On the QT | The Official Newsletter of GWA April-May 2016 | Page 6

FOOD

JIM LONG

Food garden news from
around the nation

F

or garden writers looking for stories
to write about food gardens, there are
exciting opportunities all around. Here
are a few samples of what’s going on in
schools across the country.

STUDENTS LEADING THE WAY
IN CHICAGO
While the United States Senate was bickering in 2015 over nutrition guidelines and the
appropriateness of school lunch programs
forcing students to eat more healthful meals,
students at Albany Park’s Theodore Roosevelt High School in Chicago boycotted the
school lunch program at their school.
The students took an unusual approach to
improving school lunches. They learned
that the service contractor that provided
the meals was paid based on the number
of lunches served each day. To boycott the
school lunches, the students brought their
own lunches and pressured the administration to make changes.
An estimated 80 percent of the students took
part in the boycott. They created a website
for the boycott: The School Lunch Project:
Culinary Denial (https://rhsschoollunch.wordpress.com), which outlined the concerns of
the students. The bottom line was that a rotating diet of hamburgers, pizza, and chicken
patties isn’t a healthy diet. They wanted more
fresh foods, salads, and healthy choices.

Garden writers visited Stonewall School’s garden in 2010 in Dallas.

In Arkansas, 27 school districts, which impact
169 schools and 86,729 students, are using
Farm to School practices this year. The
program helps support local farmers and
provides healthy, fresh, local food for school
lunch programs across the state.
Top products for Farm to School sales in Arkansas are apples, watermelon, berries, sweet
potatoes, and lettuce. Schools are allowed to
set their own defi