82801 September/October 2018

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

More than Pumpkin Spice Everything… ARE ORGANIC FOODS MORE NUTRITIOUS?

Verge of Vanishing

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IS THE COMMUNITY

NEWS STREAM

OF

THE BIGHORNS INCLUDING

SHERIDAN,

BUFFALO,

AND IN BETWEEN. COUNTY3.NEWS

SAME GREAT NEWS. NEW LOOK.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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82801 Features

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Health: Are Organic Foods More Nutritious?

Have you ever wondered what that ‘organic’ label really means and if eating organic foods will improve your health? Sheridan County UW Extension Nutrition & Food Safety Educator Kentz Willis tells all.

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Education: The World’s Your Oyster

Ag: Wyoming Ag Industry Performance

Life: School District Slam Dunks Lunch

The Wyoming Culinary Institute offers Culinary Arts and Hospitality Management students the opportunity to work in a professional kitchen, led by executive chefs, in a fully-functioning restaurant.

With each generation becoming further removed from agriculture, it’s becoming increasingly important to discuss the significant impact the industry has on our economy. Candice recaps local production by the numbers for the top three industry in the state.

More schools in the Sheridan County School District have ditched federal guidelines and funding opting instead for locally-grown, seasonally-driven ingredients. The innovative program is cutting costs, driving localism, recharging students— and local ag industry—and boosting program participation.

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

More than Pumpkin Spice Everything… the fall season. It’s so much more than pumpkin spice lattes, scarves and boots. On the ranch, it’s a very busy time. Preg-checking cows, working calves, farming and prepping equipment before the snow flies. Add to that, the start of school and soccer for our daughter with 60-mile round trips to town, it often feels like my husband and I are two ships passing in the night. I have to be honest though, it feels that way in every other season outside of winter, too.

Spring is calving season and summer days are 16 hours spent in the tractor, haying. Even if you don’t live the ranch life, I’m sure many of you can relate. It seems stressful, and it is always a struggle trying to balance it all, but fall remains my favorite time of year. I must admit that I am more than ready for hoodies, scarves, and boots, but I’ll skip the sticky sweet pumpkin spice latte in favor of a hot cuppa from my French Press at home. Sorry Starbucks.

We all have our own reasons for loving, (or hating) fall. These seasonal transitions can be a very personal experience based on your background, life

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circumstances and important events that happened in your life and have shaped you into the person you are today. The staff at Outliers Creative (OC), publishers of this magazine, are a diverse team of individuals who come together each month to pour a little bit of ourselves into each and every issue of 82801.

In this month’s issue, T.J., our resident east coast transplant, University of Alabama grad and avid knowledge seeker highlights what’s going on at Sheridan College. He introduces us to a southern photographer who has brought the story of the longleaf pine to Wyoming through a stunning collection of large format photographs, now on display at Sheridan College. Later, he drops in on the Wyoming Culinary Institute and gives us a taste of the programs they offer and how it gives students with Food Network dreams a taste of restaurant industry reality.

Mama bear of two, and *OC Production Editor Steph, explores how, in a bold move, Sheridan County School District #1 parted ways with the USDA’s National School Lunch program and their one-size-fits-all approach in favor of a Farm-to-

School style. Sourcing meat and produce from local students and producers, the program provides more nutritious meals to students while strengthening Wyoming’s direct to market economy.

As the Ag Editor, I take a look at Wyoming’s ag production by the numbers. It is, after all, harvest season, and agriculture is a top three industry in our state. A graphic designer by trade, I worked the most recent data from the USDA into a fun and easyto-understand infographic to share with you, our readers, the value of agriculture and the effect on a state’s economy where cattle outnumber people.

So, dear readers, I hope you enjoy the local goodness you’ll find in the following pages, the fruits of our labor here at 82801. We love what we do, where we live, and deeply value your readership.

By: Candice E. Schlautmann for 82801

* It is not an exaggeration when I say if not for her herculean efforts and that of our Art Director, Richard Massman, each and every month, you would not be enjoying this publication.

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Wyoming’s INDUSTRY PER FOR MANCE

With each generation becoming further removed from agriculture, it’s becoming increasingly important to discuss the significant impact the industry has on our economy. Wyoming’s ag industry is strong, contributing well over $1 billion dollars to the economy. It’s ranked first in average size of farm and ranch in the entire country, and we are one of a few states where our agricultural lands have seen an increase, placing it in the top three performing industries in our state.

This isn’t by luck or happenstance. Wyoming’s farmers and ranchers are some of the most honest, and hard-working people around. Driven by unshakable values and unmatched work ethic, these Wyomingites spend long hours working to provide the highest quality food and textile products for people around the globe. Their grit and gumption will ensure the success of Wyoming agriculture for years to come.

By Candice E. Schlautmann for 82801

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NATIONAL RANKING

1

AVERAGE SIZE OF FARM

2,649 ACRES

LIVESTOCK INVENTORY

2

3

LAMB CROP

WOOL PRODUCTION

2.48 MILLION LBS.

235,000 HEAD

CROP PRODUCTION by harvested acre

by head

BARLEY

HAY, ALFALFA

82,000

BEANS

1,020,000

CORN

31,100

69,000

CATTLE & CALVES

1,330,000

WINTER WHEAT

125,000

SHEEP & LAMBS

360,000

HOGS & PIGS

92,000

SUGAR BEETS

30,000

OATS

7,000

FARM/RANCH STATS TOTAL 11,600 OPERATIONS

TOTAL 30,200,000 FARM/RANCH ACRES

AVERAGE AGE OF 58.2 OPERATOR

TOTAL 60,140,012 WYOMING LAND AREA IN ACRES

Sources: USDA National Statistics Service, Wyoming Department of Agriculture, and Wyoming Businesss Council

WYOMING AGRICULTURE’S CONTRIBUTION TO THE U.S. ECONOMY

$1,723,000,000 SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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The World’s Your Oyster at Sheridan College each a man to fish, and he can feed himself. Teach Maria Domingue to bake, and she can feed an army.

Domingue, who started Flour Power Bakery after her son was injured in Iraq, has sent thousands of goods to soldiers to help boost their morale. The number of care packages varies from month to month, but sometimes the count exceeds 100.

“One month, we sent out 150 of them,” Domingue said.

Today, the work ethic and positive attitude Domingue displays in her home kitchen helps brighten the days of soldiers everywhere. But, according to Domingue, a great deal of the organization’s success began in a Sheridan College classroom. Or, at the very least, a few classrooms and a kitchen.

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“You show up, you're cutting, you’re chopping for a couple weeks, and then you start on meat, you start on baking, you start on garden-manager,” Domingue said, breaking down the culinary program. She detailed the curriculum a little more, then offered a summary. “It's basically the Culinary Institute of America, but in a crash course.” The similarity is not coincidental. Both Sheridan College culinary instructors, Chefs R.J. Rogers and Tim Rockwell, attended the institute.

“Tim and I both went to the CIA, so we based our program on what we went through,” Rogers said.

The resulting education can often take the students far, both literally and figuratively. “Once students complete our program, we're small, but we can send our students anywhere because of the background education that we give them,” Rogers said. “We have one student at Disney World right

now and a couple of kids in South Carolina. We have one student working at Mile High Stadium.

Another girl, she went to Italy.”

Rogers has also noticed a broad range of specialties that his students have ended up working in. Many of his former students are line cooks, but some have opened food trucks, sold cheesecake, and participated in other, less-thought-of forms under the umbrella of culinary arts. Rogers said he encourages this.

“I tell a lot of kids to watch the show, ‘Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,’” Rogers said. “Some of those people went to the same school that I went to. And they're just doing their own food, at their own pace, in their own way. You can take your classical culinary training and do whatever you want with it.”

Even the curriculum encourages this. A large component of the course consists of four

practicums. The first three practicums allow the students to work at any restaurant or catering events they want, as long as they earn a set number of hours. The fourth practicum requires the student to work at the culinary institute’s restaurant alongside the hospitality management students.

But, according to Hospitality Management Instructor Ross Lynn, there’s a twist. “In a traditional Culinary Institute, generally the chef will come to whoever it is, and they'll say, ‘this is the menu created,’” Lynn said. “Our chefs have turned that model on its head. So, the students come in with ideas for appetizer, soup, salad, entrees, and dessert, and collectively they vote on it.”

The menu is completely student-made with minimal guidance from the instructors. “The chefs and I just give them a little bit of direction, if maybe there's too many items that come from the grill and not enough that come from the sauté stations in the kitchen,” Lynn said.

Despite Wyoming’s central location and the program’s limited budget, the kitchen is capable of producing a wide assortment of menu items, including seafood and other dishes not often experienced by locals and students. “It's hard,” Rogers said. “We’re landlocked. So, seafood is something that we have to deal with. We have to get it flown in. But, we live in meat and potatoes country. So, what we offer through our program is they get to come down and sample something that they can't normally get in Wyoming. So, we have our little niche in Sheridan with our restaurant, and we're able to do seafood and things that aren’t common around Sheridan.”

Regardless of what the students decide to make, the program’s classical French background gives students the skills they need to prepare any cuisine. “I think just going through our program, that we do just so [many] different things that are not local— the ‘why don't you do a Moroccan lamb or goat stew?’— things like that,” Rogers said.

“So, we teach them a classical French background, which you don't normally see in Wyoming, but you don't have to cook just French food. We apply those techniques to American cuisine because we have a North American classroom with North American food, but they apply those techniques they learned to that American food, so it just elevates that American food a little.”

While Rogers’ classes teach students

everything they need to cook food—any food they want, Lynn’s classes teach students how to sell it.

“They’ve still got to learn how to read a profit-loss statement and understand the business aspect and the side of business before [they] can open [their] own place,” Rogers said.

Lynn and Rogers designed their curricula to complement each other, as quite a number of students in both programs want to open their own restaurants. “You can take both of our programs and get two degrees in three years, and that's really what we recommend,” Lynn said. “My classes focus on developing your business plan,” Lynn explained.

“What is it that your business wants to do, and how much capital does that take?”

“What our students do, is they come to me with whatever their idea is for when they graduate— it can be a bar, it can be a restaurant, it can be a food truck— and we take that, and over the course of two years, or three years depending, we form that business plan into something solid that they can have when they leave here,” Lynn said.

Whether or not they follow through on the plan depends on the student.

“Everybody thinks it’s a great idea to own a restaurant until you own a restaurant,” Lynn said.

The desire to open a restaurant has especially become prevalent with the rise of the Food Network.

“A lot of times the incoming students want to be on the Food Network,” Rogers said. “But, the Food Network is both good and bad because while it helps promote becoming a chef as a respectable career path... it also convinces everyday cooks to take a stab at becoming a chef. So, they enroll and then they get here and are, like, ‘Well, cooking's a bit harder than the way it's portrayed on TV.’” “The restaurant industry is extremely difficult,” Lynn said. “And, especially with the explosion of the Food Network, a lot more people would like to cook and learn the methods behind the cooking. That's not exactly what we teach. We teach commercial kitchen cooking— so, how to cook for a restaurant. Instead of how to cook for a table of four, we cook for a table of 100.”

For the students who complete both programs and continue the pursuit of their dreams, the world lies at their fingertips.

Domingue, a testament to this fact, praised Lynn for helping her to navigate the business world, and Rockwell and Rogers for teaching her how to run a kitchen. “Some kids make it through; some kids don’t. You have to have a love of food to make it through,” Domingue said. “But this program with these two gentlemen, was awesome.”

By: T.J. Parks for 82801

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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Are Organic Foods More Nutritious? ave you ever wondered what that ‘organic’ label really means and if eating organic foods will improve your health? Exciting new research is shedding light on the question of organic foods and health, helping to make our food purchasing decisions more informed than ever.

To be able to use the USDA Organic seal, a product must utilize approved methods for production and processing that are designed to foster cycling of resources, promote ecological balance, and conserve biodiversity. Synthetic fertilizers, sewage sludge, irradiation, and genetic engineering may not be used.

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So, will eating organic food make you healthier? Well... maybe, but the answer is not as straightforward as you might wish. To better understand how eating organic foods— specifically plant foods—might affect health we can look at two important factors: exposure to synthetic pesticides and the nutrient composition of organic vs. conventionally grown foods.

It is well documented that conventionally grown foods have a greater risk for pesticide contamination than organic. Further, it appears that dietary intake is the greatest source of pesticide exposure for children. Rinsing your food before eating it is always a good idea but it

has not been demonstrated to decrease exposure to pesticides, unfortunately.

Recent research has also uncovered significant nutrient differences between organic and conventionally produced foods. The most exciting is a finding of higher concentrations of a wide range of antioxidant compounds in organic foods. While this seems to be a positive finding, the metabolism of antioxidants is complex and there is a lot we don’t understand about how they work within the body. At this time, it is uncertain if an increased intake of these anti- oxidants would have a positive effect on our health.

Other nutrient differences identified were SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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a mixed bag: higher levels of carbohydrates, xanthophylls, vitamin C, and lower levels of protein, fiber, and vitamin E. Differences (both positive and negative) were found in a handful of minor minerals as well. These findings were statistically significant but have not received the amount of attention as the antioxidant finding because their potential for practical clinical (i.e. ‘real world’) significance is not as great. That is to say, it is unlikely these differences would positively affect health.

Despite lower pesticide levels and superior antioxidant concentrations the current evidence does not support a measurable health benefit to eating organic foods. It is important to note, however, that many individuals choose to buy organic foods due to perceived benefits to the environment and animal welfare. These issues, while critically important, are outside of the scope of this article.

Eating more whole grains, fruits, and vegetables and less added sugars and salt are some of the best steps we can take to improve our health.

Whether or not you wish to pay the premium for organic foods is, of course, your choice.

For more information on healthful food choices visit www.choosemyplate.gov.

By: Kentz S. Willis

Kentz Willis, M.S., is the University of Wyoming Extension Educator in Nutrition and Food Safety for Northeast Wyoming. He can be reached via email at kwillis3@uwyo.edu.

Republished with permission by 82801.

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Photo by T.J. Parks

Verge of Vanishing n Chuck Hemard’s own words, he was chasing something that didn’t exist anymore.

Like the rest of the old south, it had been choked out by hungry weeds, bricked over for expanding metropolises, and felled for a rich man’s profit. The longleaf pine forest was simply something that no longer existed the way it used to. Whatever patches of pine that survived often did so in a way that showed the toll of civilization’s abuse and its neglectful approach to stewardship. Those few acres, seemingly untouched by the hard hand of time, existed as dots on an everchanging landscape.

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Hemard, a photographer and instructor at Auburn University in Alabama, spent the past seven years traveling throughout the southeast, making pilgrimages to these trees in the hopes of capturing their stories. The resulting work, a collection of photos titled “The Pines,” is on display at Sheridan College. Hemard talked about his work at the Whitney Center for the Arts on August 30.

“There’s this sense of personal significance to me,” Hemard said. “I grew up in Hattiesburg, Mississippi…

So that’s kind of smack dab in the middle of what we call ‘the pine belt,’ right? They were in my yard. Not the old growth trees, but probably the second growth.

My chore was to rake the pine needles.”

Though longleaf pines themselves are abundant throughout the South, the ecosystem defined by this tree is in serious danger of vanishing.

“When I’m out with my camera… it’s about 100 to 150 years after the landscape-scale industrial removal of literally tens of millions of acres of this landscape,” Hemard said.

The longleaf pine forest, which once covered anywhere between 60 million and 90 million acres, reached a low point of 3 million acres during the 1990s. Hemard began researching the tree at Auburn’s Center for Longleaf Pine Ecosystems.

While poring over the scientific literature dedicated to the subject, he found a survey indicating the SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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locations of several remaining longleaf pine old growth forests.

This discovery led Hemard to outline his sevenyear itinerary. After that point, Hemard just needed to identify what he was searching for. “Some of these questions that I’m thinking about are ‘What does it look like today?’ ‘How much do these relics show what it might have looked like prior to settlement?’

‘How much has it changed?’” Hemard asked himself.

Hemard visited these forests with a large view camera. The camera demanded patience, an investment of $25 per photo, and a willingness to carry large items through the forest.

But, the result was a detailed and deliberate photograph documenting every element the trees saw fit to reveal.

“The amount of detail and description is kind of uncanny,” Hemard said. “It’s not the way our eye sees naturally. Our eye sees something in the distance, something up close, something halfway, and kind of puts all of that together.

Well, this is a way that, in one fell swoop, you get all that information.”

After the talk, Hemard showed me the details given by not just the pines, but the forest itself. The sky. The undergrowth. Hemard looked for scenes that spoke to him from top to bottom. To him, it was a duty.

“I’m responsible for every millimeter of that photograph,” Hemard said. To Hemard, the photographs were more than just a record detailing the landscape’s condition. The project allowed him to reconnect with the land in a physical, mental, and spiritual way. Sometimes, physical reconnection isn’t pleasant.

“There’s this little bug we have in the deep south called a chigger,” Hemard said. “They bite you. They itch like crazy.”

Hemard had a cloth extending from his view camera, over his head, and down his back.

After the visit, Hemard found clusters of little red bites scattered across his shoulders. “Apparently, I didn’t learn my lesson, because that happened three times,” Hemard said. But Hemard was also in search of more than just a reconnection. Just as artists and writers did before him, Hemard kept an eye open for the “mythic or sacred.”

“I think of a photograph as kind of being a window,” Hemard said. “Most people see it as fact.

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I see it as a sort of fiction.” To Hemard, photos are passports to realms of fantasy and imagination.

Many serve as metaphors that reveal deeper truths.

One phenomenon that particularly fascinated Hemard was the smattering of dead trees populating the landscape. These trees, called snags, remained standing years after death. Despite their upright posture, these snags are stripped bare by gravity’s pull and their color stolen by the unforgiving wind.

“To me, that’s kind of a symbol of the long, drawn-out process of dying,” Hemard said.

In one of the forests, Hemard found two

snags side by side, enduring the process together.

“They had this long life together, over several generations, and then they stood together in death,” Hemard said. Another phenomenon that caught Hemard’s attention was wildfire.

“I was interested in it visually for its potential for this, kind of, contradiction between our perception of fire as a destructive force versus a regenerative force and the sort of beauty that can come from fire.”

Fire is necessary to maintain healthy longleaf pine forests, but much of the remaining forest areas have been protected from fire. This misguided attempt to ‘preserve’ the forests, actually distorts it. The resulting ecosystem differs greatly from the way the landscape was when it was untouched by human influence.

According to Hemard, the original forests were described by 18th century naturalist William Bartram as, “open and park-like.” The fire-suppressed forests, sites many southerners are familiar with today, are densely wooded and crowded with underbrush. Hemard showed the audience this landscape in a photograph he

called “Wilderness.” Hemard explained its a human construct. It doesn’t always represent an ecosystem the way it should be. “Some of these species might be native, some might be invasive,” Hemard said. “But whatever it is choked out whatever should be there.”

Toward the end of his talk, Hemard highlighted the fact that he purposefully steered away from trying to show the quintessential forest or the quintessential tree. “I do want to reference this romanticized beauty of a bygone era, but I also want to be careful to be accurate to today and show the bigger picture of where we’re at,” Hemard said.

The collection includes a little bit of everything: overgrown, firesuppressed forests; isolated trees ignored by sprawling cities; old growth longleaf forests, nearly unchanged by time. “I hope, in the end, the pictures might add to or broaden the conversation that is already happening in science on environmental history and provide an additional sense of what this landscape was and what it is today,” Hemard said.

Despite the personal nature of the project, Hemard was glad to have it displayed in a region different than his own. “I know this project is based in my region and my personal history, but I’m hopeful that by sharing it here in your neck of the woods—which, to me, is this area that really defines the very notion of landscape in some ways—that it might encourage some of the people that are based here to get out and connect with the land,” Hemard said.

Hemard noted that most landscape photographs come from the West. But, even in Wyoming, people wishing for a connection with the land still need to seek it out. Hemard showed the audience a 1902 photo taken of Elephant Foot, a part of the Bighorn Mountains visible from Beckton Road. He thought someone would recognize it.

“Anyone recognize this place?” Hemard asked the audience. “Has anyone been here?” No one in the audience answered affirmatively. Unlike the old south, whispers of the old west can still be heard. You can hear the voices echo in the canyons and sing in the rivers. If we hope to hear it 100 years from now, we need to find the time today to stop and listen.

By: T.J. Parks for 82801

School District

Slam Dunks Lunch ids need healthy food. This should go without saying, but when the national school lunch program simply isn’t working, what do you do? Apparently, if you’re the Sheridan County School District #1, you brave the tide, unsupported, for a healthier, tastier meal program students and faculty will eat and enjoy. You build a budget around a new menu that will entice more kids and staff back into the cafeteria, hire a new

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food service director to train staff and implement the vision. Then, you go for it. Because, that’s exactly what SCSD#1 did.

Just two short years after the program’s rollout at Tongue River and Big Horn Middle Schools—which boasts locally-grown and seasonally-driven ingredients—lunch program participation is up. Way up. Now, 82801 gets the skinny on the evolution of the district’s successful, entirely original school lunch program direct from

the horse’s mouth. Meet the masterminds behind the tasty magic that’s overhauling your child’s lunchroom, reshaping their nutritional outlook and out-scoring your pack lunch (sorry, mama).

But first, a lesson in school lunches.

LUNCH LESSONS On average, kids consume up to 50 percent of their daily calorie intake while at school, SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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of school lunch has also changed. Dramatically.

which makes cafeteria snack and meal offerings downright fundamental in assuring our littles a healthy lifestyle. For children from low-income families, school meals are an especially critical source of affordable, healthy foods; 51 percent of U.S. children now qualify for free and reducedprice (FRP) school meals.

Historically, the U.S. Department of

commonly associated with lifestyle factors like poor eating habits and a lack of exercise.

It wasn’t long before childhood obesity it began being labeled as an epidemic in the U.S. In 2010, the widespread public sentiment was that the government could be the best means of stopping and/or preventing its spread. At the time, more than 30 million children participated

First there were guidelines, then labels. Next, the government stepped in and began telling schools what to serve their students. But, the government’s increasing involvement in school lunch was

Agriculture (USDA) has been responsible for the general administration of the school meal programs that provide funding to support FRP meals for underprivileged students. Meals offered through the program are required to meet established nutritional standards which were created decades ago. But, somewhere between the 1970’s and early 2000’s, things changed. The health outlook for children in the U.S. grew increasingly bleak, with an unsubstantiated rise in childhood obesity rates and documented occurrences of Type 2 diabetes—

in the National School Lunch and School Breakfast Programs nationwide. Around that same time, Uncle Sam began to play a more active and significant role in improving the nutrition of our children through legislation from the White House geared at combating childhood obesity.

At one point, Congress lead an initiative to completely overhaul and eliminate cafeteria food and snacks of the unhealthy variety. The effort was driven by Former First Lady Michelle Obama.

As a result, over the past few decades the role

not met with universal praise and, like most Band-Aid approaches at a single but widespread problem, there were holes in the application of the government’s one-size-fits-all “solution” to school lunch. For example, the same vegetable and produce items are not necessarily available locally and seasonally across the U.S. Serving strawberries in winter in some parts of the country simply may not be feasible or cost-effective.

The first implementation stages of new USDA protocols occurred in Sheridan County

SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

FEDERAL FRUMP FOOD

during the 2013-14 school year, and were met with a drop in participation at school cafeterias districtwide. SCSD#1 began to question if the changes were a good fit for their students. District officials would later describe the decrease they saw in student participation that year as a “student revolt.”

The food didn’t look, smell or taste incredible.

Perhaps worse, it didn’t fuel students for academic

wanted to bring participation numbers back up... but, how? “We really couldn’t see past that one question: How do we afford it? Because we were already subsidizing our [meal] program $80,000 - $90,000 a year, which was a tremendous burden—to take dollars that should be deployed in the classroom and apply them toward your food service program. But, at the same time, we all

with an all-new Food Service Director, Dennis Decker, SCSD#1 brought local foods into the 2014-15 school lunch program.

“The decision was made following much deliberation over budgets, federal nutrition guidelines and a jigsaw puzzle of ill-fitted standards,” Jeremy said. “We ultimately abandoned the entire federal lunch program altogether on

On average, kids consume up to 50 percent of their daily calorie intake while at school

or athletic successes. “That was a problem for us,” said Sheridan County School District #1 Business Manager Jeremy Smith. “Seventy percent of our students play sports and attend practice or games immediately after school. Our kids needed more protein and carbs than they were being allotted through the federal program’s staunch restrictions and guidelines.”

Jeremy said the district knew it needed to provide better-tasting and smelling food without increasing costs to students and faculty if they

know just how important good nutrition is for our kids,” he said.

Could Sheridan better manage their school lunches independently—without the USDA subsidies and restrictions?

the belief that we could feed our students more flavorful and nourishing meals, better-suited to their four-day school week, and without the federal ‘one-size-fits-all’ mandate.”

HECK, YES! 86 INSTITUTIONAL

“We said, we’re not just going to change the rules, we’re going to throw them out entirely.” ~ Jeremy Smith

In a bold succession of pivotal moves, including a base-level rethinking and re-engineering of menus

Once SCSD#1 had committed to opting out of the Federal school lunch program, losing SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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Students not only like the taste of Dennis’ meals, but feel better-equipped for their day.

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hundreds of thousands in funds, it first looked to start simple, with an introduction of vine-ripened tomatoes from a local grower. Next, they elected to have strawberries on the menu only when they were in season–improving the quality and taste without increasing cost by using mindfulness about production cycles.

“We decided that we weren’t going to worry about producing the cheapest thing we possibly could, we said, ‘that’s not what we’re interested in.’

Instead, we want to find that sweet spot between cost and quality and we knew we had to make the meal taste and smell better. And, what tastes better than that stuff fresh out of a garden?” asked Jeremy. SCSD#1 mom Bonnie Gregory of Sheridan Farmers Market supported the districts decision whole-heartedly. She said, during an interview with PBS, “I don’t want the pesticides, high-fructose corn syrup, and the hydrogenated oils, sodium, the artificial colors... that’s what I don’t want.”

Since its inception, response to the district’s efforts and ingenuity have been overwhelmingly positive and widespread. New, scratch-cooked meals, expanded salad bars, enhanced premium lunch options and locally-sourced ingredients are featured. Participation rates are higher than they’ve been in years. Students not only like the taste of Dennis’ meals, but feel better-equipped for their day. “This year, the school lunch is delicious and it has all the good, fresh fruits and vegetables and I found it to be a lot healthier,” Big Horn School Student Eddie Atter said.

Parents are happier, too. “I think people want to feed their kids locally-raised food... Just trying to keep our kids’ food less processed is what all of us really want for our children,” said SCSD#1 mom Rebecca Masters-Bockman, of Doug Masters Family Ranch.

Although the district has already parted ways with the USDA school lunch program at every school district-wide, excluding Tongue River Elementary School where FRP lunches are too high to be ignored, Jeremy says there’s still work to be done.

Last year, the district began to purchase local beef and hogs raised by its own students. “We purchase steers and hogs almost exclusively from our students in local FFA and 4-H, and at market price through the buyback program at the Sheridan County Jr. Livestock Sale. We send the livestock to Purcella’s Processing in Buffalo—just down the road.”

In order to continue to expand and enhance its lunch offerings and to source more local ingredients, he says the district stands ready to buy local produce. Currently, there are school gardens at each participating school, but those can’t produce in the quantities needed to sustain a district.

COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE “This is really a passion of mine, to try and provide an outlet for kids to have a connection with where their food comes from. I want my kids learning and growing in an environment that fosters greatness. I want them to know that you can do anything in life— anything you want. Just be awesome at it!” Jeremy steak sandwiches and hand-tossed pizza, just to name a few. Full-price, half-price and free meals are still provided to those students who qualify. Al la carte and additional purchase item options are also available.

For more information on the program, which was featured on Season 2 of the popular Wyoming PBS program “Farm to Fork,” contact Dennis at ddecker@sheridan.k12.wy.us. The Farm to Fork program explores the growing "direct-to-market" economy in Wyoming by meeting with ranchers, growers and herders, learning from experts around the state about food and agriculture trends, then meeting the local chefs and marketplaces they supply.

By: Stephanie L. Scarcliff for 82717

has four children of his own within the district. “’They eat the same delicious, nutritional and healthy foods as your kids do,’ I like to say,” Jeremy said.

END GAME Did the government make American children unhealthy? Maybe, maybe not. But, incidence of diabetes in children, the number of overweight and obese children is still a real problem in our nation.

One thing’s for certain: SCSD#1 isn’t going to allow itself to be bullied into serving its students unhealthy meals that smell and taste funny.

So, what’s for lunch in the district these days?

Dennis says items like French dip au jus, New York SEPTEMBER / OCTOBER 2018

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