Challenges to Bringing Local Food Into the Schools

Thought this article from the Times might be of interest:

Link to Original Article

October 17, 2007
Local Carrots With a Side of Red Tape
By KIM SEVERSON

THE dirt on Richard Ball’s farm in Schoharie County is 15 feet deep, rich with minerals and perfect for growing sweet carrots.

About 150 miles south, the New York City schools serve 850,000 meals a day. Some of them contain carrots. But the carrots come from other states.

So Mr. Ball and a group of people dedicated to getting local food into cafeterias had an idea: Why not feed New York City schoolchildren New York State carrots?

“I thought, here we are two and half or three hours away from the largest appetite in the country,” Mr. Ball said. “Let’s connect the dots.”

It seemed so simple. But after nearly two years of meetings, tests and negotiations, local carrots have yet to hit the lunch table. “The logistics are very complicated,” said David Berkowitz, who runs the city’s school food program. “While we have every intention of moving forward to purchase these carrots, there are no guarantees.”

The premise was an easy sell. The carrot project would help farmers who now mostly grow varieties best suited for the frozen food industry to diversify. Local carrots would be fresher, tastier and take less fuel to ship. And children might even eat more of them.

But as the carrot project supporters learned, it’s hard to change entrenched systems, whether agricultural or bureaucratic.

Around the country dozens of farm-to-school programs are trying to get local food back into the schools. In New York City, some of that work falls to the SchoolFood Plus organization.

Under its umbrella, there have been some successes. For the past two summers, most of the stone fruit in New York city schools has been local, and some of the frozen food served in cafeterias is, too.

But the advocates’ pride and joy is the small plastic bag of sliced New York apples. Since they were introduced in 2005, the school district has gone through several million bags, and public school children are eating four times as many apples as they used to, said Mr. Berkowitz.

So why not do the same thing with carrots?

Although food purists might argue that simply slicing local carrots is the best way to feed children, handling fresh carrots is too labor-intensive for a district trying to feed hundreds of thousands of children a day on a tight budget.

Individual packages make it easier for the school district to meet Department of Agriculture nutritional guidelines, assuring that the main source of funding for public school lunch continues, Mr. Berkowitz said. Also, he said, students are more likely to consume carrots if they are easy and fun to eat.

Since the district already serves more than 285,000 pounds of bagged baby carrots from other states, substituting New York carrots seemed an easy solution, said Karen Karp, a food industry consultant who was working with the school district and state agriculture officials to get more local food into schools.

She knew Jerry Dygert, an Essex County food processor, because he packages the apple slices. Together, they set out to find some local carrots that could be used in schools.

This was a surprisingly difficult step. Baby carrots are actually fully grown vegetables that are whittled down to size. Most growers in California, where the baby carrot was born almost 20 years ago, use a variety called Sugar Snax.

In New York, most of the roughly 2,000 acres devoted to carrots are planted with a different variety better suited for processing. And since an actual contract with the school district seemed a long way off, it was a rare farmer who was willing to take a chance on planting something new.

“The hardest thing for a farmer is to grow something and then discover there’s no customer for it,” said Mr. Ball.

But Mr. Ball believes it’s time to get local food back in the mouths of school children. So he took a chance and grew a small test patch of Sugar Snax.

By last fall, they were ready. Ms. Karp and Mr. Ball went to Mr. Dygert’s processing plant to see if the test carrots could be turned into babies. It was a bust. It turns out that New York soil doesn’t grow the best Sugar Snax. And grinding grown-up carrots into babies makes a lot of waste. That day, they lost about 70 percent of each carrot.

“Probably the most depressing day of my life last year was that test day,” Ms. Karp said. “The farmer had tears in his eyes.”

The solution, they decided, was to forget about baby carrots and make something shaped like a coin, which would create less waste and better suit the Nantes variety or a Nantes-Imperator cross, which grow well in New York. They added a crinkle cut, so the coins would better hold some kind of dip. Mr. Dygert’s crew came up with a bag decorated with carrots doing sit-ups.

Thus, Carrot Crunchers were born.

Back at the School Food office, Mr. Berkowitz agreed to test the Carrot Crunchers at a half-dozen schools in June. But they had to use carrots from other states because New York carrots weren’t available. Still, they were a hit.

Before the farmers could start planting the right carrots and Mr. Dygert could invest in new equipment to cut the carrots into coins, Mr. Berkowitz had to figure out how to battle a bureaucracy that seems tilted away from local food.

“It’s not a question of just saying I believe in local products and I’ll buy them next week,” he said.

The district buys food from four approved distributors, who are required by federal and local laws to seek out the least expensive product that will meet its specifications. School districts that spend federal money on food cannot give preferential treatment to local products, although a provision in the 2007 Farm Bill being debated in Congress might change that.

With the apple slices, a deft hand with the specification-writing solved the problem. The district ordered Empire apples sliced in a way that matched Mr. Dygert’s product. Since few other processors are making the bagged apples and Mr. Dygert’s price is the best, the distributors who supply the district are able to fill the order with his product.

Carrots are trickier in part because there is still no agreement on which kind of New York carrot is the best one to use. And although New York produces enough apples to keep the district supplied all year, carrots are a different matter. They can be stored for several months, but the district needs a year-round supply.

The specifications would have to be written in such a way that carrots from other states could be substituted when the local supply ran low. And they would have to cost no more than the district is already paying for carrots.

So everyone waited. And waited. The school year started, and still no carrots.

But the moment is close. Earlier this month, the price was set and the distributors were cleared to buy the carrots. A new batch of Mr. Ball’s carrots are in storage and the rest are ready to be harvested. He has about 20 tons in all.

Mr. Dygert said yesterday that as soon as he gets an order from the district, he will have to ship the carrots to Michigan or Vermont to be cut and shipped back to him for bagging. Until he is sure he will have enough business from the schools, he didn’t want to invest in special coin-cutting equipment.

So maybe, just maybe, New York school children will be eating local carrots by the end of the month.

“It’s like herding cats, but if we don’t start talking about it’s never going to happen,” said Mr. Ball, who hopes to persuade other carrot growers to take a risk and plant some carrots for the schools next spring.

“We spent the last 40 years getting out of the local food business so I figure it’s going to take a few years to turn that around.”