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Growing
Healthy Kids: America's Farms Feed America's Children
The health
and safety of our nation begins with access to quality food for
young children and their families. The Community Food Security
Coalition, with 270 organizations nation-wide, works in urban
neighborhoods and rural communities to directly link nutritionally
at-risk families with independent family farmers, benefiting both.
Our programs include:
- Community
food projects
- Farm to
cafeteria projects
- Training
and technical assistance for community food assessments and
food policy councils
- Local
and regional food system development
The CFSC believes
children and their families should be given access as early as possible
to quality fruits and vegetables from gardens and farms in their
region. Towards that end, the Coalition is sponsoring the Growing
Healthy Kids proposal that would provide $10,000,000 annually for
allocations of up to $100,000 to school districts or non-profit
organizations to increase students' consumption of locally grown
fresh produce. This one-time infusion of resources requires a 25%
match of funds or in-kind contributions.
Need for the Initiative
The development of life-long eating habits begins during childhood.
By encouraging children to eat healthy foods, they will have a much
better chance of avoiding serious illness later in life, such as
heart disease, obesity, and diabetes.
- According
to the Surgeon General's 2001 report on obesity, 13% of children
and adolescents were overweight in 1999 - almost twice as many
children and nearly three times as many adolescents as in 1980.
- As of
1995 - 96, fast food franchises existed in 13% of the nation's
schools. The American School Food Service Association estimated
that by 1997 about 30% of the nation's 23,000 public schools
sold fast foods.
- Less than
13% of school-age children eat the recommended amount of fruit.
On any given day, 45% of children eat no fruit, and 20% eat
less than one serving of vegetables.
This proposal
addresses these negative trends by providing resources for the following:
1. The purchase of processing equipment and storage facilities
for the preparation of fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as staff
training in food preparation.
Financial constraints and a move toward reducing labor costs have
resulted in the reduction of kitchen facilities across campuses
nation-wide. School food service is generally required to cover
their own costs, if not generate a profit. As a result, many schools
are offering pre-made "a la carte" items that compete with the standard
school meals, and some are contracting out to fast food restaurants.
With these changes, kitchens have been eliminated and school food
staff are ill prepared to process fresh produce. The appropriate
kitchen equipment and food preparation training must be introduced
back into schools so that children can have the benefit of freshly
prepared food items.
2. The development of procurement systems that work for both
food service and farmers, and the incorporation of seasonal foods
into recipes and menu planning.
Schools are accustomed to making one call to their produce broker
who will then deliver directly to the school several times per week.
Systems must be developed that encourage procurement flexibility;
they need to be convenient for the food service director and workable
with farmer delivery schedules. Some of the options that exist are
buying directly from a local farmers' market, using an existing
marketing cooperative, or developing informal delivery systems for
farmers in the same locale.
The transition to incorporating local fruits and vegetables into
meals can be daunting, especially when food preparation has consisted
of heating up meals that arrive from a central kitchen. Groundwork
is needed to determine how to fit local foods into the economic
and physical constraints faced by school food service. Research
is needed to determine what seasonal products are available, who
is growing them, and how to connect the farmers with the schools.
3. Develop experiential nutrition education programs linking
local agriculture to healthy diets and eating habits.
It has been widely recognized that traditional approaches to nutrition
education are not working. Eric Bost, Undersecretary of USDA made
reference to this during nation-wide listening sessions sponsored
by USDA last year. Clearly, a new approach is needed. We propose
nutrition education programs that link local agriculture to healthy
diets in all school curricula.
Effective nutrition education programs integrate a number of elements
to form a holistic learning approach. These elements include school
gardens, where children can experience the wonder of a seed becoming
a plant, and taste the harvest fresh from the garden - which they
themselves have cultivated. Spending a day on a local farm is a
new experience for many students. In a society where food appears
to come from trucks, seeing the trees and plants on a farm is a
powerful experience. Children are able to connect what is grown
near their home to what is eaten at the dinner table. Integrating
nutrition and agriculture programs through classroom curricula and
hands-on activities can lead to healthy eating habits that last
a lifetime.
For Additional Information Please Contact the Community Food Security Coalition:
Thomas
Forster
Policy Director
110 Maryland Ave NW,
Suite 307
Washington, DC 20002
(202) 543-8602
thomas@foodsecurity.org |
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Marion
Kalb
(for Farm to School)
Farm to School Director
PO Box 363
Davis, CA 95617
(530) 756-8518 Ext. 32
Fax: 310 822-1440
marion@foodsecurity.org
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