An Iowa school district connects local farms, food hubs and students through the lunch tray.
Iowa's Waukee Community School District is bringing more locally sourced food into its cafeterias. During Iowa Local Food Day, more than 8,300 students were served food from Iowa producers and nearby farms. The district now spends 16% of its $2.56 million food budget on local food, but expanding the effort means navigating higher costs, logistics and USDA procurement requirements.
Transcript
Kaitlyn Scheuermann Dietitian/Farm-To-School Coordinator, Waukee Community School District: “Enjoy your lunch guys”
Kaitlyn Scheuermann is the dietician and the Farm-to-School Coordinator for the Waukee Community School District. Today, she’s in a busy lunchroom at Waterford Elementary, a suburban school located just a few miles from Iowa’s capital city of Des Moines.
For this lunch period, students are eating a locally sourced meal as part of Iowa Local Food Day. This is an annual event where students eat food that comes from Iowa farms or operations just beyond the state’s border.
Kaitlyn Scheuermann Dietitian/Farm-To-School Coordinator, Waukee Community School District: “The procurement is definitely different around local foods. We work with our food hubs a lot of times, but like you said, we also work directly with producers to diversify how we spend our money and how we follow our local, our USDA procurement guidelines.
Today, purchases of local food are 16% of the district's $2.56 million food budget. On any given school day more than 14,000 students can get a school lunch.
On this day, kitchen crews served over 8,300 students across Waukee’s 19 buildings.
On the menu are nachos made with locally sourced ground beef. Apples, salsa and cherry tomatoes from producers inside the state’s border. Corn from just over the border in Minnesota. Drinks include a regular lunch staple from the Iowa-based Anderson Erickson Dairy which provides milk for consumers in six states. The farthest any of the raw ingredients traveled was about 245 miles. According to the National Center for Appropriate Technology, an organization focusing on sustainable agriculture, the typical food item travels an average of 1,500 miles.
Scheuermann says this isn’t the only time over the course of the nine-month school year where locally sourced foods are on the menu. She also offers a locally sourced item one day a month under the Harvest of the Month label.
A lot of the planning relies on the use of local food hubs to aggregate the school’s food orders.
According to the School Nutrition Association, nearly 30 million students eat school lunch every day. In some cases, the school district is the largest restaurant in the area.
Amy A’Hearn, the district’s Director of Nutrition Services, says they aren’t quite ready for Local Food Day to be every day.
Amy A’Hearn, Director of Nutrition Services, Waukee Community School District “...maybe one day, once a week there would be a local. I can't promise you that it would be every day. There is, yes, a handful of challenges. Then there's procurement. There would be a lot of stakeholders that would have to come together to be able to figure that out. It’s not a no.”
For Market to Market, I’m David Miller
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