What’s for lunch? Less junk

Grant helps Portland Public Schools feed kids more local food

By Christian Gaston

Pamplin Media Group, Dec 11, 2008, Updated Oct 30, 2009

JONATHAN HOUSE / PAMPLIN MEDIA GROUP

Kristy Obbink, coordinator of Portland Public School’s lunch program, eats lunch at Atkinson Elementary School with Alyssa Reed during the school system’s once-a-month, all-local food day.

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Most kids aren’t exactly health food nuts.

Students at Portland Public Schools are no different. They love pizza. They hate beets.

But Kristy Obbink, director of nutrition services at PPS, says that the district’s Harvest of the Month and Local Lunch programs, which put farm-fresh produce on cafeteria plates twice a month, has her questioning the assumption that kids won’t eat healthy foods. It turns out students kind of like parsnips.

“We’ve been thrilled by the fairly positive response from kids,” Obbink says.

The Local Lunch program, which debuted in October, offers cafeteria-goers a complete meal made with Oregon-grown products. On Nov. 19, the district served Harvest Parsnips grown at Kerslake Farms in Corbett coupled with a recipe for Draper Valley Chicken drizzled in a pear vinaigrette devised by former Wildwood chef Cory Schreiber.

Local Lunches cost the district about 35 percent more than the typical lunch —$1.55 rather than $1.15. The cost to students remains the same and is made up from a $290,000 grant from the Kaiser Permanente Community Fund, administered by Ecotrust.

The local fare makes a lot of sense in Portland, Obbink says. Two and a half years ago PPS started the Harvest of the Month program, which features fresh regional produce on school menus (the parsnips, for example). The response was so positive they added the complete Local Lunch this year.

“We started to hear from our community. … They were asking for foods that were grown and produced here locally in an effort to support local farmers and the local economy and in an effort to reduce greenhouse gases,” Obbink says.

Obbink says she’s been trying to buy locally as much as she can. She gets off-season watermelons from Hermiston and buys pizza from Roadrunner Pizza, based in Gladstone, which uses local flour for the crust and a sauce made for PPS that omits high-fructose corn syrup, a common sweetener. “We spend a lot of money on pizza,” Obbink says. “Kids like pizza.”

Buying locally grown meat is particularly expensive. Obbink has about $1.15 to spend for each of the 20,000 lunches that the district serves each day.

Even though the district’s buying power means she can get a good price, the price gap between locally grown meat and the commodity meat that the district gets from the federal government is difficult to overcome.

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