The Politics of School Lunch.

During my thirteen years of public school education, I can count the number of school lunches I consumed on both hands.  Although I often begged for those alluring meals of hotdogs, nachos and pizza, my mother stood firm.  Just like her stance on Lunchables, I think my mom always understood the consequences of overly convenient food.  She didn’t care if I fit in.  She preferred I eat healthy.  And as I begin to learn more about school lunch programs in public schools, I couldn’t be happier that I typically ate sandwiches and leftovers for lunch.

Not consuming public school lunches with any degree of regularity, I can honestly say I knew nothing about them before guest speaker Sarah Elliot’s discussion of the issue last Thursday evening.  F.H. King invited Sarah, the director of REAPs Farm to School Program, to speak at our second Get the Dirt dinner of the semester.  Get the Dirt dinners are held in Science Hall and provide students, alums and community members with an opportunity to eat delicious food and learn more about sustainable agriculture, food systems and related subjects.

Sarah began by providing us with a thorough overview of what public school lunches look like in Madison.  The Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) is made up of 49 schools.  And given that the majority of these schools don’t even possess kitchens, all of the food processing for both breakfast and lunch is done at an external processing facility.  Here, things are cooked and baked, but handling whole raw produce is completely avoided through the use of already diced. precooked canned or frozen fruits and vegetables.  If fruits and vegetables are used, they are taken out of a package rather than purchased whole.  Washing, cooking or dicing fresh produce is unseemly.

Meals are built for efficiency.  Food is divided into hot and cold boxes, of which children receive one of each.  For example, if lunch is a hot dog, applesauce and cookies.  The hot dog is placed in a hot box while the applesauce, cookies, bun and ketchup are placed in a cold box.  This way, food service workers can easily heat up hundreds of hot dogs quickly without having to actually put them together.  With only two or three food service workers per school and no kitchen, this certainly seems like the most effective way to get children fed quickly.

Why the need for such urgency?  Most public school cafeterias cannot even hold an entire grade, so lunch is often divided into three or four lunch periods.  The earliest lunch session may be at 10:40 with the final one being at 1:20.  Food service workers need to get 60 or 70 kids fed in 20 minutes so the next lunch period can begin.  But often these make-you-own-style meals are not well understood.  First graders may eat their hot dog, bun and ketchup separately.

When we learned that MMSD food services prepare approximately 18,000 meals per day and are not allowed to exceed $0.95 per meal, the processing facility and lack of kitchens began to make sense.  Within this $0.95 budget, $0.22 is allocated for milk and another $0.11 for packaging.  In the end, public schools only have $0.62 for lunch food!  They are dealing with massive quantities of food every day, and local agriculture (or fresh produce for that matter) just doesn’t have the low-cost or efficient preparation capabilities of processed foods.

This all being said, there are obviously a multitude of barriers for bringing local produce into the school breakfast and lunch programs.  But despite the challenges, REAP has been working for a solution since 2002.  The Farm to School program we learned about has existed since 2010, but grew out of a related project, the Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch Program, which came about in partnership with the University of Wisconsin’s Center for Integrated Agricultural Studies (CIAS).

Currently, and because of the numerous barriers for bringing local food into actual school meals, REAP’s Farm to School Program uses a Chef in the Classroom program (at Sherman Middle School and East High School), Snack Program (at ten Madison elementary schools) and Classroom Education (from AmeriCorps Educators) as their main outlets for change.

The main focus of Sarah’s discussion on Farm to School was the well-known, but rarely well-understood Snack Program. This program is possible through a USDA Fresh Fruit and Veggie Grant that serves ten Madison elementary schools.  This grant enables these ten public schools to purchase raw fruit and vegetable snacks three times per week.  Note: raw fruits and vegetables. This does not include dehydrated, preserved or pickled produce, nor does it include dairy, meat products or grain produced from local farmers, showing obvious challenges throughout the winter months, but this is a very specific stipulation of the grant.

Out of these three snacks per week paid for by the USDA grant, REAP provides only one.  Even though they only provide a third of the snacks, REAP still sources about 700 pounds of produce each week!  This shows not only the magnitude, but also the infrastructure necessary for such a program.  Also because of the fresh produce stipulation, there is a three to ten week gap during the winter months.  REAP provides a lot of carrots, sweet potatoes, kohlrabi, apples and spinach through the winter months, but some gap is inevitable.  They hope to encourage and facilitate a Harvest of the Month program in all of MMSD schools in order to utilize more products such as cheese, yogurt, and wild rice.

REAP AmeriCorps in-class education also occurs at the ten elementary schools participating in the USDA Fresh Fruit and Veggie grant.  Because these are schools that have the highest percentage of kids who receive free or reduced lunches, it is assumed that these children also have the lowest access to fresh produce.  The grant encourages not only access to fresh fruits and veggies, but also education on why kids should care about what they are eating.

So what is it like to be the director of the Farm to School Program?  Sarah works at achieving two simultaneous goals: working to increase the amount of local fresh fruit and veggies to kids while also helping to create viable pathways for local products to be used in institutional settings.  She splits her time between procuring and processing vegetables and implementing these three programs.  But her vision goes beyond these admirable daily tasks.  While doing her day-to-day job, Sarah also “tries to focus on big-picture ways to make systemic changes to our public school meal system. This certainly involves meeting lots of folks and trying to bring people together to make pathways for local food to get into our schools!”

It will no doubt be a slow and gradual process, but with a new food service director, MMSD is growing increasingly receptive to REAP and their methods.  As far as local food goes, Sarah and REAP are certainly moving forward in the Madison public school system!

Plants that Heal.

I met Danna Olsen in April, while working on creating a garden out of vacant land in the Bayview Neighborhood.  She was one of three volunteers to show up at the event, and I hadn’t even invited her!  That’s the thing about Danna.  If you’re constructing a garden or green rooftop in the city of Madison, Danna will find out about it and more than likely, she’ll show up to lend a hand.

It was a long and winding road that brought Danna into this world of green spaces and sustainability, but it’s safe to say she has found her place in Madison.  After graduating from the University of Wisconsin-Madison with degrees in Biological Aspects of Conservation and Zoology as well as an Environmental Studies certificate, Danna had trouble finding employment.  Like many of my recently graduated friends, Danna’s classes had thoroughly expanded her mind on ecological issues, but weren’t quite enough to help her obtain the jobs she desired.  Danna found undergraduate degrees in science were rarely enough.  Employers wanted Masters or Doctorate degrees, but she wasn’t ready for these higher educations.

She held temporary positions at the UW Primate Center and Monsanto before finding employment as a chemist for PPD, a pharmaceutical company in Middleton.  Although she wasn’t especially interested in this type of science, it seemed like a step in the right direction.  For 7 years, Danna was (usually) stuck in a room filled with gray crates for 40 hours a week.  The dull, monotone, windowless room was depressing (especially when summer rolled around) and Danna reached a point where she was  always complaining about her job.  She was good at it, but knew it wasn’t making her happy.  Much of the misery had to do with the environment she was working within.  Finally, she realized she had to leave before moving on to the next step: management.  On a dare, she quit her job.

Danna began work at Barrique’s where she found she had time to learn and pursue her interests again.  Always intrigued by public health and the environmental effects of health, she decided to continue her education and become a Nurse’s Assistant.  During her first summer away from PPD, Danna took a “mental vacation” and spent the majority of her summer outdoors.  Although she was shifting her life’s direction and perhaps even taking a step backward (what should have been a stressful time), she somehow felt at ease.  She attributes much of her happiness during the transition period to her time spent outdoors.

Once back involved in campus life, Danna began attending Environmental Studies Club meetings, attending Professor DeWitt’s coffee hours and volunteering for Madison Environmental Group.  She was part of a big pesticide-free campaign on campus and began to notice that environmental and sustainable changes are a very gradual process.  Because there is so much bureaucracy and divergent interests involved, innovative changes need to be handled patiently and persistently.  To many, the appearance of Bascom Hill defines UW-Madison.  If the Grounds Department began to use pesticide-free lawn care, would this iconic hill still look good?  This was one of the many voices surrounding the lawn-care debate.  This struggle is still going on.

The following September, Majora Carter came to campus.  Danna became even more inspired.  Her interest in sustainability efforts within cities broadened and she began to wonder what Madison was doing in this realm.  It turned out they were not doing as much as she’d hoped.

Danna organized the Green Roof Initiative in order to advocate for green rooftops in Madison.  The group brought together roofing companies, landscaping students and native plant exports. Group members and Madison residents can now look to Greening Madison to become educated on green rooftops in the city as well as follow their progress.

Meanwhile, still working at the UW-hospital, Danna began to notice the dreary views outside of her patients windows.  It reminded her of those 7 years spent working  indoors for PPD: little more to look at then drab gray and concrete.  While working with surgical patients, Danna began snapping pictures of the views outside their windows.  The gray and gravel rooftops couldn’t have positive implications for recovery.  With the pictures she’d taken, Danna created a slide show that connected both her interests: Green Roofs and Patient Care.  The slide show discussed the economic and human benefits of green roofing on hospitals.  She explained how vacant space could be used as a place of healing.

She took her slideshow to Health & Healing meetings as well as Facility Planning meetings at the hospital and her superiors listened. The UW-Hospital staff agreed that green roofs would improve patient care.

While still nursing, Danna began to act as a facilitator for these green roof projects, networking, utilizing resources and bringing divergent groups together in conversation.  She brought in UW engineering students to help with planning the infrastructure for her healing gardens (green rooftops require a lot of infrastructure in order to support the weight of the soil, transitioning from a normal rooftop to a green rooftop is no small endeavor).  Landscape architecture students have been recruited more recently to help design the corridor space.  Currently there is one healing garden in place at the UW-Hospital, but two more are in the works including one atop an old helicopter pad.

Danna is the quintessential example of someone taking a normal job, and making it exceptional.  Working as a nurse, she did more than just the required patient care.  She observed the environment that her patients had to live in while recovering and found a way to improve it.  It is clear to me that Danna has never been one to settle in life.  Wherever she looks, she sees ways in which things can be improved and believes in making everything around her a little bit better.

Danna tells me that for a long time now, she has been on a quest to use her abilities and interests.  She hasn’t gotten to where she wants to be yet, but feels like she is certainly headed in the right direction now.

Danna still works as a Nurse’s Assistant at the UW hospital in the Neurology Department while simultaneously taking nursing classes and volunteering her time as a environmental sustainability and greenroof advocate.  Eventually she would love a job “that looks at the  environmental factors that shape health problems.”  Soon she will be beginning graduate studies at UW-Madison.

It is safe to say that plants can heal, and more than just recovering patients, it appears plants can reshape the direction of one’s life.

Days 13, 14 & 15

Cloudy!!!  Ick, ick, ick, no wonder I’ve been crabby.  Hopefully more beautiful pictures to come!

Day 12.

Day 11.

More cloudy skies in Madison, no sunset today

Day 10.

Bike the Barns (and also Day 9 of the Sunset Challenge).

So, again, it is cloudy outside and that equates no sunset over the beautiful Lake Mendota…  No wonder people hate these rainy days.

However, despite the lack of sunset, there appears to be one determined group of people who will not be brought down by the drab weather conditions: this year’s Bike the Barns participants.  Between 8 and 10 am, approximately 530 cyclists headed out to Cambridge, Wisconsin to embark on a 63-mile, 3 meal ride, or a 26-mile, 2 meal ride.

Thought up by Jonny Hunter and Kevin Walsh of UFC, Bike the Barns is a large fundraiser for the Madison Area CSA Coalition’s Partner Share Program (which makes CSA farm shares, and therefore fresh produce, much more affordable to limited-income households).  UFC and MACSAC have co-sponsored the event since its commencement in 2007.  In the ride’s first year, Hunter expected 60 participants; they had 350 sign up.  The event had to be capped in its second year!  Every year since, the ride has sold out.  Registration was full in early August this year!

Bright and early (er, well, cloudy and early), this year’s participants registered and picked up goodie bags (complete with pink t-shirts, designed by Art and Sons, more intimately known as Drew Garza and Scott Pauli) before heading to the park shelter for morning snacks.

Immediately, my friend pulled on her new pink shirt, complete with a bicycle pulling a plow.  Although Garza and Pauli’s design business has been up and running for a little over a year now, they have been doing the t-shirts and promotional material for Bike the Barns for the past three years.  Garza and Pauli got connected with Bike the Barns through Hunter (they have done a lot of work for Hunter and UFC while establishing their artistic identity).  After MACSAC’s executive director and community program manager educated them on MACSAC as well as the whole CSA process, Garza and Pauli began doing work for the event.  It was important to understand the significance of Bike the Barns and the meaning behind it in order to create images that would represent the event well.  This opportunity as well as working with UFC has given the artists an opportunity to be free with their work.  Hunter and MACSAC employees were very receptive to Garza and Pauli’s creativity and design work, allowing them to grow as artists.

The weather at Lake Ripley Park was chilly but everyone cheerfully drank their coffee and munched on delicious yogurt cups prepared by UFC while waiting for their registered start times and hoping for clearer skies.

My registration time was 8:20, so I “had to” leave within the 20 minutes after 8:20.  This was the general request, but with no race bib or official starting line, my race departure relied on me and me alone.  Because riders left as they pleased between 8 and 9am, the ride had an extremely casual feel to it.  There was no need to worry about how fast or slow you biked because you didn’t know when anyone else began and truly, there was no one paying attention to or concerned with your speed.  Riders of the 63-mile ride followed lime green arrows stuck to the road, indicating when to turn, although ride maps were also distributed.  Riders of the 26-mile ride followed yellow arrows that would take them to farm stops 2 and 3.

The first farm stop, High Meadow Farm, was 25 miles from Lake Ripley Park and somehow the rain held off for this largest portion of the ride.  Here cyclists enjoyed croissants from GRAZE, Sassy Cow Creamery chocolate milk as well as watermelon and apples.  Bikers were free to wander the grounds, looking at the farm’s chickens and vegetable crops.  20-minute farm tours were also available.

Back behind the tent where hungry riders grabbed meal number 1, the farm’s moveable chicken pen sat ready for viewing.  During the green seasons, chickens sleep and lay eggs within these portable structures called Chicken Tractors.  The structures are moved weekly for fresh, clean pasture.

Our time at High Meadow Farm was a bit chilly, but the rain still held off… until I pulled out my camera.  From about the moment we got back on our bikes until we arrived at farm stop #2, the rain and wind did not let up.  I, a glasses wearer, cannot tell you  much about the scenery of this 20 mile ride as my glasses were tucked away in my raincoat pocket as I rode blindly down country roads.  One thing I can tell you is that this stretch was extremely hilly and that hills are a lot less daunting when you cannot see them.  I think this was the fastest bike ride of my life.  There is something about cycling through the elements that just makes it a lot more fun.  In the middle of a cycling event, rain is a kind of instant community-builder: we were all out there, we were all struggling, we were all drenched and therefore, we were all immediately friends.  When I put my glasses back on at farm stop #2, everyone was still smiling and to me that is a testament to how well-run and well-loved this event is.  We were dripping and disgusting but absolutely pumped to eat a lunch prepared by the Underground Food Collective, inside of a hoop house full of tomato plants.

This picture was taken during our first few minutes at Stop #2: Wholesome Harvest.  Cyclists were allowed to park our bikes on the front yard (which I feel like we turned into a mud pit, along with the whole driveway, thanks so much Wholesome Harvest!).  Here we enjoyed open face sandwiches of roast beef with tomato, onion, sarvecchio, jus and toast alongside a bean salad with a lemon vinagrette and a wheat berry salad with carrots and beets.  Maybe I was just starving and cold, but given that I’d eaten croissants, chocolate milk and fruit less than two hours previous, I don’t think hunger had nothing to do with how absolutely incredible this meal tasted.  My friends and I chowed down the entire thing in less than ten minutes.

After a twenty minute warm up in the hoop house, we left Wholesome Harvest with much fuller stomachs and hoped this would warm us up.  But I regret to inform you that this is where the pictures stop because my friends and I took the 10 mile ride back to Lake Ripley Park rather than the 18 mile ride that included ice cream sandwiches at Sprouting Acres Farm.  We, unlike the vast majority of riders, were not sufficiently prepared for the weather.  With feet that felt like bricks and legs that were chilled to the bone, we biked back.  My friends were happy with this decision, but after speaking with Hunter, I was pretty disappointed that I missed their ice cream sandwiches made with apricot jam and homemade ice cream using Sassy Cow Creamery milk.

When I told Hunter that I would certainly still eat that ice cream treat on a cold day, he matter-of-factly replied, “Lots of people did.”  A little disappointed that I hadn’t been tough enough to join my fellow crazy Madison bikers in making it to the ice cream sandwiches, in the end, I was thrilled that Bike the Barns had such enthusiastic support.  It seems my friends and I were in the minority when it came to sticking it out through the weather.  According to Andy Watson, a farmer at Sprouting Acres Farm, an amazing number of people kept rolling in throughout the day. Almost 100 people asked for a farm tour at this final stop despite the conditions, and many many more enjoyed the delicious desserts.

By the post-ride party, some riders had put in more than 10 hours on the road, but it was all worth it for pork and beef tacos, fresh tomato and tomattillo salsa with cabbage and carrot slaw.

In the end, out of the 660 participants who signed up ahead of time for the event, only 39 people did not show up for registration, leaving the total at 535 registered riders, 20 bike support folks, 50 volunteers and 12 SAG wagon participants!  And here’s one final impressive number for you: by the end of the day, UFC had prepared over 2000 meals for Bike the Barns.

So where does all this food come from? As Kiera Mulvey, executive director of MACSAC told me, UFC does a great job of  “serving up amazing meals using mostly donated produce (a feat of its own!) and is willing to work in whatever conditions we’re able to come up with.  Incredibly flexible and creative, its always been a joy to see what the menu consists of and how they’ve transformed all the food donated by our amazing farmers into a full day of fresh food for over 550 riders.”  The vast majority of this food comes from MACSAC farms.

Along with the flawless and delicious meals, it was quite apparent that this event has evolved over the years into an amazingly well-supported, well-executed and enormously popular event.  Planning for next year will begin immediately.  Participating groups will get together to assess this year’s successes and figure out what can be done better next year.  “This is our 5th year and I feel that we finally are getting a pretty good idea about what it takes to make it more work,” Hunter tells me.  As a bike participant, this was pretty apparent.

Kiera offered me a little insight into the support staff MACSAC has working on this event.  Willy Street bikes, REI Madison, We Are All Mechanics, Just Coffee and Uphill Grind have all offered tremendous amounts of support over the years.  MACSAC also relies on a volunteer committee of 6 folks (3 staff and 3 volunteers) to do most of the pre event planning, organizing, development and logistics.  There are also 5-two person crews of route markers the day prior to the event, 5 in office volunteers the week prior to the event helping with logistics and prep, and approximately 50 day-of-volunteer slots (although, often folks do multiple shifts, so only about 30 individuals helping the day of).  This year and last, Scott Kremer and Mike Miller, served as dedicated ride support volunteers.  Their goal: reaching out to long term supporters and coordinating their presence, hoping to make involvement larger and more comprehensive.  As Kiera explains, “Willy St. Bikes has always been a huge event supporter, but we’ve arranged with them in the past few years to have more of a day of presence to lend more assistance to riders.  It comes a lot from personal connections between committee members and also from a great track record of a successful event, bike shops are excited to help out because they know this is an awesome community of riders out there not to win races and beat records, but to enjoy our amazing cycling atmosphere, our community of farms, and the great food.”

With great respect for one another’s talents and abilities, this collaboration seems to bring the best out of everybody.  I, for one, am thrilled MACSAC, UFC and partner organizations all came together.