SAMPLE OP-ED

Obesity has become a major public health concern. Every day, research is telling us several things that most of us already knew: Americans are too fat, we don't exercise enough, and we don't eat enough fruits and vegetables. Moreover, these factors are causing Americans to have unbelievably high rates of diabetes, heart disease, and other diet-related illnesses.

In spite of the U.S. Department of Agriculture advice to eat more fruits and vegetables, most of us have never come close to the five-a-day goal. In fact, only 20% of American high school students eat five servings a day of fruits and vegetables, according to the Center for Disease Control.

While taking personal responsibility for what we eat is the ultimate answer (even Uncle Sam can't make us eat our broccoli) public institutions must do more, especially for children, to help us along. Texture, taste, and freshness are important to us all, and no one should expect kids to eat nutritious foods unless they taste good and look fresh.

In our nation's schools, which serve lunch to 29 million children each school day, food service directors and local farmers are teaming up to put more fresh native fruits and vegetables on kids' cafeteria trays. Instead of a child eating a mushy apple from out of state or even out of the country, she's picking up a sweet apple grown at a local orchard.

Food service directors at over 400 school districts across the country are now buying fresh produce from local farmers or telling their wholesale vendors they want locally-grown food, not products from thousands of miles away that use the fossil fuels that we're running short of. At the same time that local farmers are starting to feed local kids, innovative teachers are building history, biology, geography, and health lessons around the locally-produced food that students are eating in the cafeteria, or around gardens located in the schoolyard. School children are starting to identify their food with a place and even the face of the farmer.

So-called "Farm to Cafeteria" or "Farm to School" programs span the nation and vary by region. In Connecticut, South Windsor School District is one of 25 districts implementing Farm to School. Under the leadership of food service director Mary Ann Lopez, South Windsor's 5100 students are getting a taste of Connecticut-grown, even when there's snow on the ground. Thanks to South Windsor farmer Dave Shaffer, who produces Russet potatoes on 12 acres of land and stores them in a 60-year old potato barn, Mary Ann has created a popular school potato bar that operates long after the last potato has been dug. "His potatoes are perfect and beautiful," she says, "and because they are so fresh, the kids love them."

In California, several school districts run "Farmers Market Salad Bar" programs, in which nearly all the produce on the salad bar is locally-grown. Students take field trips to local farms and farmers markets, as well as get active in their own school gardens, to learn where food comes from. These activities produce a winning result: kids clamor for more fruits and vegetables, even on pizza day.

In 2004, Congress included a provision in the Child Nutrition Reauthorization, called "Access to Local Foods and School Gardens" that authorizes seed grants to schools that want to start these programs. The grants would help school districts pay for start-up costs like menu planning, developing purchasing arrangements with local farmers, special equipment, staff training, curriculum design, and school gardens.

A small amount of assistance from the federal government to our local schools could be a win-win situation: encouraging the consumption of more fruits and vegetables among children and strengthening small and medium size farms. To date Congress has not provided the $5 million needed to start the program. Now is a good time to drop your member of Congress a line and tell him or her that we want to keep kids healthy by providing them with local food.