It was an odd scenario one night last week at Broughal Middle School in Bethlehem. About 100 people — farmers, school officials, parents and food service professionals — had just seen a documentary movie about the challenges of changing the food culture at a large school district. And yet the group, many of whose members were already involved in individual projects to get locally grown, healthful food in schools, struggled with the question: Where do we begin?
The answer, said a panel of experts and officials of the Kellyn Foundation, a local health-oriented nonprofit that sponsored the program, is to begin wherever audience members find themselves.
That's because changing food culture in a systemic way, they said, is not a mountain but a whole mountain range that needs to be conquered.
The panel discussion, a locally grown food-tasting and the movie, the local premiere of "Cafeteria Man," were all part of an effort by Kellyn co-founders Eric Ruth and Dr. Meagan Grega to start a conversation about building a sustainable sustainability program in the Lehigh Valley. Ruth and Grega viewed the program as the Valley's statement supporting the first national Food Day, being observed by like-minded food reformers on Monday.
"The whole purpose of tonight is getting together the disparate groups who all want change," Ruth said.
The highlight was the movie, a documentary about the efforts of Tony Geraci, the former food service director for the Baltimore City Public Schools, who worked with students and then parents, teachers, administrators, bureaucrats and business leaders to overhaul the district's dysfunctional food system. The film chronicles how a seemingly indisputable goal — getting healthier, locally grown, less expensive food for the district's 83,000 students — received anything but unanimous support.
"There's so many forces against this obvious change," said Richard Chisholm, co-director of "Cafeteria Man" at the forum. The forces aligned against Geraci were so determined that he was subjected to death threats, Chisholm said.
Participants outlined some of the challenges facing the Valley. For one, the region's population has grown substantially, largely moving into subdivisions built on fields that once grew crops that fed the Valley. That's one of the reasons organizers have to start small, Grega said.
Farmers also had their doubts. "The economics are still prohibitive for my farm," said Anton Shannon, who operates a small farm in Upper Milford Township. A wholesale deal, he said, would not pay the bills. "If I could be paid retail, I would love to do this," Shannon said.
Diana Young, a volunteer at Flint Hill Farm in Upper Saucon Township, does school tours at the diverse animal farm that provides milk, cheese, eggs and other products. But she anticipated resistance to change.
"I'd like to see it, but I don't know if it'd be accepted," she said. "I think people will be afraid."Schools also have contracts with food service providers that cannot simply be undone, they noted. Food service giant Sodexo "for years has been doing the wrong thing," Chisholm said, but the company is changing.
Indeed, Robert Irving, a general manager of food and nutrition for Sodexo at Lehigh Valley Hospital, said the company has created an independent sustainability unit. The company is in the early steps of a 14-point plan to increase the use of local, sustainable produce, he said.
Sodexo has expanded sustainable practices at Lehigh Valley Hospital's facilities in Bethlehem and Salisbury Township, Irving said, and will continue expansion as the program rolls out.
Meanwhile, Sodexo has fresh salad bars in Bethlehem's high schools, and other schools such as Broughal are tending their own gardens that will provide vegetables for the cafeteria. Broughal Principal Edward Docalovich proudly noted that the school's kitchen does not have a deep fryer.
As the movie showed, kids who are exposed to fresh food, prepared well, often will find their tastes moving away from heavily processed foods. In Baltimore, the cafeteria food, which was pre-plated out of state every day, was so bad students brought their mystery meat and cardboard pizza to a school board meeting and challenged directors to eat it. Along the way, they grew food in an urban garden under Geraci's direction and by the end were chowing down on greens and meatless entrees.
"Kids will eat asparagus if it's fresh and tasty," Grega said. In addition, it is not necessarily true that fresh food is more expensive than packaged, processed food, she said. Kellyn has worked with schoolchildren to make simple meals of brown rice and sauteed vegetables that kids love, she said. The problem is that after years of eating meals out of a box, Grega said, many people have forgotten how to cook.
Grega said kids' excitement about fresh food may translate back home, because parents are the most important factor in the health equation. But, she acknowledged, changing one meal during the school year by itself isn't going to stem the growing obesity trend. "You can't save everybody at school lunch," she said.
Faced with the same walls Geraci confronted — fears about fresh food, bureaucracy, parents squeezed for time and money, monied interests supporting the status quo — the Lehigh Valley should start small but commit to the long haul, Ruth said.
"This is meant not to be one event where you go home and say, 'Wow,' " Ruth said. "We want an outcome. Don't try to hit a home run. Start. Just start."