[4] Given this growing problem facing the nation's youth, school lunch nutrition will play a vital role in halting and potentially reversing this concerning trend.
Many initiatives targeted at changes at the school, community and individual levels have been undertaken to combat the growing rates of childhood obesity.
[6] Up to 20% of schools’ food service budgets are supplied by these commodity purchases, often prioritizing availability and short term prices over the nutrition of students.
[8] The USDA partnering with the US Department of Defense Personnel Support Center also began delivering fresh produce in 1995, before the Community Food Security Coalition formed in 1997 to push for the expansion of farm to school programs nationally.
[9] Attempting to support local, smaller farmers has always been a goal, but costs of supplies and labor can frequently be prohibitive leading to efforts to work around unionized food service workers, making use of nonprofits to support school efforts, and even pre-processing agricultural products offsite before delivery to schools.
[6] The development of networks of distributors across the country has continued to be a challenge, as many preexisting distributions and farmer cooperatives see farm to table as a niche market.
[8] The National Farm to School Network (NFSN), established in 2007, began as a collaborative of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, Occidental College and the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC).
In late 2011, it was decided that the National Farm to School Network had outgrown its original home and it became its own organization under the fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center.
Potential benefits of the program for communities, schools, farmers and children include:[10] $0.60-$2.16 of local economic activity [11] Recent studies conducted by Beery et al. demonstrated additional, unexpected benefits from programs similar to Farm to School, as illustrated by the following quotes:[12] Multiple studies have looked at the environmental impact of conventional agriculture versus the local food movement.
Studies that examine the LCA still show that there is no clear conclusion on the environmental impact of local versus non-local agriculture.
Another study supports this argument that global food systems have better energy efficiency due to the size of production, the so-called “ecology-of-scale”.
At least one analysis evaluated the potential economic impact of farm to school programs for an entire region (Central Minnesota) in a comprehensive manner.
[21] The investigators empirically developed a realistic set of potential foods to include in farm-to-school lunch programs in the region.