Farming out food for the school lunch line
Never mind that a thin stream of water is leaking through a crack in the greenhouse roof. Or that most of the class of 5-year-olds who were brought in to see the plants didn’t like the radish and mustard greens they tasted. It will take a lot more than that to dim Baltimore City Schools’ new food service director Tony Geraci’s enthusiasm for his latest project, the 33-acre Great Kids Farm, tucked behind strip malls and fast-food joints in Catonsville, Md.
“This will be an alternative school that teaches the idea and premises of sustainability,” Geraci explained. He has grand plans: The farm will serve as an incubator for school gardens throughout the city. This summer, he plans to launch three student-run restaurants that will serve the farm’s produce.
“We want to give the kids the experience of the food from farm to fork: where food happens, how it happens, why it happens and how they can make better choices to change the way things work,” Geraci said.
Almost 74 percent of Baltimore’s 83,000 students receive free or reduced- price meals. Students call the food “nasty.” Three years ago, they marched into a school board meeting to complain that meatloaf stuck stubbornly to their plastic meal trays and milk was sometimes frozen.
Geraci believes students deserve to eat delicious, healthful meals. And those meals help students learn. “You cannot have the expectation that a teacher can teach if the kid is hungry or jacked up on sugar,” said Geraci, 52. “My job is to put healthy kids in front of teachers so they can teach.”
Geraci grew up in New Orleans and was, by his own admission, a lousy student. But he loved home economics. He became a chef and moved to New Hampshire where he ran restaurants and for several years was a food broker for Tyson Foods. In 1998, he broke his back in an industrial accident and spent a year in the hospital. In 2003, he became food service director for Contoocook County, N. H.. Within three years, the district had launched a farm-to-school program in conjunction with the University of New Hampshire, and all its 11 schools were serving food cooked from scratch. At the same time, Geraci managed to bring the money-losing lunch program into the black.
That success brought him to the attention of the Baltimore schools. “Tony doesn’t have an ounce of cynicism about what’s possible,” said Andres Alonso, chief executive of the city’s schools.
Baltimore had used the property as a nature center, but Geraci convinced school officials that a farm was just the place for children to learn about where food comes from. The property had three greenhouses. Since taking it over, the staff has planted a three-acre field of vegetables and a small orchard and brought in pigs, chickens and goats.
Geraci says he hopes the farm will teach kids not only about how plants grow but also about career opportunities. Students who work on the farm will learn how to landscape, a potentially lucrative job, and will see how easy it is to grow, say, micro-greens, which the farm began selling this spring to local restaurants.
To that end, Geraci is opening three restaurants called Great Kids Cafe. Students will be paid to manage the restaurants by grants from the city’s office of career and technical education.
Then there are the lunches. Geraci’s first move when he arrived in Baltimore last August was to prepare school kitchens and staffers so he could cancel contracts for pre-made lunches and concentrate the $35 million budget on fresh and, where possible, local food.
Geraci says his decision was driven as much by economics as any high-minded philosophy. Case in point: The federal school lunch program offers Washington state apples at $56 a case. “I can buy Maryland apples for $6 a case and feed 50,000 more kids a year with the same amount of money,” Geraci said. “What do you suppose I’m going to do?”
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