How whole grains are making big gains in California schools

In 2021, Shandon Joint Unified School District in Shandon, Calif., received a special delivery from Vermont—a hand-built stone mill.

Weighing in at approximately 1,200 pounds, the mill helps provide students at Shandon and nearby San Miguel Joint Unified with a variety of whole-grain items made from flour milled onsite.

The mill’s arrival was made possible through the California Wheat Commission’s (CWC) Wheat2School project, a grant-funded program that aims to get more local whole-grain dishes into school meals.

The project’s origin dates to 2018 when CWC Executive Director and Wheat2School Founder Claudia Carter partnered with C.E. Dingle Elementary School to take the wheat growing in their school garden and turn it into whole-grain items for students. With a little help from the Wheat Breeding Program at the University of California’s Davis campus, Carter and the team at C.E. Dingle worked with students to transform their wheat into whole-grain tortillas.

“That gave me the idea to be able to try to replicate somehow what we were doing [at C.E. Dingle Elementary] at that time with them because I thought it was so cool,” she says.

After securing funding from the California Department of Food and Agriculture and, later, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carter’s Wheat2School Project was born. Today, the program partners with several districts throughout the state to make local whole grains a fixture on school menus.

The mill at Shandon Join Unified provides a variety of whole grain products for students. 
Trial and error 

The mill at Shandon is managed by the district’s nutrition director, Gelene Coelho. When the mill first arrived, the CWC helped Coelho get it set up and instructed her on the basics. From there, “it was trial and error,” she says.

It can take anywhere from an hour to two hours to mill the wheat, depending on what type is used. Coelho has been able to source multiple varieties through the CWC, including red wheat, durum wheat and more.  

“Most of [the wheat has] come from, I would say the Sacramento area, […] mostly in Northern California,” she says.  

Once milled, the whole-grain flour finds its way into a variety of menu items at both districts, including dinner rolls, conchas (sweet bread), pasta, waffles and muffins. 

Some items, such as the muffins, are easy to convert to whole-grain versions since whole-grain flour swaps readily with white flour in the recipe, says San Miguel Food Service Director Lauren Thomas. Other dishes require more experimentation to get them just right. 

“When you get into more of those doughs, that's when you have to have a little bit more technical assistance to it,” she says. 

It took two years for the team at San Miguel to perfect its whole-grain pizza dough, for example, but it is now one of the most popular items on the menu. 

“I feel like now we really landed on this 100% whole-wheat pizza dough that the students love,” says Thomas.

From the cafeteria to the classroom

Alongside adding whole-grain items to the menu, Wheat2School also has an educational component, bringing whole grains from the cafeteria to the classroom. 

During the program’s infancy, Carter hired interns to develop interactive lesson plans for different grade levels that allow students to learn more about various types of wheat and how they’re harvested. 

Students at both districts also get hands-on experience through an on-site wheat garden. While the volume of wheat produced by students is not enough to be served in the cafeteria, they do get to harvest and mill it themselves using small mock mills. 

“[The mock mills have] the stone, so the students can practice changing the sizing and then putting the wheat kernels in the hopper and milling it into flour,” says Thomas.

 The team has also started after-school cooking classes that use the student-milled whole grains and produce grown in the school gardens. 

“We've been doing pizza in the gardens, so the kids are using garden vegetables that they've grown in their pizza sauce and then making the pizza dough and grilling them on the oven outdoors,” says Thomas. 

Thanks to a new round of grant funding, students will get additional education opportunities this school year through One Cool Earth, a local nonprofit that will incorporate parts of the Wheat2School curriculum into garden lessons for elementary students. 

Shandon and San Miguel students can now enjoy whole grain pasta on school lunch menus.  
Continuously expanding

When Carter first started Wheat2School, she was generally the one reaching out to districts to see if they would be interested in participating. Now that word has gotten out, it is often the districts who approach her.  

This year, South Monterey School District in King City will follow Shandon’s footsteps by receiving its own mill for in-house flour production. Additional districts throughout the state will incorporate other aspects of the Wheat2School program, including sourcing local whole-grain products and offering its educational curriculum.

As more districts partner with Wheat2School, Carter hopes to secure additional funding to keep the program growing. Her goal is to increase whole-grain consumption among students and show adults that young eaters do enjoy whole grains, especially when they have a hand in the growing process.

“[Students are] growing it, so they're seeing the farming agriculture aspect and they're processing that,” she says, “and at the end, they're eating it, so they're learning not only through the curriculum, but also by experiencing, so that really what to me is an effective part of this.”