Resident, volunteer promotes local farm-to-school effort

By Keri Luiz
Assistant Editor

Matthew Wallace has less than fond memories of the school lunches in the days when he was a student at Mills Elementary School.

Now, the 36-year-old father is organizing a community meeting to bring awareness of healthy food choices to Benicia, and to gain support for a farm-to-school program to improve children’s lunches.

“It’s obvious if you talk to anybody, nutrition is very important in education,” he said. “If you don’t have a full stomach, if you haven’t been well fed, how can you concentrate?”

Wallace, who has volunteered once a week with Robert Semple Elementary School’s garden program since December 2010, saw what the students were eating for lunch. “I started noticing things like turkey gravy with a biscuit and mashed potatoes,” he said. “It’s like carb-carb-carb. It just didn’t seem like anything to eat.”

The experience prompted memories of when he was a new student at Semple. His mother had enthusiastically signed him up for the school lunch program based on her experience as a child.

But when he received his lunch, “it looked disgusting, it didn’t taste good.”

Another child asked him if he was going to eat his lunch. “The kid said, ‘You’ve got to eat it if you’re hungry.’ I remember giving him my meal.”

Recalling his own experience and wanting better for today’s children, Wallace started wondering how to improve school lunches.

In a conversation with his sister, who recently graduated with a master’s degree in nutrition policy from Tufts University in Boston, Wallace learned of the popularity and effectiveness of farm-to-school programs, which connect schools with local farms with the objective of serving healthy meals in school cafeterias.

He broached the topic at a meeting of the Benicia Unified School District’s Wellness Advisory Committee and was encouraged by then-head of the committee Judith Tata and Superintendent of Benicia Schools Janice Adams.

Wallace did some research and came across examples of successful farm-to-school programs around the state, including in Davis and Berkeley. And he discovered that Benicia’s schools were 10 to 15 years behind in developing a similar program.

Now he and others are working on establishing just such a program in Benicia, with the first step being the meeting he’s organized for Jan. 23.

“The recommended process is to have this first community meeting, and invite all the stakeholders,” he said. “The local farmers, food distributors, parents, teachers, school administration, food service, nonprofit organizations — all these people need to get involved, to make a statement that yes, this is what we would like to do.”

From there, he said, a committee needs to be formed. “The budget that the school has to make these meals is very limited. That’s been the excuse: We can’t shift. We can’t serve local organic food, or we can’t serve locally sourced food because it’s more expensive.”

But Wallace points to the Davis Joint Unified School District, where a nonprofit helped secure grant money that went toward the school lunch program. “That’s why you need the participation of the nonprofits,” he said.

For Wallace, a farm-to-school program would have three benefits: It would improve food quality at the schools, it would be better for the environment, and it would have a positive effect on the local economy.

But his chief motivation is to help students who rely on school meals. “It’s not (for) the students that, if they don’t like what is served at the school lunch, they can go home and get something to eat. It’s for the people that really depend on the subsidized meal,” he said.

Students from low-income families “are depending on these meals being quality. These children, they can’t fend for themselves.”

Wallace hopes to develop a plan to get local, sustainably sourced foods to the schools. “It may be subsidized at first,” he said. “The more students that participate in the lunch program, the more federal money the lunch program receives.”

He said he hopes that by improving the quality of meals, more parents will find the lunch programs more desirable.

And he wants to reduce the stigma of the programs, too. At Benicia Middle School, for example, “If the students are getting free or reduced meals, they have to go into the cafeteria which separates them from the other students who are paying money to buy these items that are a la carte,” he said.

“If you want to buy something that is part of the menu but not part of the USDA subsidized meal, you can a la carte. So these students are being ostracized for being in the cafeteria.

“We need to find a way to stick up for the people who cannot stick up for themselves,” he said.

If You Go
Parents, teachers, PTA members, school administrators and local farmers and food distributors are encouraged to attend the meeting will be in the Talk Town Room at Benicia Middle School, 1100 Southampton Road, from 6:30-7:30 p.m. For information, call Matthew Wallace at 707-297-3666 or email matthewbwallace@yahoo.com.