The Oregon School Nutrition Association is pleased to announce a new local foods feature to their annual trade show March 11 and 12, 2011. All Oregon, Washington and Idaho producers are invited to participate and be showcased, but we will have limited space to only feature 12 in the main gallery.
The recent passage of federal legislation and increased attention on local foods in schools has created more opportunities than ever for regional food producers. If you are looking to engage in, or deepen, your connections to the growing school food market, this is the one event not to miss! The event will be held at the Salem Conference Center, and 250 school food buyers will attend. If you are ready to register, please download and complete the vendor application posted here.
Deadline to submit applications is February 28. All vendor booths are filled on a first come first serve basis, so if you’d like to be part of the Local Foods welcoming gallery, please submit your form as soon as possible to guarantee a spot. When you do, select booth options between 89-100 and make a special note that you’d like to be a part of the Local Foods main gallery.
If you have already registered for a booth and would like to make sure that you are part of the Local Foods gallery or have other questions, please feel free to call or email Michelle Markesteyn Ratcliffe, Oregon Department of Agriculture, Farm to School, 503.872.6620 or mmarkesteyn@oda.state.or.us.
Friday, March 11
1:00-5:30 pm – Exhibitor Move In Time
7:00-9:30 pm – Friday Fun Night with a live band
9:30 pm on – Free to have hosted broker/vendor rooms
SHOW HOURS:
Saturday, March 12
10:00-11:00 am – designated for Directors and Purchasing agents only
11:00 am-2:00 pm – All members will be welcome
5:00 pm – Closing ceremony
BOOTH RENTAL: Booths will be $650.00 each.
A booth consists of the following:
“Quite frankly, I had no idea of the farms that were in our area.” – Lisa Vincent, Nutrition Services Operations Supervisor, Beaverton School District
Have you ever wondered how many farms are located close to your school district and how to get in touch with them? Check out FoodHub’s video featuring Susan Barker and Lisa Vincent of Beaverton, Oregon School District Nutrition Services. They explain how FoodHub helps make it easier to execute their Farm-to-School program by finding local farms and local products. Springbank Farms’ Brian and Michelle O’Driscoll talk about the pride they take in selling to schools.
We’ve seen that changing procurement practices is one of the most high-impact, meaningful ways to transform school food, but it can be helpful to tackle the issues from multiple angles. Smarter Lunchrooms is a new project from Cornell University that aims to design sustainable, research-based lunchrooms that subtly guide students to make smarter choices.
The project’s creators explain:
What can a well-meaning school do to help their students eat healthier? One way might be to raise the prices on the less healthy foods. Another way might be to eliminate unhealthy choices from the food service menu.
Many schools are hesitant to go this far. They are in the very real position of also balancing concerns of profitability, compliance, variety, and unfairness to those who are income disadvantaged.
Another set of solutions has been largely overlooked. These are the lunchroom changes – the environmental changes – that can lead a student to unknowingly make healthier lunch choices without knowing they were “nudged” in that direction by the way the lunchroom was designed.
The Smarter Lunchrooms site provides robust research, real-life case studies and plenty of tips for how to change the lunchroom to “nudge” kids toward healthier choices, such as re-naming menu items to sound more appetizing, making vegetables and fruit the “default” sides to a main dish, and displaying healthy foods in appealing, well-lit ways.
Is your district employing any of these tactics? If so, we’d love to hear about it!
Washington School Nutrition Association (WSNA) and the Washington State Department of Agriculture Farm-to-School Program are partnering to celebrate Washington agriculture on September 29 with TASTE WASHINGTON DAY. Schools around the state will be serving a locally-sourced meal and providing education and activities to celebrate the farms that feed us.
WSDA Farm-to-School Program will provide support to match up farms and schools and facilitate the purchasing process. Many school nutrition directors are off for part of the summer, so we’d like to start the process as soon as possible.
We will also help schools add educational activities to the day, whether that’s posters in the cafeteria, inviting a farmer to lunch, or visiting or lunching in a school garden. We want Washington’s kids to spend that day considering the farmers who grow their food, and we want Washington farmers to help us bring that to life!
For more information, to be listed as a participating farm, or to get help linking to your local school districts, please contact Tricia Kovacs, WSDA Farm-to-School Program Manager, at tkovacs@agr.wa.gov or 206-256-6150.
In late April, Clare Columbus, Nutrition Services Director for the Gervais School District, found out that her regular farmer would not be able to supply the lettuce she needed for the April Harvest of the Month she had planned. (The Harvest of the Month is a program in which the cafeteria features one seaso
nal ingredient from a local farmer in their menu.) Instead of panicking, Columbus used FoodHub to send a quick message out to several farms nearby that listed themselves as having lettuce, as well as posting to FoodHub’s Marketplace section. By the end of that day, she had found her lettuce! Ivan Maluski from Tipping Tree Farm in Colton (only 6 miles down the road from Clare!) got in touch and delivered the lettuce himself the next week. Now Clare has developed a new relationship with a local farmer, and Ivan has a new customer. Match-making success!
Photo by Scott Trimble
This month, Portland Public School students who eat school lunch will find that their salad bars include fresh radishes from Gabe Trif of Cal Farms in Oregon City.
Gitta Grether-Sweeney, the assistant director for the district, posted a request on FoodHub’s Marketplace section for 200 pounds of radishes. Trif was one of three respondents. Connection made!
Gitta has another post in the Marketplace section right now for mixed greens for the salad bar. FoodHub farmers, be sure to login regularly to check Marketplace posts!
The opportunity to connect with school districts and get regionally produced foods into the school cafeteria has never been greater. FoodHub is here to help jump start the connections. There are a number of new school districts in FoodHub—see the list below. Do you produce food in or near these communities? If so, be sure to connect!
David Douglas School District
Hillsboro School District
Kings Valley Charter School
McMinnville School District
North Marion School District
Sheridan School District
Willamina School District
Photo by Carole Topalian
Portland Public Schools has been serving locally grown fruits and vegetables each month, making a point of letting kids know the farm and farmer who grew each “Harvest of the Month” item. In February, lunch trays featured Hilltop Farms’ rutabagas grown by the Kerslake family, and plenty of kids were licking their lips. Need to see it to believe it? You can! Listen to Atkinson Elementary School students rave in this lovely video.
[If the screen appears black in your web browser, you can also view the video here.]
We’re excited about the opportunities FoodHub provides to school districts, and hope to see more and more kids in the cafeteria eating rutabagas with a smile. “Yeah! Pretty cool.”
Those hard working folks at the Oklahoma Department of Agriculture have created a nifty produce calculator so that when a school food service director says, “I need enough apples to serve 600 1/4 cup servings to the kids” apple producers will stand a chance at knowing what that means in terms of cases or pounds.
You can download an excel spreadsheet, ingenious in its simple, straight-forward design. We’ll work on incorporating something similar into FoodHub for Northwest products, but in the meantime, check out the Oklahoma Farm to School website and click on produce calculator.
“Farm to School”
You’ll hear that phrase every now and then. Quite simply, “farm to school” represents the basic notion that we can get better food into our schools. Beyond better, we can and should get regionally produced food into our NW schools.
Today I ate rutabagas with my 6-year old son at Atkinson Elementary in Southeast Portland. The rutabagas were on his tray because Portland Public Schools (PPS) worked with Hilltop Farms to source the yummy root vegetable. PPS has a Harvest of the Month program where they feature a regionally sourced product every month (the same product ends up on the menu at least twice in one month). PPS features both fresh and processed products in their Harvest of the Month program, helping kids understand that freezing blueberries is a great way to enjoy the yummy berry after the growing season has come and gone. Beyond the Harvest of the Month program, PPS goes out of its way to source as much local product as possible, routinely featuring “Local Lunches” such as Truitt Brothers 3-bean vegetarian chili.
And PPS isn’t alone. Schools THROUGHOUT the Northwest are interested in strengthening partnerships with regional vendors.
Food producers – please keep checking to see which schools have joined FoodHub and reach out to them. Can you commit to one or two items? Can you grow on contract for next school year? Suffer through the necessary paperwork and you might just find yourself making some little kid’s day.
Schools – please keep watching to see which FoodHub producers might be a good fit for you and reach out to them. Figure out how to translate your serving needs into poundage or case quantities that make sense to farmers.
Yummy food, happy, healthy kids. Let’s do it.