Farmers, chefs and educators met at Farmhouse Cafe with members of the Conscious Kitchen organization on June 20 over a simple meal of tostadas and chicken pozole to discuss a common goal: improving the freshness and quality of the food served to students in local schools.
“Conscious Kitchen is here researching Central Coast farms,” said Becky Herbert, owner of Farmhouse Cafe. “We are inviting all the players together to figure out the needs and the challenges of getting local organic food into the schools on the Central Coast.”
Based in Sausalito, Conscious Kitchen was formed in 2013 and began working with Bayside Martin Luther King Jr. Academy on a pilot project to replace prepackaged and processed foods served to students with healthier options drawn from local organic farms.
“We started a program called Turning Green 18 years ago to help mobilize high school students around climate action,” said Conscious Kitchen co-founder Judi Shils. “That has grown to now reach all 50 states and over 150 counties. Conscious Kitchen is the same concept, taking students on a journey to better nutrition and a healthier, more resilient future.”
Surrounded by organic farms in Marin County, Shils said that hearing parents complain about the poor-quality food their kids were getting made her want to get local farmers more involved in the supply chain of the school cafeterias.
Joining with chef Justin Everett of Cavallo Point Lodge, they created breakfast and lunch menus for 150 students that were 100% organic, using fresh local food sourced from local farmers.
“We started having other high-profile chefs come in make meals,” she said. They would come in with their white coats and stand behind the service line. We had tablecloths and silverware and flowers, just honoring the students.”
Soon, the teachers started joining the students for meals and word started getting out.
“We realized if we could do it for one school, we could do it for others,” she said. “We went to a district in the East Bay and did a one-year pilot program for 550 students. The service staff at first thought we were disruptors but then realized that the idea of providing better food really lived in us.”
Planning on a cookbook project brought Shils and Herbert together, and when they met, they realized they had the same values and ethics concerning food. Learning more about the San Benito County region made her interested in trying to develop a program here.
“This region is so rich with organic farms, but the small farms are barely making ends meet,” Shils said. The marketplace is so massive, but the farmers don’t know that they can get involved in supplying school food. There’s a ton of red tape and paperwork and all the things that are barriers.”
Attending the dinner, Watsonville strawberry grower Javier Zamora of JSM Organics, has been encouraged by the conversation so far.
“Judi, through her non-profit,” he said, “is trying to connect us with more schools, so they can purchase from small family farms. The kids get to eat direct from the farm, and the farmers have a venue or way of marketing things directly and perhaps making a little more money than what we usually do.”
Zamora said that increasing the profit for independent farmers is a critical issue.
“The small family farms have great disadvantages,” he said. “Not every small farmer has the financials and the marketability for them to succeed. This program bypasses some of the brokers and grower-shippers that sometimes end up making more money than the grower.”
Shils has been setting up dinner meetings with interested parties and is working to discover what is available as far as the distribution infrastructure.
“How do we create a table that everybody can sit at so that they can learn from each other and get to know each other?” she asked. “That is what we are trying to do with these dinners.”
Besides mapping out the farms, she has already begun discussions with the Pajaro Valley Unified School District and plans to approach the Aromas-San Juan School District as well.
“We are kind of opening the doors and then figuring out what school districts might want to transition,” she said. We also talked to the food bank about potentially being a central kitchen and making organic food that we would help source to the schools.”
While everything is still in the early planning stages, Shils remains determined in her goals.
“We want to get the best food possible into the bodies of these kids,” she said “For some of them, what they get in school might be all the nutrition they are going to get during their day.”
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