Food in the News/ by Shelley Lance, Blog Editor
More exciting news from the Obama administration: the USDA is finding ways to help school cafeterias purchase fresh local produce and will “issue new purchasing guidelines for schools that place attention on locally grown foods.” You might think this is a no brainer, but, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world that has been our federal school food policy up to now, the current situation is that “there are all sorts of regulations that make it impossible or expensive for schools to buy locally grown produce.”
The blog, School Lunch Talk, which summarizes this new USDA policy here, comments that “Italian schools, for example, are required to purchase ingredients that are either organic, traditional, or local. Italy’s school lunch legislation sounds a lot like ours in that its goal is to support domestic agriculture while nourishing school children. The difference is that Italy uses school lunch to support local and sustainable agriculture while the United States uses school lunch to support large agribusinesses. With all the new policies coming out of this USDA, things might be about to change.” Let’s hope so.
I found the School Lunch Talk blog via a tweet by Amy Pennington.
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