For many years, if a public school district wanted to serve students apples or milk from local farmers, it could face all kinds of hurdles. Schools were locked into strict contracts with distributors, few of whom saw any reason to start bringing in local products. Those contracts also often precluded schools from working directly with local farmers.
But buying local got easier with federal legislation in 2008, and then again in 2010, when the U.S. Department of Agriculture created the Farm to School program to get more healthful food in schools and link smaller U.S. farmers with a steady market of lunch rooms.
A new survey of schools and their local food purchases offers a bit of a progress report on the program. During the 2011-12 and 2012-13 school years, the survey found, 36 percent of U.S. school lunchrooms were feeding kids food from local producers: things like carrots and peaches, all from nearby.
[For more of this story, written by Tracie McMillan, go to http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesa...-others-cant-or-wont]
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