Garden to Cafeteria Mythbusting & Best Practices - Notes from the Farm to Cafeteria Conference Short Course
Lauren Howe
Garden to Cafeteria discussion, facilitated by Slow Food USA
· Definition: not a procurement plan, not large-scale sourcing (that would be a school farm), but small quantities of produce from the school garden going to the cafeteria onsite for the salad bar and some hot recipes
· Slow Food is concerned with school food culture: connecting the garden, cafeteria, classroom, and after school programming
· Best existing models for food safety were USDA GAP and GHP policies for farmers
· Andy & Slow Food Denver created DPS Food Safety Protocols, which have been shared with Miami, Chicago, San Diego etc.
· Slow Food USA has received a Whole Kids Foundation Innovation Grant to create a GTC toolkit - stay tuned for more info & join our upcoming GTC webinar: Thursday June 23 at 3 PM ET
· Salad bar signage is really important, especially if heirloom or unique vegetables
Questions/Breakout Discussion
· How do we get food service department on board with GTC? Especially contracted food service?
The food service department needs to see VALUE in the GTC program to their overall feeding program. The must see a MARKETING benefit to have the GTC program in action. The benefits to the Food Service Dept. can be an increase in the average daily participation (ADP) in school meals (more kids going through the line because they want to eat the school garden produce), the ability to say that they have a Farm to School program to support healthier meals, and the ability to market to parents that they are using local produce and supporting the educational and health opportunities for the children.
You can also “force” a contracted food service company to initiate a GTC program by adding a requirement to their contract that there will be a GTC program in the schools. Contract renewals are a great time to add programs like Farm to School and GTC.
· How to overcome reluctance from administration for GTC?
In most cases, school administration has had very little to say about GTC. They usually deflect to Food Service to make these decisions. But there have been very active principals that will do speak up about GTC. Principals are concerned about liability on their school grounds and the value of activities in reference to academic achievement. To ease their concerns about liability, we talk about the use of food safety protocols that are approved by the Health Dept and the Food Service Dept. We can minimize the risk by using the protocols, set up good training and closely monitoring the program. IN most cases, this will satisfy the principals. Concerning academic achievement, studies have shown that proper nutrition supports academic achievement. Students eating fresh produce from the garden as part of their lunch, supports academic achievement.
· How do we write protocols that make the health department and risk management comfortable?
Find out who is doing inspections in the school (food service should know this) - typically county health departments. Then go to this group to co-create protocols. It is best to start with some already established protocols from another school district so that everyone has something to add/subtract from rather than create new. There are numerous GTC protocols out there and ideally, you can find a set of protocols from your state, as the Health Dept. will relate to a local set of protocols better than from out of state. But if there are no state protocols, sample some from other areas to find a set that seems to work well with your garden and cafeteria programs. In general, don’t involve the legal department unless they come to you.
· How do you appropriately write the protocols and training so that food safety doesn’t make food seem scarier to kids (and adults!)?
Do not get too technical with a bunch of fancy words. Have a garden leader understand the concerns of the health department from a scientific point of view and then translate those concerns into every day English. Speak the language of the people, not of the experts and scientists. Works well if a support org gets trained by the Health Dept. or FSD and then shares this training with the garden leaders and kitchen staff.
· Slow Food GTC Protocol highlights:
o Kids wash their hands
o Water supply (all garden water is municipal water supply)
o Health of workers (students can’t have been out of school sick for the last two weeks and participate in harvest)
o Cleanliness of tools used during harvest (e.g. Whole Foods donated shopping baskets that can be full of produce and hosed down in the garden and sanitized between harvest)
o Field wash of the produce to get the big chunks of dirt off (kitchen managers clean again)
o In DPS, School garden produce must be refrigerated overnight because salad bar produce needs to be served below 40 degrees, so it’s just stored separately from other deliveries
o Equipment: harvest tools like scissors, harvest baskets, scale, bowls, invoice
· How do we train the students, volunteers, and kitchen managers to handle the food safely? Both out in the garden and in the kitchen
Once the protocols are established and agreed upon by the district, the Health Dept. and any support orgs for the gardens develop a training workshop to teach the students, volunteers and kitchen crew how to implement the protocols. Set up a 1-2 hour training workshop and review the protocols and any documentation that needs to be done. Also include some hands on training, such as how to sterilize the harvest baskets, how to field wash the produce, or how to clean and store the garden produce in the school kitchen. Allow participants to ask questions. It is a good idea for the support org to send people back to the school within a couple of weeks to check on the actual implementation of the protocols and tweak anything that is out of place.
· How do we pay the gardens for this produce?
USDA has given 4 choices for FS Directors to use their funding to support GTC:
1) NPSFS Account Investment- The FSD can buy things like seeds, plants, and soils in exchange for the produce to be used in the cafeteria.
2) Interdepartmental Agreement- In some cases the school gardens are under the control of a district department, like facilities or after-school programs. Since this is a district department, the food service department can provide money to another department in the district to pay for the produce from the gardens.
3) Informal Procurement- If the value of the garden produce is above the small purchase threshold, then the FSD needs to use an informal procurement process. The FSD can contact other similar programs and get fair pricing from them to use in the gardens.
4) Micro purchase procedure- if the value of the school garden produce is under the small purchase threshold established for your area, then the FSD can pay the schools directly for the produce.
· Should FNS pay organic value for produce from the garden?
For the time being, we need to get FNS comfortable in paying for the produce at any rate. To keep things simple, FNS should pay an average price to the gardens that they pay the vendors for similar produce. Once FNS has figured how to pay the gardens and it becomes part of their normal practice. Then we can look at organic prices for the school garden produce.
· What to tell FNS if they don’t want to pay for GTC produce because they are part of the district, which provides the land and water?
o Perspective: a district typically isn’t going to pay more than $1,500 for GTC, which is only a drop in the bucket for FNS’s budget
o Alternatively, paying the students teaches them about food justice, value of their food etc.
o Pricing is determined by average cost of other purchases – comes out to about $1/lb. to keep it affordable for FNS and give the school garden at least something
· What are the easiest things to start growing and getting into GTC? What is more intermediate?
Anything that can be eaten raw with minimal preparation is best for the GTC program. We target products for the salad bars that can be eaten raw and need minimal slicing. Produce that needs to be cooked should come later when the school kitchens are confident in their abilities around scratch cooking and have the necessary equipment to prepare the item.
· How can you do this schools that don’t have a functional kitchen but a room with a sink and microwave?
Produce can be washed in a sink using proper sanitary and kitchen procedures or can be washed in a couple large tubs. To prepare the produce for the salad bar, all you need is a cutting board and a chef’s knife to cut things.
· Are there USDA resources that lay out that it’s ok for the garden to sell to the cafeteria?
The USDA has a couple of memos to Food Service Directors (http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/SP06-2015os.pdf & http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/SP_32-2009_os.pdf) supporting the use of school garden produce in the school kitchens and described ways to pay for the produce. The USDA has also come out with Fact Sheets supporting school garden produce use in the school cafeterias (http://www.fns.usda.gov/farmtoschool/farm-school-resources#School%20Gardening%5C). This is a great one on school gardens: http://www.fns.usda.gov/sites/default/files/f2s/FactSheet_School_Gardens.pdf
· How do we break down the “urban myths” around GTC?
Education and promotion is the best way to break down urban myths. The creation of the GTC Toolkit by Slow Food USA and supported by Whole Kids Foundation will be the centerpiece of a campaign to increase the use of GTC programs in schools. The toolkit will break down the barriers of implementing the GTC program in school districts.
· How to overcome the obstacle of perceived increased kitchen staff labor around washing and prepping fresh produce?
Most school kitchen staff is being trained on minimal processing techniques of fresh produce as part of farm to school programs. The small quantity of produce coming from school gardens should not add any real burdens to the labor efforts of the kitchen. We will develop kitchen-training protocols to help overcome any reluctance in accepting school garden produce.
· How can students be part of the food safety protocol development and evaluation development process to determine educational outcomes?
The
actual protocols need to come from the Health Dept. and the Food Service Dept.
as they are responsible for the food safety in the kitchens. Students can play
a role by helping to develop the training protocols to teach the volunteers and
other students how to implement the food safety protocols in the garden and
during the harvest. Students also play a
large part recoding the harvest each time by weighing and measuring the amount
of food coming from the garden before it is delivered to the kitchen. They can also conduct a survey of fellow
students in the cafeteria to try to measure the impact of having school garden
produce on the salad bar.
· How to balance education with production? (e.g. having kindergarteners plant carrots is not very efficient) How do you determine what’s a “good level” of GTC? Is GTC even necessary if there are better ways to educate kids about where their food comes from?
Garden to Cafeteria should not be thought about in the terms of efficiency and production. The largest impact that GTC will have is the educational benefits of students being part of a local food supply chain and seeing that their hard work results in fresh produce that the school kitchens value enough to serve with the food coming from the kitchens. Denying kindergarteners the chance to plant carrots just because they will not be that efficient is not a fair trade-off for the great experience they will have in being part of the production from the school garden.
· What’s a best-case scenario for a garden’s production? (Especially if you want to divide the outputs among farmers markets, tastings, cooking classes, GTC pantry donations etc.) / How to keep track of how much produce is actually going into the cafeteria?
Slow Food reminds people that it’s ultimately the school’s choice what they want to do with the relatively small amount of produce that comes out of a school garden and that GTC is only one great option.
DC Greens actually discourages GTC in hot food prep of entrees and sides because of lack of volume but salad bars are great. In Denver Public Schools, 20-25 schools participate in GTC in the 8-week harvest season, and the range of output is between 50-400 lbs. per school. Really depends on the goals of the garden and if GTC is a high priority.
· Do food safety protocols apply to “grazing in the garden” too?
Basic guidelines in Denver that say kid picks it for themselves, not to feed their friends (transfers germs).
· How to move beyond snacks in the garden to tastings in the cafeteria to cooking with garden produce?
Moving from snacks to cafeteria tastings to cooking with produce requires a good understanding of food safety. The best practice is to establish food safety protocols from the beginning of a garden program by working with the Food Service Dept. By showing that the program follows food safety practices, the Food Service department will have the confidence to work with the school garden programs to bring food into the cafeteria. Much of school garden programs is building relationships and gaining the confidence in others.
· For Family and Consumer Sciences and cooking classes, do the same food safety protocols apply as GTC?
These teachers should get some training, but the same extent is not as
necessary
Detroit School Garden Collaborative with Betty Wiggins
· The office of school nutrition within Detroit Public Schools (141 schools)
· FNS pays for the collaborative
o Full time program manager
o FE farm manager
o 8 garden attendants (4-6 hours/day agricultural workers)
· “Stoplight Salad” à red, yellow, green
· Used $500k USDA dollars to build a greenhouse for DPS to do their own starts – food service dollars can be used to pay for people, equipment, etc. for gardens and school farms
· Schools should ask their contracted food service to pay for a full time garden manager as part of the school lunch program; mandate in their bid that they have to do school gardens
Kirsten Saylor
Erika Hansen
ERIKA HANSEN
Garden Educator | Big Green Memphis
C: 571-217-7608
Real Food Grows Here
Click here to enter your harvest tracking data!
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Chapman, Harold
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Tristana Pirkl (CE CEN)
Hi Kristen,
The Garden to Cafeteria toolkit developed by Slow Food USA and supported by Whole Kids Foundation includes steps on how to set up the protocols for the whole chain of procedures, including the kitchen end. There is also an accompanying sample set of protocols from 5 districts, which also include Chicago’s protocols. More will be added as we wrap up our pilot program-2 districts just successfully launched their programs!
Whole Kids Foundation is also sponsoring Slow Food USA’s consultation (either in person or remote) with interested districts and we still have a couple of spots available. Please contact Andrew Nowak at and...@slowfoodusa.org if you’re interested.
All the best,
Tristana
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TRISTANA PIRKL |
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