Going the Distance to Shorten It

With our First Lady touting the advantages of fresh, unprocessed and locally grown foods and 60 Minutes profiling Alice Waters on Sunday, March 15, the momentum continues to build for farm to fork relationships.

And on March 19^th-21^st, the momentum will rise to a whole new level. Over 600 local food leaders will gather in Portland, Oregon for “Going the Distance…and Shortening It,” the Fourth National Farm to Cafeteria Conference, convened by the Community Food Security Coalition, the National Farm to School Network, School Food FOCUS and the Real Food Challenge. The conference will focus on sustainable food systems, food innovation, and training to make the link between farms and institutions like schools, colleges, daycare centers, hospitals and prisons.

Why is this important?

Consider the following:

• Obesity rates among children have doubled in the last 10 years and tripled for adolescents.
• 27 percent of U.S. children are overweight.
• One in three children born in the year 2000 will develop diabetes—make that one in two if the child is black or Hispanic.
• For the first time in 200 years, today’s children will likely have a shorter life expectancy than their parents.

Scary stats like these can numb us to the reality happening in cafeterias across the country – the faces and human stories behind the lunch line. Too many of our neighbors, over 35.5 million Americans, including 12.6 million children, are food insecure, which is another way of saying they are hungry. These kids need and deserve the same high quality, nutritious food as their fellow classmates whose moms packed fresh, organic, whole-grain lunches.

But shouldn’t our National School Lunch Program provide the best for the kids whose parents can’t spend $5 a day on a packed lunch?

School meals are an important way to tighten our nation’s burgeoning waists due to an overfed and undernourished population. But soaring food and energy costs, the lure of fast food outside the school campus, financial pressures caused by tight state budgets and diminished tax revenues all stand in the way of food services providing healthy and delicious meals to schoolchildren.

But is there a solution that can help turn around these trends? Yes there is – it’s called farm to school.

Farm to school programs ensure that our children eat the highest quality food available. Originally a response to the alarming rise of obesity and Type II diabetes in American children, these programs deliver not only food that nourishes children’s bodies in the short-term, but also knowledge that enhances their educational experience and cultivates long-term healthy eating habits. Farm to school programs are a win-win for kids, farmers, communities, educators, parents and the environment.

Farm to cafeteria has gone the distance in the last decade, with the number of programs exploding from a handful in the late 1990’s to over 2,000 today. Local purchasing efforts in colleges, hospitals, and senior and daycare centers are also growing rapidly.

In Portland, “Going the Distance…and Shortening It,” will include field trips to local farms, school lunchrooms and processing facilities; short courses on research and evaluation, grant writing, and collaborative models; and more than 30 workshops on sustainable foods, experiential education, and sessions for food producers and providers. Keynote speaker Joan Dye Gussow, author of “This Organic Life,” will discuss sustainable agriculture as part of a public reception and dinner on March 21, the last night of the conference. A youth summit will run concurrently. And of course, food at the conference will be organic or sustainably produced, and locally sourced whenever possible.

More information about the conference events can be found online at www.farmtocafeteriaconference.com.

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::