Less Meat, Better Food, Happier Kids: Oakland Unified Reinvents its School Lunch Kristine Wong Civil Eats Emphasizing higher-quality meat and plant-based proteins has helped the California school district reduce its school lunches' carbon footprint, serve healthier food, and save money. Cash-strapped school districts that want to feed students healthy meals often find themselves [...]
School Food Director Embraces Buying Power, Diversity to Improve Menus Addie Broyles My Statesman One rainy day last fall, Anneliese Tanner scrolled through photos of sweet potatoes on her phone. The managers at some of the 114 school cafeterias under her watch in the Austin Independent School District were posting photos of the vegetables [...]
Food Justice is About Workers Amy Frykholm interviews Jose Oliva The Christian Century Jose Oliva is the codirector of the Food Chain Workers Alliance, which aims to improve wages and working conditions for “all workers across the food chain.” The FCWA recently helped develop a Good Food Purchasing Policy, a set of standards that [...]
Oakland Schools Embrace Good Food Plan Rachel Trachten Edible East Bay Purchasing program bolsters nutrition, sustainability, and local sourcing Can public schools influence our nation’s food policy? They can, and San Francisco schools recently signed on to direct their substantial purchasing power toward healthy, local food. As this magazine was going to press, [...]
Fresh Approach with Farm-to-School Meals in Oakland Tara Duggan San Francisco Chronicle Getting a 5-year-old to try a bowl of very green tabbouleh salad isn’t always easy. But kindergartner Jera Flenaugh was game to taste the chopped parsley, tomato and bulgur dish during lunch at Glenview Elementary in Oakland last week. “It tastes [...]
Good Food Rising Jonathan Baldoza Food First What kind of world do we want to live in? This was the question that resonated throughout the evening of Monday, October 24th in “Good Food Rising: Celebrating Cities, Schools, and Communities Supporting the Good Food Movement,” organized and hosted by Real Food Media in partnership with [...]
OUSD Aims to Put Its Money Where Its Values Are Luke Tsai East Bay Express How do you provide lunch for an entire city of hungry schoolchildren on a budget of just $1.25 a meal — and do so while also making sure the food is highly nutritious and sustainably sourced, and that it puts [...]
Already a Leader, OUSD Ups Ante on Feeding Students Kate Williams Berkleyside On Oct. 26, the Oakland Unified School District (OUSD) will officially commit to a set of sustainability- and health-focused food purchasing standards for its district-wide meal program. These standards, outlined by the Center for Good Food Purchasing (CGFP), a Berkeley-based organization working to create [...]
L.A. Unified to ban the purchase of chicken raised with antibiotics Teresa Watanabe Los Angeles Times Aiming to bolster student health, Los Angeles Unified and five other major urban school districts announced plans Tuesday to ban the purchase of chickens that have been raised with antibiotics. The action by the Urban School Food Alliance [...]
How One Groundbreaking Set of Rules is Changing the Food in L.A. Schools and the System Behind It Leilani Clark Civil Eats Daniel Blackwood has witnessed a couple of big changes since he started working as a delivery driver for Gold Star Foods, the food distributor for the Los Angeles Unified School District [...]
