Mmm, farm to table eating. Just hearing the phrase conjures a visual feast, a cornucopia spilling over with rainbow-hued produce, a basket of pastel eggs from free-range fowl, fresh cuts of chicken, beef, pork, waiting to be cooked up in imaginative recipes that make the most of what we grow and harvest here in the Hudson Valley. Envision a meal hand-crafted from this beautiful bounty, served on…
A plastic cafeteria tray?
Yep! Served on a school lunch tray—with a carton of fresh Hudson Valley milk to wash it all down.
Imagine a meal of strawberry and asparagus salad with a honey dressing (Ellenville Central School District); Asian-style meatballs with garlic green beans and brown rice (Pawling Central School District); Sfoglini pasta with local New York beef sauce served with a side of roasted butternut squash (Red Hook/Rhinebeck/Pine Plains school districts).
These are actual menu items that were served to area students in the 2023–24 school year. And yes, the kids ate them. Discussed them. Learned from them.
And the benefits of these tasty, locally sourced meals extend far past ensuring fresh, nutritious food for the students. Farm to school purchasing infuses millions of dollars right back into local farms. It creates more resilient food supply chains. It connects disparate communities and centers the importance of our local food producers. It makes food more real, a thing that is grown and cultivated from the earth, sustainably, with the goal of nourishing our bodies and not harming our environment.
Oh, if only it were all so easy. Given that there are thousands of acres of farms and producers all over the Hudson Valley, fresh-from-farm-to-school meals may seem like an obvious idea. But the sweet simplicity of “farm-to-table” eating is no match for the grim reality of the institutional procurement practices, rules, and regulations that largely control what school food service directors serve up.
“It’s a lot of math,” admits Larry Anthony, the longtime food service director for the Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Pine Plains school districts. “And the logistics. The logistics of working all this out is what makes farm-to-school lunches so challenging.”
“The math” is what shapes every single decision a food service director makes, with each penny spent per meal carefully considered and each calorie painstakingly parsed in order to jibe with national guidelines set by the USDA and its National School Lunch Program, which provides funding for meals and determines what must be included in those meals. “Procurement laws make a lot of red tape,” says Lauren Collica, food service director at Pawling Central School District. “We can’t just throw caution to the wind and purchase whatever we want whenever we want, so the bidding process is just hard for small farms and small businesses and disadvantaged businesses.”
And neither farms nor schools are a one-size-fits-all piece in the procurement puzzle. “I’ve reached out to farmers, but to put carrots on the menu in all my schools, I need 1,200 pounds of carrots,” says Anthony. “And they’re like, ‘Wow, that’s more than we can do.’” Fortunately, this reality didn’t sway Anthony, who has been food service director at Red Hook and Rhinebeck since 2014.
“We have so many local farms,” he says, “and I just want to show the kids what’s out there in the world and in the Hudson Valley. I don’t know how you can miss when you look at all the resources that are available and what we can bring to the table,” he says, intentionally landing the pun. Anthony started scouting local farms, like Hearty Roots Farms in Germantown for produce, Feather Ridge Farm in Elizaville for eggs, and then Hudson Valley Fresh came on board, 8 or 9 years ago, to supply milk to all three school districts Anthony oversees. All of that was a labor of love—and legwork.
Support Is Growing
Fortunately, Anthony wasn’t alone in thinking that getting local farm food to the schools was a good idea. Beginning in 2015, both federal and state governments launched programs to solve and support the use of local farm products in institutional settings, most notably Governor Andrew Cuomo’s “No Student Goes Hungry” Program, which expanded funding for the existing Farm-to-School program. It also launched a reimbursement program, creating a financial incentive to entice school districts to wade into the complications of local procurement, by offering an additional 19.1 cents per meal if the school district could reach a threshold of 30 percent locally sourced, minimally processed foods. This also funded the “boots on the ground,” folks who could connect producers, distributors, and school districts.
A pair of those boots belongs to Kristy Apostolides, a regional Farm-to-School Coordinator for the Lower Hudson Valley at the Cornell Cooperative Extension, who started her career in sustainable agriculture and food systems work. “The objective of these programs is to increase the volume and variety of New York state food products in schools,” she says.
Katie Sheehan-Lopez is also a Farm-to-School Coordinator for the mid-Hudson Valley. “This job is really coordinating the supply chain. So, we work with the producers, the distributors, the people who are doing the purchasing, which is usually the school food service director. And sometimes there are manufacturers involved, or the state agencies that oversee all of this.”
Anthony sees what Sheehan-Lopez does a little bit differently: “And then the Godsend came, Katie Sheehan-Lopez from Cornell.” He quickly cited her ability to connect him to local beef and chicken—protein had been pretty scarce for him to find, and chicken is the universally loved and needed protein for school lunches. She also connected him to lightly processed products like New York State pizza dough and no-nitrates local hot dogs from Slate Foods. (Julia Van Loon, who runs Slate Foods, was a food service director for decades before becoming a meat processor and distributor, so she is particularly lauded and loved by school food service directors.)
Sheehan-Lopez’s presence as a connector made it possible for Anthony—and the other food service directors she works with—to easily clear the 30 percent local New York state-grown and -made threshold. “And it’s not just about chasing that 19 cents,” says Anthony, though the math is always on his mind. “It’s also to keep the money within the local farms—and for the kids to see that it’s all from here.” He cited a child who, reading the sign that noted where that day’s cauliflower had come from—Hearty Roots Farm—said, “Hey! My dad works there!” Those are the connections that bind communities together. Apostolides from Cornell is invested in growing respect for farmers. “In reality, they are integral to our being here.”
Collica from Pawling, who just closed out her first year serving lunches that met the 30 percent New York threshold, feels the community bond deeply as well. “We’ll never serve an apple here that’s not grown locally. It would be so foolish for us to even consider it.” She knows, also, that the kids are attached to some of the local produce by name, like Dykeman’s corn. “Our students know that farm,” she says. “They go there for class visits. And every September, they know they’re going to have Dykeman’s corn at school with their lunch. Mandy Dykeman drops it off to us directly, it’s wonderful.
“And when you’re in a small district like Pawling, you’re very close to the community. And the Board of Ed and our superintendents are really committed to serving local and healthy food options in our district,” she says. “Having those champions makes all the difference. Food service director jobs, with staffing and meeting all our financial responsibilities, and just getting the food in the door, no matter what level of buy it is… it’s a lot. So for the bigger districts who aren’t participating, I’m not knocking them, because it’s just hard. But if the bigger districts in our region get on board [with farm-to-school] then the distribution will just really open up.”
It’s the excitement of planning the next great meal that keeps all of these food service directors doing the complicated math and procurement.
Creativity Is Key
It is a slow process to undo 100 years of building up “efficiencies,” which is what led to the large, national distribution chains where food was being produced to travel long distances—not for flavor or nutrition. And in many districts, particularly in the lower Hudson Valley and Westchester, the cafeterias are operated by food service management companies, “which have been much more difficult to get [farm-to-school] into, for sure,” says Apostolides. But in Rockland County, Apostolides is working with two private yeshiva schools, which have the added complication of a strict kosher certification. “One of those schools is making really interesting efforts and making great new connections between communities.”
“It’s often the last mile of the distribution piece that is the hardest to solve,” says Sheehan-Lopez, who has delivered eggs to schools once as a last-mile solution of her own making.
The Ellenville Central School District, in Ulster County, has a strong partnership with its food service management company, Whitsons Culinary Group, says Vince Napoli, Assistant Superintendent for Business for Ellenville Schools. He proudly names a half-dozen top meals, including the strawberry-and-asparagus salad, and credits Debra Fisher, Whitsons General Manager for Ellenville, for the creativity and programming she’s brought to the school.
“The goal is to get the kids to try new things,” he says, “and for them to be excited about it.” Even beet brownies—brownies partially sweetened by ground beets—were a big hit, Fisher reports.
Her favorite dish this year was ground goat served with sweet potatoes. “I infused local honey with hot peppers to make a hot-pepper-honey sweet potato,” she says. “That was a meal I was most proud of.”
It’s the excitement of planning “the next great meal” that keeps all of these food service directors plowing ahead and doing the complicated math and procurement that makes these memorable farm-to-school meals. At the end of the 2024 school year, Larry Anthony got his hands on a sample of steelhead trout from Hudson Valley Fisheries. “That really had me stoked,” he said, quickly reeling off some high-grade food service director math: “Price point comes in at $7 a pound, which isn’t horrible, so 44 cents an ounce, a two-ounce serving for the middle and high schools. I can boost the protein with some quinoa….”
He ran the samples to his head cook at Pine Plains high school, JoAnn Fennelly, “I just said ‘Do your magic.’ Tomatoes. Olives. Garlic butter. Local asparagus from Red Barn Produce. This was just a sample to taste test with the kids, so she could let her talent fly unhindered by procurement math. “When she sent me the picture of what she’d made, I almost cried,” Anthony says. “I was so proud of that.”
And it will definitely be on the menu in all the Red Hook, Rhinebeck, and Pine Plains schools this year.
Related: 10 Boutique Butcher Shops for Fresh Meat in the Hudson Valley
