Rural Iowa schools growing the state's local food movement

The local food movement is catching on at Iowa schools, and advocates say rural districts are the ones catching onto the movement most quickly. East Elementary School in Independence, Iowa, has 13 raised-bed gardens and has become the symbol of a "small but budding local-food movement in Iowa schools," Reid Forgrave of the Des Moines Register reports. "In the past few years, this northeast Iowa district has cooked more lunch items from scratch with healthier ingredients, invited farmers to classrooms to explain where food comes from, and built gardens where students plant and harvest food used in lunches."

Obtaining local food for school districts can be easier in theory than practice. Andrea Geary, the local-food program manager with the University of Northern Iowa's Buy Fresh, Buy Local program, told Forgrave the transition from government-subsidized commodity foods to local products is easiest for small rural school districts. "They know they want healthier food, they know they want local food, they know they're not happy with the current broken food system," Geary told Forgrave. "But they don't know where to go." The Iowa Farm to School program now has 11 chapters.

In Independence, custodians "converted old bleachers into raised-bed gardens, filled with dirt from nearby wetlands," Forgrave writes. "A Farm to School coordinator developed a network of local growers." The school district, which became Iowa's first Farm to School chapter three years ago, purchased 30 pounds of local strawberries for yogurt parfaits during the first year of the program, but demand had increased so much by the second year the district purchased 300 pounds.

On the same morning that Forgrave observed first-graders digging for potatoes, "a local orchard owner visited third-graders, explained how an orchard works, showed them how to peel the fruit and let them sample Cortland apples," Forgrave writes. Food services director Kelly Crossley explained, "We could put fruits and vegetables in front of them until the cows come home, but until we reinforce it in the classroom and with parents, they're not going to touch it." (Read more)