several green cucumbers for a few schools.  After some fresh pie and ice cream from the small food stand, we left and loaded up with boxes upon boxes of fresh produce in tow.

The next day was the Strawberry and Salad Greens Event.  I volunteered at the E.W. Stokes Public Charter School, one of the schools that received lettuce from the Auction.  I worked with two other volunteers to set up a table in the cafeteria before the first students arrived for lunch.  We displayed a blossoming strawberry plant, a photograph of a strawberry farm and a lettuce farm, lettuce seeds, a small lettuce plant, a large head of lettuce, gardening tools, and a map of the local farms where the strawberries and lettuce from the kids’ lunch had traveled from with respect to the District.  The students were served lettuce we had just bought from the auction and strawberries from a West Virginia farmer.

After eating their meals, students and teachers approached us and were pleasantly surprised by the small green strawberries growing on the strawberry plant.  Some kids told us that their families had just started vegetable gardens at home and others stared in awe at the baby lettuce plant and tiny lettuce seeds.  Enticed by their friends’ excitement and the promise of Strawberry and Salad Greens event stickers, more students approached us as we inquired how their salads tasted and explained where the food came from. Kindergarteners came to play with the gardening gloves and watering can, but stayed to examine lettuce seeds and the petals on the strawberry plant.  One student ate her strawberries while peering at the strawberry plant in front of her.  The students tasted the freshness and crispness that resulted from the hard work, effort, and motivation the farmers put into their crops.

I will continue to volunteer with the D.C. Farm to School Network regularly in the upcoming months, and look forward to making events like this one successful.  One thing I learned from the whole experience–hard work, effort, and motivation tastes pretty good.

Local lettuce and berries for school lunch being prepared at CentroNIA

If you walked into a D.C. school cafeteria on June 3^rd 2010, you may have been surprised at what you saw on students’ trays!  Over 150 schools in DC featured fresh, locally-grown strawberries and salad greens as a part of their school lunches.  This was part of an event called Strawberries & Salad Greens, organized by the D.C. Farm to School Network and in partnership with participating schools and food service providers.  For a medley of pictures from the event in DCist, click here.

Breakfast on the line at Thurgood Marshall Academy – blueberry muffin and local strawberries!

About 40,000 students in all 8 wards of the District gobbled up juicy, red berries and bright green lettuce in their lunches.  Approximately 7,300 pounds of local strawberries and 2,400 pounds of greens were purchased and served for the event, contributing about $20,000 to our local food economy.  The produce was grown on farms in Virgina, West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania (visit dcfarmtoschool.org/strawberries for more information about the local growers).

Westmoreland Berry Farm, which supplied berries for DCPS meals on June 3^rd

In addition to helping schools find sources of fresh, local produce, the D.C. Farm to School Network coordinated “Where Food Comes From” tables in 16 school cafeterias.  At these tables, volunteers and parents displayed plants, posters, pictures, and gardening tools.  As students enjoyed their meals, they were able to see, touch, and smell where their food came from!

Carl Rollins with Common Good City Farm shows a strawberry plant to a group of pre-K students at Simon Elementary School

In twelve schools, local chefs performed interactive cooking demonstrations using local strawberries and salad greens.  Kids were able to help professionals prepare recipes, taste samples, discuss the importance of eating fresh, local, healthy foods, and bring home recipes to try with their families.

Chef Oliver Friendly of Eat and Smile Foods makes home-made granola and local strawberry parfaits at Thurgood Marshall Academy Public Charter School

The D.C. Farm to School Network is a program of the Capital Area Food Bank that works to get more healthy, local foods into Washington, DC school meals.  Learn more at www.dcfarmtoschool.org.

Kacie Warner from the Washington Youth Garden prepares a strawberry arugula salad with students at Center City Public Charter School

Contributing Editor

The D.C. Council yesterday agreed to fully fund the recently approved “Healthy Schools” initiative, but not with the “soda tax” proposed by Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3). Rather, the city will begin imposing a more traditional sales tax of six percent on all soft drinks sold in the District.

What, you might be asking, is the difference between these two approaches to taxing sodas?

The beverage industry vigorously campaigned against the 1-cent excise tax on sodas because it would have raised the shelf price that consumers see when they purchase soft drinks. The sales tax of six percent, by contrast, appears only on the sales receipt after beverages have been purchased.

Although the industry also opposed the sales tax, it brings the District in line with neighboring Maryland, which already taxes soft drinks at six percent. Virginia levies a much lower 2.5 percent sales tax.

D.C. council members were more comfortable with the traditional sales tax approach because it is already familiar, in contrast to the more progressive excise tax, which was aimed not only at raising money to improve food served in the District’s public schools, but also was seen as a weapon to combat obesity by making sugary sodas more expensive.

The penny-per-ounce excise tax would have only applied to sugar-sweetened beverages.  Diet drinks, calorie-free drinks, juices (with at least 70% juice), milk, coffee, and tea would have been excluded. The six percent sales tax applies also to artificially sweetened beverages, including diet and zero-calorie drinks, sports drinks and energy drinks. It will not apply to beverages containing milk, coffee, juice or tea.

The one-cent excise tax also had a cap of 30 cents per container.

The six percent sales tax is projected to raise more revenue–$7.92 million annually–than the penny-per-ounce tax on sugar-sweetened beverages–$6.3 million. Costs associated with the “Healthy Schools” initiative are expected to run about $6.5 million per year.

But the “soda tax” may not be dead. An aide to Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), who authored the “Healthy Schools” legislation, said last night she will continue to press for the one-cent-per-ounce tax on sugary beverages sold in the city. “Because the obesity epidemic is such a enormous health crisis in the District (73% and 72% of residents in Ward 7 and 8 are overweight or obese!), Councilmember Cheh plans to continue to push for a penny-per-ounce excise tax because it is a good health policy.”

Stay tuned.

Contributing Editor

A proposed tax on soft drinks to fund “Healthy Schools” legislation appears to be on shaky ground at best and may be dead on arrival. Meanwhile, social service advocates are engaged in a mad scramble to stave off cuts to services for the poor. While some members of the D.C. Council are talking about increasing taxes on the city’s wealthy to bridge the budget gap, Council Chairman Vincent Gray (D) is accused of hiding out in his office, muttering something about the need for a “365-day discussion” on taxes.

So where does that leave all the improvements in school food that Council member Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3) worked so many months to include in her “Healthy Schools” bill? The Council approved the bill unimously. But where are they when it comes time to actually pay the estimated $6.5 million annual cost for all those new wellnes initiatives?

Asked if there is a Plan B, an aide to Cheh says, ”We’re still pushing the (soda) tax in some form and think we can make it work. Everything is very fluid at this point,” meaning no one is willing to say what will happen today when the Council votes on the city’s budget package. 

This might be a good time to stop and reflect on what’s in danger of not being funded in the “Healthy Schools” program:

* An additional 10 cents for every breakfast served to children in D.C. public schools. Breakfast is universally free to all students who attend D.C. Public Schools, but currently not free in charter schools. The additional money could help improve food quality. Under Chartwells-Thompson, the giant food service company hired to provide D.C. Public Schools meals, children are served industrially processed convenience foods.  Charter schools contract with individual catering companies, or cook their own food on site.

* To provide free breakfasts in charter schools, the city would pay an additional 30 cents for each breakfast served to students who qualify for free or reduced-price meals based on income.

* An additional 10 cents for lunch. This would supplement federal subsidies schools receive through national school meals programs. The federal government currently provides $2.68, for instance, for every fully-subsidized school lunch.

* Forty cents for all students who currently qualify for reduced-price lunch. The federal meals program recognizes three classes of students based on family income: those who qualify for free meals, those who pay a reduced price, and those who pay full price. This provision of “Healthy Schools” essentially would eliminate the “reduced price” category. Those students would receive meals free.

* Encourage breakfast by offering a morning meal in classrooms. To cover the cost of this initiative, public schools and charter schools would receive $7 for each student in schools where at least 40 percent of students qualify for free or reduced-price meals.

* Five cents for every lunch that contains at least one component made from locally grown and unprocessed foods. “Healthy Schools” would, for the first time in D.C., promote sustainable local agriculture by paying schools to incorporate local products in school meals.

* Grants for schools that take steps to engage students in more physical exercise.

* Grants to encourage construction of gardens on school grounds.

* Construction of a central facility in the District to process and store local produce, and provide culinary job training.

Many provisions in “Healthy Schools” do not require extra funding, such as reducing sodium and eliminating trans fats from school food, or making food sold in vending machines healthier. Schools will be required to post the ingredients used in meals. Vendors will be required to identify the source of all produce served. Schools will also be required to provide at least 30 minutes for students to eat lunch. Over a five-year period, schools will be called upon to dramatically increase the amount of physical education they provide for students.

It’s a shame that “Healthy Schools” had to be linked with a tax on soft drinks at the last minute. Cheh had promised to find the money for “Healthy Schools” somewhere, but no one antipated she would link her legislation with such a controversial tax measure just weeks before the Council took up the city’s budget. Is this Cheh’s version of a Hail Mary pass?

Although Cheh’s proposal to levy a tax of one cent per ounce on soft drinks is well-intentioned–providing an instant source of funds for “Healthy Schools” and to increase food access in underserved neighborhood, plus reducing consumption of sugary beverages among folks who least need the extra calories–they really are two separate animals and should be considered separately. The main objectives–better school food, increased access to good nutrition, more physical exercise, supporting local agriculture and school gardens–deserve to be funded in their own right, without being tarred by a brawl over taxing soda.

Anyone with a radio has heard the campaign the beverage industry is waging to deep-six the soda tax. This was entirely forseeable, and not the kind of battle that should be fought at the last minute with children’s well-being hanging in the balance. Local lawmakers hardly need additional political incentive to leave the city’s children in the lurch. Hopefully the soda tax will not poison the water for “Healthy Schools” permanently, and perhaps some sort of compromise will emerge. If not, the Council should find a way to fund “Healthy Schools” without a soda tax, and save the debate over sodas for another time.

Ed Bruske writes The Slow Cook blog.

• 43% of students enrolled in city public schools are overweight or obese — one of the highest rates in the nation
• The District Government spends more than $400 million annually to treat obesity
• Childhood obesity causes diabetes, hypertension, liver disease, sleep apnea, heart disease and is linked with higher rates of cardiovascular disease and certain types of cancer, and can lead to an early death
• For children, each extra can or glass of sugar-sweetened beverage consumed per day increases their chance of becoming obese by 60 percent

What’s a Solution?
On May 4, 2010 the DC City Council unanimously passed a groundbreaking piece of legislation called the ‘DC Healthy Schools Act’ to do more to ensure the health and wellness of District school children. This legislation:

• Increases access to healthier food in schools – the act raises nutritional standards for school meals to include more whole grains, a wider variety of fruits and vegetables including those that are locally grown. It eliminates the reduced-price co-payment for lunch, and provides free breakfast in all schools with breakfast served in the classroom in schools with high poverty rates;
• Raises the bar for physical, health, and nutrition education – sets a goal of 60 minutes of physical activity for students each day and triples the amount of physical and health education;
• Establishes school-based environmental and gardening programs – recycling, energy-reduction, lead water and paint testing, and other environmental programs.

Given the current budgetary constraints, Councilmember Mary Cheh has proposed funding the Healthy Schools Act with a penny-per-ounce soda tax. Revenue from this tax would raise enough money to fund the Healthy Schools Act and will support:

• Food access initiatives,
• Community and faith-based anti-obesity programs, and
• Nutritional programs for seniors

Tax Myths
This tax is nothing new.  Currently, 33 states, including Maryland and Virginia, tax sugar-sweetened beverages. Recent polls have demonstrated that over 70 percent of the city’s population supports implementing the soda tax.  Beverages that would not be taxed include:

• Diet drinks and other non-caloric beverages would not be taxed
• Beverages containing milk, milk alternatives, and greater than 70 percent fruit or vegetable juice would not be taxed

How You Can Make A Difference

We need your help to convince DC’s Council to fund the Healthy Schools Act and other community initiatives.

Stand for healthy children and healthy communities by contacting your Councilmember and signing our petition at www.supporthealthyschools.org.  Support healthy kids now!

Anyone home at D.C. Schools food services?

By Ed Bruske

Contributing Editor

I was ready to have a perfectly civilized discussion–blog-to-blog–with Sam Fromartz over at ChewsWise on the subject of what we can do to get kids to eat better when I was stopped dead in my tracks by the lunch being served at my daughter’s elementary school here in the nation’s capital. Look at the photo above and tell me what you see. Do you see the same thing I do? French fries, a bag of Sun Chips, and an 8-ounce carton of strawberry-flavored milk.

You almost have to rub your eyes and take a second look. Can this really be true? Hello, Jamie Oliver! Not all the bad school food is in Huntington, W.Va. We’ve got the same stuff right here in Washington, D.C., barely a mile from the White House.

To my knowledge, Michelle Obama has never addressed the glycemic bomb being served daily to public school children right outside her door. But I could be wrong. Yes, just a mile or so from the White House, where we’re told over and over  the Obamas are hard on the case, solving the nation’s childhood obesity epidemic, kids in elementary school are being served chips, fries and strawberry milk for lunch.

Oh, wait. I forgot the ketchup. Two foil packets of it. That should count for something. And as far as chips go, Sun Chips–made from corn, whole wheat, rice flour, whole oat flour–are probably the lesser of many evils. Still….

I actually found it heartrending to watch my daughter’s lunch group–10- and 11-year-olds–waiting patiently for their midday meal, first at their tables, then pressed against a wall in a queue near the door to the food line, only to emerge at the other end with this on their Styrofoam trays. Some also had a mealy-looking chili with beans. Some had a fresh pear. But under federal “offered-versus-served” rules, kids only need to take three of the offered items to qualify for a federally-subsidized meal. That’s how you get fries, chips and strawberry-flavored milk. (Fries count as a vegetable, and the milk protein, the chips grain. Get it?)

Yes, we can have a conversation about how to get kids to eat healthier foods. But first, we need to ask, Where are the adults in this picture? Children have not yet reached the age of consent. Grownups are supposed to take care of them. Yet when you enter a public school cafeteria, you step into a kind of culinary gulag where for years the adults grinding away anonymously inside have done their best to keep the truth of what they are doing hidden from the public at large. And the public at large has been just as happy not knowing the details. This was a matter we conveniently left in the hands of ”professionals”–food service workers, nutritionists, government regulators, food industry lobbyists–who have spent the last several decades devising ways to make “food” for children that grownups don’t have to pay for.

Now, with Jamie Oliver’s “Food Revolution” being aired on network television, and school meals showing up in vivid color in the blogosphere, we are finally getting a glimmer of what “school lunch” really means. It’s not a joke any more. What we feed children has consequences. And the pictures are ugly.

Yet it is obvious that children–and especially what they eat–are not a priority. We would much rather spend billions fighting foreign wars, building tanks, dropping bombs. Honestly, what we get from most politicians is lip service and a nickel tossed into the collection plate. We are on the brink of losing our collective memory of what constitutes real food. Yet no one is accountable. We are not to judge the “lunch ladies” too harshly. They are doing the best they can. We are not to judge the food service directors too harshly. They also are doing the best they can. We should not judge our local government leaders too harshly. They depend on federal dollars. We should not judge parents too harshly. They are busy working to make ends meat….

Would anyone like to step forward and take responsibility for feeding our children in school?

The final indignity came when I was abruptly stopped from taking further photographs in the lunch room by the school’s assistant principal. She whisked me off to a conference room where the principal was having lunch with teachers (what would happen if the adults at school had to eat the same food as the kids?) The principal told me she had been admonished for the series of articles I wrote from the school’s kitchen back in January, a glimpse behind the curtain that revealed the “fresh cooked” scheme the school system had recently implimented in collaboration with its contracted food service provider, Chartwells-Thompson, was nothing of the sort. To continue taking photographs of the food, the principal said, I would need clearance from higher up. “I don’t want to get in trouble again,” she said.

Turns out there was an aftermath to my expose of the D.C. school kitchen. The young kitchen manager I profiled, who liked so much to add shredded cheese to boost the flavor of all those industrially-processed dishes she was heating in the steamer, has disappeared, presumably re-assigned.

I’m trying to square this with what Anthony Tata, schools Chancellor Michelle Rhee’s chief operating officer, told The Washington Post about me and that series of articles on Feb. 12: “I think it’s great a parent is super-involved and we are soliciting his input as we go forward with our program changes,” Tata said.

Blah, blah, blah.

I accuse the adults responsible for school food of gross indifference. I accuse all of us of failing to step up to the plate. I challenge Chancellor Rhee and Anthony Tata to have a real conversation with parents about the food children are eating in school. But let us not fail because we refused to look at the problem square in the eye.

Ed Bruske write The Slow Cook blog.

Good afternoon Madam Chair and Councilmember Barry:

My name is Carl Rollins and I am here on behalf of Common Good City Farm. When I was riding my bike here this morning I stopped by the farm. This time of year it doesn’t look like much, but I saw the future. Through the fence, I could see cherry blossoms on a tree we planted a year ago. Garlic scapes were shooting up towards the sky.

This abandoned school baseball field could be the first of many. We could have one school farm like this in each ward.

On my tour I also passed the school where I will soon help plant a garden as part of a program planned by a church foundation.

School garden programs cannot be viewed apart from the issues of community food security and access to healthy, affordable food. We know what the problem is; it’s an emergency.

This is about nutrition, it’s about health, it’s about the environment, and combating climate change.

I also passed new buildings being built. But will any of this be for the homeless men I saw who camp out on 14th street? Couldn’t some of these potentially work on and receive the bounty from the potential gardens in DC? However, in order to grow gardens we need to grow gardeners first. The garden program is vital to changing the worldviews of our young and building community.

Focusing on test scores misses the point. Standards-based lessons taught in gardens will create adults with changed behaviors and reduced carbon footprints. People who will seek green jobs and maybe become urban farmers like me.

Environmental literacy is an ethic, an ideal. In order to change the world we need to teach our young character. Teaching nutrition and healthy lifestyles through gardens is one way to teach self-discipline.

Without self-discipline how can students study or ever hope to hold down a steady job? Half the men in DC will have contact with the criminal justice system. Without a foundation of self-discipline how can we hope to teach anything? This can’t be tested.

Moreover, without a streamlined mechanism for making land available for garden programs and urban farms the future of healthier schools and our planet is jeopardized. Without laws and urban planning that prioritize sustainable development our shared vision won’t happen. Barriers must be removed.

I foresee school farms, farmers markets and CSA’s–scaled-up urban agriculture. This bill mentions DC Code 48-402—it should “implement” this law. The farm to school provisions should provide a preference for DC-grown produce.

I know that you are concerned about funding. With these two provisions, the gardening community won’t need funding we can get our own grants and even commercial loans to sustain the good work the local community has begun.

Improved nutrition, easier access to school food and incorporating local produce in school meals would cost the District an estimated $6.5 million annually under proposed “Healthy Schools” legislation, according to the D.C. government’s Chief Financial Officer, Natwar M. Gandi.

Gandi released written testimony yesterday indicating that most of that money would be spent on increasing the city’s contribution to school meals by 10 cents for breakfast and 10 cents for lunch, as well as a 5 cent bonus for meals that contain locally grown products, free breakfast for all students and covering the cost currently paid by students who qualify for reduced-price meals under the federally-subsidized meal program.

The cost of the legislation, which had previously been undetermined, brought out a parade of charter school officials complaining that they did not have the means to pay for it. They appeared at hearings before D.C. Councilmember Mary Cheh (D-Ward 3), author of the bill.

“This is much like ‘No Child Left Behind,’ full of unfunded mandates,” said Donald Hense, of Friendship Public Charter School. “The financial incentives are not enough for us to change our food service.”

Along with setting healthier food standards, the legislation also mandates increased physical activity for children. Charter school officials said in many cases their schools have neither the funds nor the facilities to comply with the proposed standards. “How can charter schools implement all this?” said Josphine Baker, executive director of the Public Charter School Board. “Ten cents for breakfast and lunch is just barely enough. It could be cost prohibitive for all schools to use local produce. It’s a challenge sometimes to provide both a rigorous education and healthy, nutritious meals.”

Gandi estimated the total cost of the legislation for the city’s charter schools at $1.6 million. Cheh vowed that she will find funding to cover all of the bills requirements. “We fully appreciate the costs,” she said. “I’m working assiduously on getting that money. And I’m pretty much sure that I will get that money.”

Cheh added that the legislation will save money in the long run in reduced health costs for city residents. “Even if it cost money and we didn’t save money, how much is it worth to have people lead healthy lives?” Cheh said. “We will save money and have better lives.

Ed Bruske writes The Slow Cook blog.