by Max Smith
Oddly enough, I think your ability to suck the marrow out of this post will depend on your ability to keep a childhood bed-time song in the back of your noggin’. Prepare yourself for a plate-full of nostalgia. It goes like this:
You’re my little potato, you’re my little potato,
You’re my little potato, they dug you up,
You come from underground!
The world is big, so big, so very big!
To you, it’s new, it’s new to you!
You’re my little potato, you’re my little potato,
You’re my little potato, they dug you up,
You come from underground!
Let’s talk about root crops (they dug you up),
And lamb chops (they chew on you),
And things to eat…like apples
and cheese and ‘nanas and cream,
Jellies and butter,
it’s late at night, I hope this little bottle helps you go to sleep…
… You smile, a smile, a little smile!
The world is small, so small, it’s very small!
You’re my little potato, you’re my little potato,
you’re my little potato, they dug you up,
You come from underground!
The Regional Real Food Conference hit a realistic high-note for me when FoodCorps Kyra Williams and Kevin Moore formed a circle of students, and recited the logistical riot-act involved in the coordination of modern Farm to School programs in Montana. They’ve helped forge a market for local farms and met some of the progressive desires of many University of Montana (UM) students. The main café seats 1,500 students for lunch and dinner meals and, as Kyra puts it, their work as Vista Volunteers has been to be a liaison—to strike a balance between farmers and students and the Dining Service staff. (Click here for an overview of the UM program). One objective has been to train farmers to be more like business people in order to meet the needs of a standardized system of processing and distribution. There’s another side to this plate, lest you interpret this as a one-way street to rigid farmer reform. They’ve also made an effort to educate the food service business in the art of reaction and the reality of a different food system. Sounds easy, right?
Maybe not so much. I’d liken their workshop—Working with Farmers: Translating Farmers—to the experience of hitting a speed-bump for the first time (I’ll explain this below). The most intriguing messages were a) the processes of creating and maintaining a farm to school program involve “behind the scenes work” and b) students should not expect to delegate research and networking roles to professionals in the future, especially if we’re concerned with our access to fresh food on campus and the potential for new, rewarding markets for local farmers. Conceptually, everyone was right there with these motivations, which I think allowed us to grow into what could have been such an overwhelmingly complex topic.
Let’s face it—this workshop was the compressed speed-bump at the conference. I had just seen a wicked presentation from Whitman College’s Organic Garden troupe about their pioneering work designing and looking after a chicken tractor. Looking back, that workshop was incredibly palatable compared to the inner-workings of an institution’s food system. Everyone had eaten it up, and we hadn’t turned down seconds—even when the Walla Wallians turned to pictures and descriptions of the great broiler hen slaughter of 2009. (Side note: it seemed like everyone was working on starting or maintaining their own groovy expression of a Whitman College Organic Garden; everyone had their own chicken tractor, if you will).
The speed-bump workshop seems like a decent metaphor for our Farm to College conversation. It works a little better than the gauntlet. I mean, like a concrete barricade, the workshop required that we slow the pace of the conference in order to follow the many layers of industrial food that these programs uncover and repackage. Were we all prepared to hit such a barrier of realistic real life, real campus food challenges like a crowded Westfallia hitting a speed-bump at 50 mph? Surely not. But I’d imagine this was the subject—the type of cascading wall—we were just salivating to engage at the conference. From the outset when each student introduced themselves and explained what drew them to the topic, several students were incredibly transparent, briefly diagnosing burgeoning or aspiring Farm to College programs at their schools. I could tell they were going to extract some magic from this workshop. My broad take on this workshop is that like progressive foodies often do, we helped adjust each other’s lenses by sharing experiences. In doing so, the challenges of revitalizing this particular form of local market didn’t actually seem uber-daunting.
Growing a Farm to School Program from Scratch
Moore and Williams broke down the barriers to upstart Farm to School programs and proposed two solutions, which I think boil down to looking inward and outward for support.
Student activists must immerse themselves in the concerns of their university’s dining service business. Meaning, when you’re making the case for a new market, you’ve got address labor and equipment costs, because infusing local food into campus kitchens generally takes time and might even require the business invest in new cooking paraphernalia. It’s also important to look into current distributing contracts. This may sound hokey and secret-agenty at once, but the best way to do this is by forming relationships with the staff and getting “a sense for the hierarchy.” Taking a glance at larger food web issues is also essential. Researching the food system involves more than addressing national trends. I mean, it probably won’t hurt to mention to your campus food service provider that the USDA’s subsidization of commodity crops for decades has, along with several other trends in public affairs, has dictated what’s cheap and available to schools.
What the Vistas meant by looking outward was extending some research tentacles out to find the price and availability of locally produced fruits and veg, any state laws regulating purchasing prices that might prevent these foods from getting into the chompers of students, and any possible coalitions with existing community organizations that could provide resources and support for your project. For example, the UM Farm to School Vistas collaborate with groups to provide legislative support as well as information on local producers and processors. Examples include: Grow Montana, AERO, and Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. By this time of the conversation, it became clear to me that growing a farm to school program is excellent training for a career in food systems. Not for me—I’d rather look at soil all day, but damn…this work literally lays the foundation (demand) for local production, processing and distributing upstarts (more on this later).
Out of this labyrinth of a conversation on background research, I had an epiphany. A venn diagram suddenly became clear in my mind where outward and inward inquiries came together as the Vistas explained the importance of understanding your institution’s buying volume for certain products. This knowledge can be used to inform future research of producers nearby. Following up on this research by visiting several farms, exposing yourself to their questions and concerns, about supplying an institution, and seeing what the work day looks like seems like it’d be the most rewarding part of the ground-work process. It may be hard to track down farmers in your area or it may not. One of the class assignments in Montana State University’s Sustainable Food and Bioenergy class has taught me to seek out the county extension office staff. It’s likely they have access to a farm directory for the area in question and it’s their job to facilitate these sorts of things.
One group of students grilled the speakers about how to forge a more professional relationship between their school permaculture garden and their cafeteria. Suggestions included looking up fair market prices for vegetables on the web and composing a business plan. These are avenues that can be shared with other students at your university…like business majors. (By the way, if you’re reading this, let us know if there’s been any progress!).
Assessments don’t stop when you’ve figured out what your campus’ food system looks like. When the program gets rolling, it’s just as important to propel research professors as well as graduate and undergraduate students to assess the program’s development. The University of Montana’s Neva Hassanein led such an investigation in 2006. One of the places her students visited was the Montola seed-oil crushing plant hundreds of miles away. Their goal was to peel back the program’s layers, and learn “about the social and economic connection between the two places, a bond forged by the University of Montana’s Farm to College Program” (Read more about the study, “Tracing the Chain“).
I can’t remember whether students in attendance or the F-to-C Vistas brought up the next conversation, but whoever did fueled a lively discussion. It began as a comparison between the entities that manage cafeterias on campuses—independent food businesses like the UM Dining Services and Bon Appetit Management Company or college administrations. But this issue brought out an interesting (albeit lost to the cosmos of my mind) list of pros and cons to either management system. (Sidenote: perhaps someone will read this and refresh everyone’s minds, including my own, on the specific pros and cons). I’d never heard of Bon Appetit before, but after doing a little snooping online, I have to say they’ve kind of won me over with their commitment to connecting with farmers, even people new to producing. Check this out and tell me it doesn’t yank your umbel!
The topic also illuminated a growing theme within the workshop—every school, every state, every region has unique foodshed issues to wade through.
Finding Encouragement in Cooks, The System, the Business Community, and Fringe Outlets
Whether you’ve got to convince lawmakers or institutional administrators, diets and minds can be changed. Never underestimate the assistance one person can have in your campaign. For example, your college may have an outstandingly fresh-thinking cook. Kevin Moore’s message was to mobilize them, because ultimately they have the power to transform culture. I don’t know about you, but I dig hearing the idea that our pallets are in their hands, these people who want others to experiment. “Chefs are trying to slowly put new things into dishes,” said Moore, offering up the UM cafeteria head chef’s recent efforts to expose the unexposed or unwilling to recipes with beets! Now that I think about it, there was many a’beet in my first year spent in the dorms. I can’t imagine a better motif for freshmen year, actually…sprinkled into memorable dining hall moments are delicate rows of beets. Chioggia beets in isolation, beets in soups, beets in salad—everywhere I can recall, beets were on the beat. Is this why cooking is Pollan’s next frontier?
When one student asked Kyra whether it would make sense to renegotiate the Sysco Distributing contracts, she explained the paradox that she works within to grow the UM’s Farm to College Program. Naturally, I began to think about the sacrifices we make when we understand the complexities of a system. Do we create our own systems (food and housing co-ops, schools, tool libraries)? Or do we, as they say, inflict change from within the system. My mother has done both. She started an experimental non-profit school that operated for several years in Missoula. Now her work as a public school English teacher centers on bringing poetry festivals and a balance to the well-known tests of Leave No Child. She’s fond of saying, bewilderingly, “I can tell administrators who can read and who can’t better than a test…that’s what I’m paid to do!” Does her story—from being a counter-cultural beacon to an agent within—represent a normal progression for most things?
Viewed with an understanding of these different, but worthy, dynamic contributions, her decision strikes me as less of a compromise. And that’s how Kyra explained the tradeoff of using a BIG distributor like Sysco, getting some savings for buying in bulk, and directing those savings into food that’s real and pure. Could Dining Services afford Kyra and Farm to College without the BIG guys?
It’s an interesting thing to ponder, especially if you’re at a larger institution with large demands. I submit that by soaking up pride in the pure, and working within the system to construct a functional and expanding farm to school program is a small price to pay for the large and small shoots that’ll jut out. We may well look back and bask in this early trade-off as if it was the act that infused regional food producers, processors, and promoters with the preliminary capital they needed to flourish. That’s not to say creating institutional support for local chow is the only route to success, though. Check out this episode of Greenhorn Radio and let any watery assumptions about the business community evapo-transpire away.
With an optimistic tone, Moore suggested the possibility for students to find different campus outlets to plug in new local items, whole or processed. For example, if your Farm to School program goes bust or if it’s meager compared to the available output of local farms and processors you’ve attracted, there may be an appealing campus retail outlet (like a school market) or a catering service that may be receptive to the introduction of more progressive farm products grown or processed on smaller scales. Catering Services (CS) at the University of Montana are a great example. It makes sense, but I was initially surprised to hear caterers are the most flexible when it comes to local food. Their menus change more than restaurants and I’m guessing they serve less people than the typical cafeteria.
The head-haunchos behind UM Student For Real Food’s garden took advantage of this niche market, pouring small mountains of kale and basil into our CS last summer and fall.
Farm to Gruel: The Tragedy of Federal Support for Healthy School Lunch Programs
A few petitions are circulating online that hold our representatives responsible for their incompetent support of Farm to School Programs. Evidently U.S. lawmakers passed legislation in 2004 which promoted these programs, but they appropriated money to fund it. The Farm to School grant program authorized in the 2004 Child Nutrition and WIC Reauthorization Act could fund an upstart Farm to School Program at your institution. But in order to provide “one-time competitive grants to schools or non-profit organizations to develop purchasing relationships with local farmers, plan seasonal menus, start school gardens, develop hands-on nutrition education, and provide solutions to infrastructure problems including storage, transportation, food preparation, and technical training,” we need to pressure our representatives into co-sponsoring it and eventually voting for it. It’s about to hit the hill! (For more info, check out: http://hotugc.wordpress.com/2010/02/22/hungry-for-a-better-school-lunch/). If you attended Crissie McMullan’s food policy workshop, you know how simple and meaningful it is to contact a representative about this bill. (Sidenote: one of her interviews about these programs titled, “Local Food in School and College Cafeterias: Making it Happen in Your Community” is posted online. It’s worthy of an ear.).
An Upcoming Food Conference
And finally, if farm to school issues are really yer bag prove it at the upcoming big-whig conference devoted to this national topic. It’s called Taking Root and will take place March 17-19 in Detroit. I won’t be there—my hands are split at the seams with a new greenhouse job and the task of organizing these MT urban land-lovers. Hopefully speakers at the conference will take a tip from Kyra and Kevin’s playbook by encouraging students to leap into the kitchen, the fields, and the office with a flair for improving the lot of farmers and farmworkers and devolving the modern college food system.
And here’s the classic sentimental ending. There’s something very meaningful and true about that childhood song, “Little Potato” that plays on the Montana Public Radio every week. The Real Food Conference, the Farm to College workshop, the diverse set of projects; it really makes me feel like we’re unearthing food culture and the connections that were out to recess for so long. That our movement is a little potato, we’re digging it up, (and although we’re leveraging a little institutional support) its strength comes from underground!
Additional Resources:
Tracing the Chain: An In-Depth Look at the University of Montana’s Farm to College Program (http://www.growmontana.ncat.org/docs/tracing_the_chain_e_summary_new.pdf)
Oxfam Food and Farm Toolkit (http://es.oxfamamerica.org/files/FoodandFarmToolkit.pdf
Attra’s “Bringing Local Food to Local Institutions: A Resource Guide for Farm-to-School and Farm-to Institution Programs” (http://www.attra.org/attra-pub/PDF/farmtoschool.pdf)
Max Smith is a freshman at Montana State University in Bozeman, Montana. He strives to become what he called an “enlightened farmer,” identifies strongly with goats, and has a passion for kale pesto. You can reach him at greenunderbelly@gmail.com.
