Students embrace healthful, local food

PITTSFORD, N.Y. — Elementary school students rarely request beet salad or butternut squash for lunch.

But that's what is happening at Allendale Columbia School in Pittsford, one of a few local schools where the lunch team switched out some wholesale food from large corporations for locally sourced items to support area agriculture and teach kids about sustainability.

"This was always something that I've been interested in doing," said Allendale Columbia food services manager Laura Reynolds-Gorsuch, adding that her first experience with "farm-to-school" food was with Morgan Farms in Marion a few years ago — the farm provides the school with local apples in the fall.

Individuals and families are part of local food collectives that gather food from local farms and distribute them to clients.

"So I wondered, can a business do that?" Reynolds-Gorsuch said. She got involved with Headwater Food Hub, which collects items from 30 to 40 local farms each year and distributes them year-round.

"From there, we started making as much as we could from scratch and sourcing as much local food as possible," she said.

The school sources local meat, cheeses, vegetables and fruit from local farms via Headwater, and turns to Flour City Bread Company in Rochester for its bread products.

The school's lunch team cooks as much as it can from scratch, including salad dressings, soups and desserts each day, she said. All the food is delivered right to the school's doorstep by each vendor.

April marks Allendale Columbia's first full year of this new food approach, and while some students aren't so sure about more exotic offerings like watermelon radishes, many kids have embraced the change, said Reynolds-Gorsuch.

A large component of the switch was to help kids learn about local farming and sustainability, she said.

"They're very aware ... they understand that the less gas that we use and the more we keep things to the local economy, the better it is for the environment," she said.

Phil Bianchi, Headwater Food Hub's wholesale director, often sits down with school or college food service directors to work out what they need in their kitchens and how to get it to them via farms based in New York state.

"I commend Allendale for being ahead of the curve … and not just feeding the kids, but really nourishing their minds and their bodies … this school is on the cutting edge of that," said Bianchi, adding that a few other Rochester schools and colleges, such as the University of Rochester, have made changes in menus to include more local food.

Headwater evaluates local farms for quality before taking them on board as food distributors for local schools, he said.

"These are all small to medium family farmers that we really believe in and stand behind all their practices," he said.