Can Indiana schools provide fresh, local, seasonal food to students?
=`TRĈj D`fcTVU DTYĒ] =f_TYVd By Charity Singleton Craig | Photography courtesy of Conscious Kitchen
S
chool lunches have a bad reputation. Just ask my teenage sons. The meat looks suspicious, the vegetables are overcooked and even the “normal” food, like pizza or tacos, doesn’t look all that normal. Tacos in a bag? Rectangle pizza? And that’s saying nothing about the nutritional value. If a school lunch doesn’t look or taste good, how can it be healthy—especially if it comes from a freezer with no clues to its origin? Here’s a thought: what if the food served in schools was grown and produced locally? Certainly, that would be healthier, and it seems like an easy enough concept. But is it?
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edible INDY Fall 2017
4R]ZW`c_ZR dVcgVd eYV T`f_ecj¦d «cde `cXR_ZT dTYĒ] ]f_TY Conscious Kitchen, a Sausalito, California, nonprofit, began as an offshoot of the student-led activist group Turning Green. Founded by Judi Shils, the group is comprised primarily of college students, who became engaged in sustainability causes around the world. “A board member said we’d lost our footing in our own community,” Shils explains, and that led them to consider the food being served in their local public schools. Hence, Conscious Kitchen was born.
