Farm to School at Loughborough Public

Jeff Green | May 31, 2017

Starting about six weeks ago, on Thursday mornings at about 11 o’clock its been salad bar time at Loughborough Public School. Students and parent volunteers from Alan Macdonald’s grade 7 class fill the small salad bar with ice, as the students from a food class from Sydenham High School arrive, along with some other grade 7 students, with a rack full of bowls of food.

Last week (May 25) there were bowls full of mixed greens, grape tomatoes, chopped cucumbers, and diced chicken. The salad bar, located in the middle of the foyer, was quickly filled and students and staff from throughout the school began to arrive, metal camping type plates in hand, to get their Thursday lunch. About 100 people have signed up for Thursday lunches at $4 a week, and they purchased the metal lunch containers at cost as part of the program. They heap the food on the plates, as grade 7 students and parent volunteers make sure they aren’t skipping out on their greens. The food varies from week to week based on what is available and which items are proving to be the most popular.

It looks like a healthy alternative to the old standbys of hot dog and pizza day, which provide parents with a day off from preparing lunches but doesn’t exactly jive with messages about healthy eating and exercise that are promoted by the Ministry of Education and local school boards.

But this lunch program is a lot more than that. With a two year, $20,000 grant from the Farm to School program, which is a division of farmtocafeteriacanada.ca, the Thursday lunch program is one piece of an integrated puzzle that Macdonald, along with gardener and writer Janette Hasse, Sydenham High School, and Southern Frontenac Community Services, have been building over several years.

The grant is being used to set up the program, which involves growing food at the school in raised beds  located just outside of the classroom, sourcing all the food that is not being grown as part of the program locally (through Wendy’s Mobile Market and other sources) preparing food at Sydenham High School, dealing with waste through composting, and much more.

The idea is to capture the entire chain of food production to food waste, from soil preparation and seeding, to preparing fresh produce, learning about how animals are raised for meat, and on and on.

“We think that once this program is fully up and running we will be able to feed everyone in the school who wants to participate, with no waste and all food grown and prepared by our students or local farmers,” said Macdonald.

And the program is being designed for sustainability.

“The grant is helping us get started. It enabled us to purchase the salad bar, build raised beds and create a model for the project, but this project is meant to become a permanent part of life at the school, and will be expected to be self financing,” Macdonald said.

Macdonald’s classes have been involved since 2014 in a greenhouse garden project at the nearby Grace Centre in conjunction with a project run by Janette Hasse, which provides food to augment the offerings of the South Fronenac Food bank, and he also had a personal interest in gardening, and all of the science that goes along with it.

The Farm to School program provides an opportunity to make a difference for students at both schools. Madonald has been using food production, including the science of soil development through composting and other means, growing Shiitake mushrooms, raising ducks, etc as a way of developing what he calls ‘food literacy’ among his own students and the entire school.

“It also fits in with the agriculture that is developing in the region, new market garden businesses are springing up all the time, and this puts the school in contact with all of those businesses,” he said.

And the students in his class, as well as parent volunteers, are learning each week about the kinds of foods people will eat if they are exposed to them.

It’s still a struggle to convince some of the students that the mixed greens, which include beet greens, Arugula, along with differentvarieties of lettuce, are as tasty as iceberg lettuce. There is no such problem, however,  with sweet grape tomatoes and crisp cucumbers, as they found out on Thursday.

With the kindergarten kids still to come, the tomatoes were all gone, and at least one very young salad bar enthusiast was sent back to his class for a few minutes while more tomatoes and cucumbers were found and put out.

When the salad bar was fully stocked, back came the kindergarten kids, led by the one who had been sent back to his class.

As he was filling his plate, he grabbed a couple of tomatoes with his hands while no one was looking and bit into them.

He smiled when the sweet juice filled his mouth and chewed away while spooning chicken onto his plate.