Anthony Elementary School in Leavenworth, Kansas, was having a lot of discipline problems at lunch time. The school cafeteria was a hotbed of disorder, with students shouting, pushing, spilling milk, and throwing away most of their food. A few lunch aides tried to keep the chaos under control while teachers took a 30-minute lunch break from their students in the teachers lounge.
    As part of an effort to restore order, the school shut down the cafeteria and sent children back to their classrooms to have lunch with their teachers. The teachers taught the kids table manners and polite conversation. They gave them all vitamins with their meals. They introduced them to new foods they never would have tried otherwise. The school also created structured exercise time rather than the random activity of playground recess.
    The behavior problems vanished, not only at lunch time, but also throughout the day. Within two years, test scores made a remarkable leap: on a state math assessment, for example, the school went from 40.5% of the students earning an unsatisfactory score to none rated unsatisfactory. The number scoring “exemplary” jumped from 2.7% to 47.6%. (http://brightspot.org/eee/index.shtml)
    Anthony Elementary provides a dramatic example of the importance of lunch to academic achievement, but it is by no means an isolated example. Today, there are small, incremental changes in school nutrition happening everywhere as an acknowledgment of the connection between food and performance. Farm-to-school projects have spread from California to 22 states and now number 400 nationwide. Special meals featuring local food are becoming regular events in many places. And funding agencies are spending considerable amounts of money on projects to get kids to eat better. Mark my words: School lunch is on the verge of a renaissance.
    It won’t be easy, though. As absurd as it seems, there are many obstacles standing in the way of feeding our children properly.
    Jack Kloppenburg, a Rural Sociology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been doing some research into the situation both nationwide and in his local school district, which started a program called Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch in 2002. (www.cias.wisc.edu) Three pilot elementary schools were chosen to implement an extensive set of food-related activities, including field trips to farms. Working with the pilot schools’ food service staff developing recipes that used local produce, Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch was able to get the school district to double its spending on fresh produce. But that amounted to only $2,500 a year. Here are some of the obstacles he identified in the farm-to-school movement:
•Money, of course. School food service programs have to pay their own way, and are under pressure to offer meals the students will buy. In our fast-food nation, kids aren’t standing in line for the fresh, healthy choices.
•Centralization of food service. In the Madison school district, 15,000 meals are made every day at a central facility and trucked to the 45 schools to be warmed and served. Most schools don’t even have cooking facilities any more.
•Price, procurement and supply. Farmers need to get better prices than what the schools normally pay from wholesalers. Farmers have to make it easy for schools to order from them, and they have to have an adequate supply.
•Processing. In most places, produce has to arrive ready-to-use, which could require a processing plant.
    These barriers are not insurmountable, but they are going to require time and determination before our schools can provide the healthful food that is so crucial to our kids’ success.