Local Food

The USDA wants to make it easier for schools to purchase food directly from local producers. As part of an effort to bring their rules into line with recommendations in their publication Dietary Guidelines for Americans, 2020-2025 they’re proposing to make it easier for schools to employ a “geographic preference” for local foods in their bidding process. School districts themselves decide whether this is something they want to do, and they define for themselves what “local” means.

I love it!

If you love it (or hate it) you have until April 10 to comment.

Scratch Cooking

There’s something else I found interesting in the proposed rule changes. They’re recommending that the salt allowed in school meals be further reduced. So far schools have been able to meet the low sodium requirements with processed foods that are readily available, but lowering salt even more would make that difficult. The alternative is scratch cooking — that is, cooking from scratch at the school or district site. Most schools don’t do that, and don’t have the staff, the skill, the time or the equipment for it. The USDA has therefore estimated the cost of remedying all that and included it in their proposed budget.

Scratch cooking is a big deal! When you buy ready-made food, that puts a lot of steps between you and the farmer. That gap is where giant food corporations live. They buy from farmers in huge quantities, process food pulled from all over the country and imported from other countries, and ship it everywhere for sale. Then they lobby the government with their generous profits to bend food policy in their favor.

The average farm size in Iowa is over 300 acres, and they grow a lot of corn and soy. No one is going to plant 300 acres in field corn to supply a local market, but if there IS no local market, what choice do they have? Schools (and hospitals and just plain folk) all doing scratch cooking could support a friendlier, healthier local food system.

Here’s a nice post on the subject: From Farms to Schools: How a New Roadmap Will Transform How We Feed California Schoolchildren.