MISSION VIEJO, Calif. — Millions of students across the country receive at least one meal from school. That is why the California Department of Education is tapping into organic foods as a key ingredient in bringing healthier options in school lunches.
Superintendent Tony Thurmond first kicked off the Mission Possible: Go Organic initiative in June 2024, encouraging districts to commit to introducing more organic ingredients in school meals.
As districts begin that process, Kristin Hilleman, director of Food and Nutrition Services, at Capistrano Unified School District said they began their journey into incorporating more organic foods years ago at the request of a student.
"We started with baby carrots and we chose a fruit each month that was seasonal and that would work within our program like the apples, tangerines, we did pears, oranges, things like that," Hilleman said.
She said it has not been easy, but the effort has since taken off, having served more than 80,000 pounds of organic food since the last school year.
"We like to do organic produce as much as possible because that eliminates pesticides and different things that students are ingesting," Hilleman said.
She said that isn’t to say conventionally grown foods are bad, but simply put, organic foods are not grown with soil additives and fertilizers. Organic foods have also been shown to reduce risk of certain types of cancers, according to the Mayo Clinic.
For families who rely on schools to feed their children, this may also be the only place they get fresh organic produce. That lack of access to healthy foods is an issue seen across the country, as children in the United States also have higher rates of obesity and heart disease.
Just like organic foods are pricier at the grocery store, school districts also have to pay a bit more to provide these options. Hilleman said they get both state and federal funds, but still have to be strategic with the food bids they make.
"We have nine different produce vendors that we work with and that whole process was probably in totality about five months worth of work to make sure we were able to procure high quality, organic and conventional produce at the right price to be able to sustain our meal program for this school year and beyond," Hilleman said.
Hilleman noted that right now, schools are in a transitional period when it comes to lunch menus.
"In the eighties and the Reagan era, the National School Lunch Program took a turn as far as food production was concerned, and they moved to more convenience foods, so prepackaged items, processed items, things like that. The whole process continued all the way up until now and so there's a big push to go back to the good old days of scratch, cooking, freshly prepared," Hilleman said.
Hilleman said without a full scratch kitchen in the district, there is only so much they can do to continue upscaling their effort.
"We haven't found a lot of available organic entree items yet. We're still working and sourcing those, but we do try to source organic produce as much as possible when we're purchasing for our meal program and that runs from elementary all the way through to our high school students," Hilleman said.
Although school meal programs across the country could be impacted as the U.S. Department of Agriculture is cutting about $1 billion in funding to schools that buy foods directly from local farms and ranchers.
Meanwhile, Hilleman hopes the intention used to curate school lunch menus transfers over to healthy eating habits for all students.
