I came to the student-grown food project conceiving of it as a farm to school (“FTS”) project, specifically a FTS institutional procurement project. I’ve since changed my mind. I realize now that student-grown food and FTS operate on differing underlying assumptions and open up to different sets of possibilities. But it is really interesting to hold the student-grown food project up to the FTS literature and see how it expands that discussion.
The FTS movement began in the late 1990s (Vallianatos, et al., 2004) as a decentralized effort to reconnect schools with their local farmers (Joshi et al., 2008). FTS is an umbrella term for a set of activities that include school gardens, farm visits, cafeteria taste testings and
institutional procurement of locally-grown food (NFTSN, 2019). Because the food that the students grew was purchased by the district’s Child Nutrition program and served in the high school cafeteria, the project could arguably be read as a FTS institutional procurement project.
FTS institutional purchasing programs traditionally take the form of districts purchasing from farmers directly or through local aggregation and distribution centers (Vermont Agency of Agriculture, 2014). FTS procurement programs across the U.S. received a boost in 2008. That year’s Farm Bill amended the NSLP regulations to allow districts the flexibility to exercise geographic preference in using federal funds to purchase unprocessed, locally grown or raised agricultural products (LaCorte, 2011). The 2010 reauthorization of the school lunch program further expanded schools’ access to local foods by expanding the USDA’s definition of “minimally processed” local food to include foods that are washed, chopped and cut (RWJF, 2011). This change made it easier for cafeterias to incorporate locally grown food without hiring additional staff. Ironically, poor, rural school districts are the least likely of any size or
Proponents of FTS programs frequently point to three benefits to argue their case: FTS programs provide children with healthier school lunches; they shorten food transportation distances and are therefore better for the environment; and they positively impact local
economies (NFTSN, 2015, Bagdonis et .al, 2009, Tuck et. al, 2010, Vogt and Kaiser, 2008). A lot of FTS procurement literature tends to focus on the economic impact that a school’s
purchases have on the community’s agricultural sector. The 2015 USDA Farm to School Census estimated that FTS programs across the U.S. generated $798 million in economic activity in their local economies (USDA, 2015). Although there has been no large-scale analysis of the economic impacts of farm to school procurement programs, numerous studies over the past several years (Gunter & Thilmany, 2012; Kane, Kruse, Ratcliffe, Sobell, & Tessman, 2009; King, & Pesch, 2010; Kluson, 2011; Tuck, Haynes, Wolf, Kane, & Stubbs, 2013) suggest that school district purchases of locally grown produce do benefit their local economies.
Noticeably absent from the literature on FTS institutional procurement programs is any discussion of student involvement. In 2015, the USDA conducted a national farm to school census; the questionnaire listed twelve ways that schools could potentially purchase local foods; school farms were not listed as an option (USDA, 2015). Additionally, the FTS literature focuses primarily on elementary and middle school students (Turner, Sandoval, & Chaloupka, 2014). With the younger aged children, the focus is largely on the impact that garden/farm-related experiences have student academics as well as nutritional and behavioral outcomes (Blair, 2009; Dilafruz and Dixson, 2013; Duncan et al., 2016). As Turner et al. (2017) note, the FTS literature becomes very thin when the students get old enough to take on active roles in the FTS process. Using data from the National Farm to school survey and the School Health Policies and Practices Study, Turner et al. (2017) also estimated the percentage of schools that incorporate produce
grown in “school gardens” in their school lunches is between 5% & 10%. There was no mention of who did the growing in those “school gardens.”
The silence around student involvement in the FTS procurement literature inscribes youth as passive consumers and creates a narrative of students as explorers in the world of local foods. As a movement, FTS is steeped in the political ecology of school lunch; it is ironic, therefore, that the procurement literature should exclude any discussion of students as agents who can learn about gardening as a way of feeding themselves or their community. Figure 3 is a poignant depiction of how the FTS narrative both engages the activity of students and then re-inscribes them as passive players in the school lunch game.
Figure 3. Picture from the farm to school literature. From Going local: Path to success for farm to school (Joshi, Kalb and Berry, 2006).
Although the students participating in this FTS program are dressed in aprons and hand- crafted paper chef’s hats, they’re standing on the receiving side of the cafeteria serving line. The picture seems to say that children’s engagement with local foods was a quaint act of make- believe complete with costumes. More importantly, their FTS experience didn’t change the
underlying dynamics of the school cafeteria. Despite their symbolic uniform of the creator/agent, at the end of the day, they find themselves re-inscribed as the consumer, waiting to be served food by older women on pieces of Styrofoam that will leach toxins into their - or someone’s - community’s soil for 500 years.
This was not the story of HHS’s student-grown food project. In the HHS student-grown food project, there was no make-believe. While they, too, were ultimately the consumers of food served to them by older women on disposable paper containers, they had been active agents in the very real process of providing food for a school lunch. Although it was just a proof of concept, we started learning the physical, interpersonal and inter-institutional skills we need to not depend on corporations for school lunch. Our pedagogy was a pedagogy for independence and of liberation. Those knowledges and those liberatory possibilities could not have been affected had the school system bought the produce from a local farm.