A Mount Desert Elementary School in Northeast Harbor, there’s a lunchtime revolution afoot. Food at the school’s cafeteria is often fresher and more nutritious than in the past, coming, in part, from local farms right on Mount Desert Island. And some of the schoolchildren even have gotten their hands dirty harvesting their lunches.
A Needed Change
Scott McFarland, principal of Mount Desert Elementary and father or stepfather to four of its pupils, said the change to healthier lunches was long overdue. For years, he said, typical school lunches have been too loaded with artificial sweeteners and hydrogenated oils.
“We’ve been killing our kids and we didn’t know it,” McFarland said.
Linda Mailhot, the school’s food service director, said the decision to improve the lunches came from her own visceral reaction to the food available in the school kitchen.
With the help of Heather Albert-Knopp, director of the Healthy Acadia Hancock County Farm-to-School Project, Mailhot arranged last year to buy fresh produce and eggs from two local farms.
School buses served as delivery vehicles for the produce and dropped off eager young farm workers, as well. The school’s fourth grade class traveled to nearby Beech Hill Farm to harvest vegetables; the students made the booty they brought back into a unique soup named in their honor.
The school also receives a regular donation of organic bread from Little Notch Bakery in Southwest Harbor.
Mailhot said the difference between local produce and produce off the distributor’s truck has been night and day.
“The carrots are so fresh,” she said.
Students noticed the change. School lunch counts have been up and it’s not unusual for whole grades to opt for the hot lunch option. Faculty members break bread with students more often now, too.
This spring, McFarland hopes the school can plant its own plot at Beech Hill Farm and eventually start a garden on school grounds.
A Cafeteria Trend
The Mount Desert Elementary cafeteria mirrors a growing statewide trend, said Healthy Acadia’s Albert-Knopp, as the Maine Department of Education actively promotes farm-to-school connections.
In Hancock County, the Surry Elementary school also recently bought a large supply of local carrots. Similar programs will soon begin in Lamoine and Southwest Harbor schools. Albert-Knopp is networking with a handful of Hancock County farmers and three local seafood producers to meet rising school demand.
On Islesboro, an island community in Waldo County, the school’s lunch program has been supplied with organically grown produce for eight years now (WWF Sept. 05). Several other island schools serve locally-produced food as well.
“People are starting to get excited about farm-to-school,” Albert-Knopp said.
Adapting to Good Food
But local food isn’t cheap; McFarland estimates his school pays ten percent more for local produce.
It doesn’t come ready to serve, either. Carrots come from Cysco, a major supplier, washed, peeled and precut, while Mailhot and a coworker must do that prep-work themselves with local carrots. She admitted the additional prep time, menu planning and pickup coordination that come with buying local can be overwhelming.
But she’s been able to keep up thanks to volunteer efforts from the school’s culinary arts club. Students help prepare and serve meals and even keep up with state-required paperwork. In the future, Mailhot hopes to formalize culinary arts service-learning projects into the curriculum and find more volunteer help from the community.
Another challenge, Mailhot said, is convincing students to try the new vegetables.
“Kids didn’t learn to eat what we’ve been feeding them overnight, so we can’t expect them to change overnight,” she said.
She’s integrating new foods into the daily menu slowly and she often prepares new vegetables in familiar ways so students won’t be overwhelmed by the change. The cafeteria also is set up buffet-style to give children options.
Mailhot hopes to continue integrating healthier foods into the menu until they become the norm and unhealthier cafeteria fare the anomaly. She said she’s happy with this year’s progress.
“We haven’t served chicken nuggets once this year,” she said.