I recently attended a meeting with the Pittsburgh Public Schools to discuss local food in PGH school lunches. At the meeting was Michael Peck the director of food services for PPS, Cathy Willets purchasing supervisor for PPS, David Golomb president of Green Grocer whole sale produce, a food distributor for PPS, Josh Burnett education director for Grow Pittsburgh, and Jordan Kay director of marketing for Enrico Biscotti a local bakery, restaurant and catering service.
Right now PPS is working on this Peak Harvest program that started last year, inspired form the “harvest of the month” program in Oregon. “Peak Harvest” showcases one item of food each month that is grown locally. Here, the program is difficult to sustain through the winter because of the climate and we talked a lot about what items could be featured during the winter.
Other issues discussed about purchasing local food in school lunches were about quantity, finding local farmers that have the capacity to feed 13,000 kids. Accessibility, locating farmers and being able to transfer and obtain food in a way that is still local and consistency, having produce that is consistently the same size for two reasons 1) kids get upset when their apple is smaller then their peers and 2) the produce has to be an exact size to fit into the lunch trays.
In terms of preparing food at schools, Elementary and most middle schools in PGH do not have kitchens. Either they were not built with kitchens because fifty or so years ago when a majority of the schools were built during the steel industry boom kids went home to eat and when the steel industry collapsed in the 80’s schools were shut down and downsized.
Dismantling of school kitchens is also tied into the rise of large scale agriculture and food processing, it is cheaper for many schools to pay a food distributors to send them pre-made trays of food that can just be heated and served at the school rather then hiring kitchen staff to cook and serve it. Funding is another issue for improving the quality of school lunches. Because of the large amount of government funding that is cut from public education, schools often turn to large food distribution companies and corporations like PEPSI for financial support in exchange for selling corporate products in the cafeterias.
Whether or not the local region has the production capacity to can, freeze, clean and prepare its crops is yet another issue. California with so much large-scale agriculture has a lot of capacity for this, but smaller agricultural regions like PA don’t. Places like PA (and pretty much any state not on the west coast) become increasingly dependent on CA for food (specifically lettuce).
Local food can be costly, the PPS is working with a 1$ per student per meal budget that’s 20 cents per item in one meal. Vegetables have to be served raw because there is no place to cook them and it costs more to cook vegetables for 13,000 and to add another stop in the chain of distribution.
So what is being done? This past Labor Day PASA helped Slow Food and Grow Pittsburgh put together an event called A Time For Lunch it is a national day of awareness around school lunch reform
All across the country Slow Food is sponsoring many cities to put together their own potluck for the community to bring awareness around school lunches. There were about 360 communities across the nation holding an “Eat-In” that day.One of the speakers at the event, Julie Pezzino from Grow Pittsburgh did a good job highlighting the challenges PGH public schools have in accessing and providing fresh food at school. One of the biggest issues she pointed out was that the schools here aren’t allowed to have knives in the kitchens because of a contract they are working under with the state. They also have outsourcing troubles because of this contract and can’t bring food directly into the school kitchen it first has to go through the PGH public school food distribution system.
