Ecotrust in the News

Portland Tribune and Community Newspapers
December 11, 2008
By Christian Gaston

What's for lunch? Less junk

Grant helps Portland Public Schools feed kids more local food

Most kids aren't exactly health food nuts.

Students at Portland Public Schools are no different. They love pizza. They hate beets.

But Kristy Obbink, director of nutrition services at PPS, says that the district's Harvest of the Month and Local Lunch programs, which put farm-fresh produce on cafeteria plates twice a month, has her questioning the assumption that kids won't eat healthy foods. It turns out students kind of like parsnips.

"We've been thrilled by the fairly positive response from kids," Obbink says.

The Local Lunch program, which debuted in October, offers cafeteria-goers a complete meal made with Oregon-grown products. On Nov. 19, the district served Harvest Parsnips grown at Kerslake Farms in Corbett coupled with a recipe for Draper Valley Chicken drizzled in a pear vinaigrette devised by former Wildwood chef Cory Schreiber.

Local Lunches cost the district about 35 percent more than the typical lunch — $1.55 rather than $1.15. The cost to students remains the same and is made up from a $290,000 grant from the Kaiser Permanente Community Fund, administered by Ecotrust.

The local fare makes a lot of sense in Portland, Obbink says. Two and a half years ago PPS started the Harvest of the Month program, which features fresh regional produce on school menus (the parsnips, for example). The response was so positive they added the complete Local Lunch this year.

"We started to hear from our community… They were asking for foods that were grown and produced here locally in an effort to support local farmers and the local economy and in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases," Obbink says.

Obbink says she's been trying to buy locally as much as she can. She gets off-season watermelons from Hermiston and buys pizza from Roadrunner Pizza, based in Gladstone, which uses local flour for the crust and a sauce made for PPS that omits high-fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener. "We spend a lot of money on pizza," Obbink says. "Kids like pizza."

Buying locally grown meat is particularly expensive. Obbink has about $1.15 to spend for each of the 20,000 lunches that the district serves each day.

Even though the district's buying power means she can get a good price, the price gap between locally grown meat and the commodity meat that the district gets from the federal government is difficult to overcome.

The grant allows Obbink's staff more wiggle room to purchase local ingredients for a full lunchtime spread made with local ingredients.

In October, the district offered Tillamook cheese quesadillas with fresh, local salsa, apples and pears. In May, it'll be Zenner's hot dogs and Kettle chips. "We're still trying to choose kid-friendly food," Obbink says. "It's the same sorts of foods we might provide but with a twist."

Schreiber, who works for the Oregon Department of Agriculture trying to connect farms to schools, thinks that even if kids are eating similar foods, they're experiencing them in a new way.

"Part of the educational awareness is letting kids know what food is like in the raw form and the garden form rather than the prepared form," Schreiber says.

Obbink says that for some kids, experiencing fresh fruits can be an eye-opener. "We'd never served fresh strawberries in this district because they're way too expensive," Obbink says. "We had kids literally who'd never had a fresh strawberry."

But last year, a PPS staffer happened upon the booth for Unger Farms at the Beaverton Farmers Market. The chance encounter led to a harvest-of-the-month shipment.

Matt Unger, one of the owners of Unger Farms, says that selling strawberries to PPS worked out for him since taking the flats of fresh berries to the district's central distribution hub saved him money on gas and labor. The size of the order helped, too.

Obbink hopes that the Local Lunch program is seen as a success in Salem, too, where Ecotrust has proposed that the state spend 15 cents of lottery funds on every lunch.

Oregon doesn't fund school lunches, so Obbink relies entirely on retail sales and federal reimbursements for the free and reduced lunch program.

Obbink knows it's a bad time to be asking for money, with state coffers suffering from a downturn in the economy, but the pitch is that by buying more local produce, the state will help the local economy.

Schreiber says that of the $103 million spent annually by school districts in Oregon on food, only 25 percent goes to local producers. Most of that goes to local dairies, with only $5 million or so going to local fruit and vegetable farmers.

"(The market) is quite large, so it has the potential of creating some real economic stimulus as far as keeping those dollars in the pockets of processors and farmers in Oregon," Schreiber says.

Ecotrust in the News

What's for lunch? Less junk

Grant helps Portland Public Schools feed kids more local food

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