What’s the largest restaurant chain in the United States?
It’s a trick question! The answer, as Curt Ellis of FoodCorps says, is school cafeterias.
It’s true, as FoodCorps notes, that “restaurant chain” is more of an analogy than an actually descriptive term for the way these programs operate, but there’s no denying the school food industry is massive: There are seven times more school cafeterias in the U.S. than McDonald’s locations. Last year, the National School Lunch Program (NSLP), which helps subsidize school meals in the U.S., provided 4.6 billion lunches.
Schools need a lot of food—and where they source their ingredients from matters. Through their food procurement, schools have significant power to help support local growers and strengthen the food system.
Let’s get every school in our communities involved in farm to school initiatives!
What does this mean? Farm to school—or, as my friend and mentor Chef Alice Waters prefers to say, school-supported agriculture—calls on school leaders to take responsibility for supporting local growers, connecting communities to healthful foods, and helping kids understand where their food comes from.
Already, more than 67,000 schools in all 50 U.S. states are practicing farm-to-school programs! This work is about more than just a nourishing lunch: The impacts of school-supported agriculture extend into classrooms and follow students the rest of their lives.
“We have 875 schools across the nation in marginalized communities that outperform their peer neighbors by 10 or more percentage points on all school performance indicators,” says Stephen Ritz, Founder of Green Bronx Machine. “Let’s be real, the greatest lever this nation has towards equity is public education.”
“When we support the people who grow the food for the schools, it’s the biggest gift that we can give the next generation,” Waters says.
We’ve got to be clear-eyed about this, though: School food leaders face the unbelievably complex task of feeding millions of children nourishing, healthy, delicious meals that’ll fuel them for a day of learning—often with only a few dollars or less per meal, and plenty of bureaucratic hurdles along the way. It would be incredibly misguided to claim that a school that’s not practicing farm-to-school programs doesn’t care about school-supported agriculture or the food system. More likely, they just lack enough resources and financing to do so.
“I work with elementary school children who are all hungry,” says Tony Hillery, Founder and CEO of Harlem Grown. “They all go to school for their basic nutritional needs, in schools with no art, music, or gym.”
“I have yet to meet one parent who doesn’t want three organic meals a day for their children—but where do you get it, and how do you afford it?” he asks.
Fortunately, there are organizations around the globe working to get schools these resources, so they can actually put programs in practice that use food procurement as a force for good.
In the U.S., the National Farm to School Network is doing important work connecting educators, policymakers, farmers, and supporters to share resources.
“School food programs, and the thousands of workers who make them run, are a bedrock of equity in our food system,” writes Helen Dombalis, former Executive Director of the National Farm to School Network.
Several cities and institutions across the country have adopted the Good Food Purchasing Program, which helps focus food procurement on five core values: local economies, health, valued workforce, animal welfare, and environmental sustainability. The Native Farm to School program, from the First Nations Development Institute, works in Indigenous communities to help school staff and tribal knowledge keepers build food sovereignty.
The Alice Waters Institute, linked to the Edible Schoolyard Project, is set to serve as a training center for K–12 educators and food service professionals, as well as a research hub for leaders in the fields of regenerative organic agriculture, sustainable food systems, climate change, education, and public health.
And the Patrick Leahy Farm to School Grant Program through the U.S. Department of Agriculture, one of the only U.S. funding sources dedicated to school-supported agriculture, is doing amazing work, too: This year, they’ve awarded a record US$14.3 million toward 154 grants, reaching about 1.9 million students.
Globally, organizations like Bright Bites in Ontario, Canada, the Permaculture Institute of Thailand in southeastern Thailand, and a pilot called School + Home Gardens in the province of Laguna, Philippines, provide curriculum support and consultations with school nutrition leaders to help educate kids about sustainable food, healthy eating, and biodynamic growing. Across Europe, SchoolFood4Change is an EU-funded project headed by a consortium of 40+ organizations, scientists, educators, chefs, health experts, and more. The project works to develop innovative and sustainable food procurement criteria and create a more holistic, healthful food culture in schools.
And the expansion of Home-Grown School Feeding programs in 15 countries across West Africa, supported by the United Nations World Food Programme and a consortium of other governmental and civil-society partners, has been an extraordinarily successful demonstration of how school-supported agriculture allows supply chain stakeholders like farmers and consumers like students to strengthen each other and work toward a more collaborative, resilient food system.
Let’s continue to direct much-needed funding toward these initiatives, too—from both the public and private sectors. NGOs have a massive ability to help drive success here, whether by leading on-the-ground action or financing efforts themselves or by driving partners in the right direction. But to be blunt for a moment: If a nonprofit or company aims to be focused on improving education but fails to consider food, they’re falling short on their mission and, really, doing young people a disservice.
And let’s encourage young folks to speak up, too! Students’ voices can be tremendously powerful in encouraging schools—and funders!—to act, and farm-to-school programs are so much more meaningful and transformative when students play a central role.
This is the perfect time to be talking about this, too: This week is National School Lunch Week, and October is Farm to School Month!
“There’s a huge opportunity to move the needle on healthier food and to teach life-long lessons on eating healthy,” says Claire Marcy, Senior Vice President of the Healthy Schools Campaign. “I feel like our schools are prepped to teach all these life lessons to kids—and the school meal program needs to be in sync with that.”