The pilot will help schools purchase more California-produced organic food, offering up to 15 cents in additional reimbursement per meal for qualifying schools. The bill recognizes that school food is an especially important source of nourishment for low-income students. At the same time, low-income communities across the state are burdened disproportionately by toxic pesticide use and often bear the brunt of climate change-related impacts.
The pilot program will facilitate expansion of organic markets for these farmers by encouraging participating school districts to source from socially disadvantaged farmers. When founder Miguel Crisantes Gatzionis passed down the farm to his son, it was accompanied by a deep love of agriculture and respect for the land and the people working on the farms. With the start of the new year, the West Mexico organic tomato deal from the Culiacan district in the state of Sinaloa is starting to heat up.
Cooler weather has resulted in a continuation of the demand-exceeds-supply situation that has been the norm for the past 10 months—but that should change in the coming weeks. Stay current on all the most important news and features with our weekly newsletter. Other Articles:. The bill would make the implementation of its provisions contingent on an a one-time appropriation being made for its purposes by the Legislature in the annual Budget Act or another statute.
The people of the State of California do enact as follows:. Chapter 14 commencing with Section is added to Division 17 of the Food and Agricultural Code, to read:. California Organic-to-School Pilot Program. The Legislature finds and declares all of the following:. A The amount paid per school meal by the school food authority to purchase the California organic food products.
She began her program in , dubbing it The Conscious Kitchen. It went so well, in fact, that Shils tried to extend the program for a longer period, but the idea was met with some skepticism. There were certain costs associated with the initial outlay of the project, like fixing up the kitchen, and buying new cups and plates. But those were bought with long-term savings in mind. This school year, the program has expanded to include Willow Creek Academy, a charter school in the same district, bringing the total number of students consuming non-GMO lunches to over a day.
And this, if Shils has her way, is only the beginning. We were absolutely deluged with responses. To Shils, it's as simple as changing how we think about buying food. She tells me the story of inspecting a school kitchen a few years ago. This stasis is what Shils is waging war against. To implement change, it's hard and scary. There's a lot of legwork to be done, but it's stuff we know. All the questions that a kitchen team is going to have, we already know the answers to.
To help get that information out there, Shils and her team are holding an instructional webinar on Thursday, September 10th at 10 a. For more information -- including instructions how to download the program prior to the webinar -- head over to the flyer for the event. Throughout the webinar, and in the ensuing months and years as the program continues to expand, Shils hopes to bring about change by simply getting people to realize that this could actually work.
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