Q: What are the backgrounds of the members of the task force? A: This is a coalition of many people from many different perspectives. A lot of parents are involved who are really concerned about their kids' welfares. There are teachers involved and school counselors and school administrators who understand and know the relationship between nutrition of what kids are eating in school and educational attainment, behavior and many other things.
We also have two school food-service directors involved who have been extraordinarily helpful to us to figure out the intricacies of the reality of the system they face. We have farmers, a whole bunch of health practitioners, including a couple medical doctors, so it's a very broad coalition.
Q: Describe the benefits for schoolchildren, farmers and the general community?
A: If we could actually have a food system that had fresh, healthy, local food here grown by local farmers for our kids, it would result in many, many positives. The first of which, all that money that was spent on those 417,000 lunches could go to local farmers and local food providers. It would be keeping our money in our community at a time when we really don't need to be exporting it someplace else in these economic times.
Food is really at the center of economic development. If we actually had a healthy local food culture here, that we branded ourselves as the county that feed our kids with our own food and they were healthy and the obesity and diabetes rates dropped, educational attainment rates went up and there was a general sense of community around food, it would attract a lot of people here. It's what people are looking for.
Beyond that, there's health-care costs. At a time when we're bankrupting ourselves with health-care costs and making our employers uncompetitive in the world market because of health-care costs, a local food system that fed healthy foods to its citizens could lower health-care costs, make us more competitive.
Full Story: http://www.mlive.com/news/chronicle/index.ssf?/base/news-15/1229339716307060.xml&coll=8
