Teaching (and Learning) How to Love Local Food

story by Donna Hecker & photography by Talitha Schroeder

“Never have I ever thought I’d see a steak lunch in a grade school”, declared one of the first “customers” through the cafeteria line at Second Street School in downtown Frankfort. Yet there it was – a delicious array of grilled sirloin steaks, fat baked potatoes, butternut squash cornbread, thyme-roasted carrots, and fresh salad lettuces and microgreens.

Every bit of it was raised by local farmers and served free of charge to all students. Meals for the teachers and other staff were compliments of Superintendent Sheri Satterly and board members, some of whom also helped dish up the district’s first-ever Love Local Lunch.

Frankfort Independent Schools is a CEP (Community Eligibility Provision) district, which enables it to serve free breakfast and lunch to all its students. FIS also participates in the Local Foods for Schools program, which channels USDA funding through the Kentucky Department of Agriculture to be used for local food purchases. Additionally, the district has a farm to school coordinator (Connie Lemley) and hosts garden clubs at both Second Street School and Frankfort High School.

Amy White, FIS Food Service Director, is a fierce advocate for introducing students to new foods and supporting local farmers. “I had some extra local food funds that needed to be spent and wanted to do a special treat for our students. I wanted to serve almost exclusively local food for this lunch, and I always want to find ways to purchase more of it from local farmers. I told Connie my idea and we started planning.”

That was over three months ago. Along the way, other groups and individuals joined in to make Amy’s dream a reality. Members of the Franklin County Cattlemen’s Association. A team from Kentucky State University. Franklin County Cooperative Extension Agents. The Franklin County Farmers Market and Friends of the Market. YesArts. Inside Out Design. BrokenFork. Capital Area Master Gardeners. The Kentucky Native Plant Society.

Keenan Bishop set up a grill rig to cook the steaks, supplied by Our Home Place Meats at the Berry Center. Maggie Dungan of Salad Days sent sliced carrots, which were roasted with dried thyme from the school garden. High Five Farm, Cedar Ring Greens and the Second Street garden club provided salad fixings. Potatoes came from Happy Jack’s Farm, where Holly Hill Inn once served 28 varieties at a harvest dinner. Students grew butternut squash at Jane Julian’s Franklin County farm, and FoodChain processed the squash and baked it into cornbread made with Happy Jack’s cornmeal.

The garden club created table decorations and art teacher Julia Harmon’s students designed flyers and other promotional materials. Nat Colten, Community Sustainability Coordinator at KSU’s College of Agriculture, Community and the Sciences, not only brought photographers to document the event, but also demonstrated his considerable dishwashing skills during lunch service.

Nat said, “I got involved because Connie and Keenan asked me if I wanted to be. Working toward more local, and equitable, food systems is part of my job responsibilities. I’m also on the board of the Friends of the Farmers Market, and the Love Local Lunch embodies our shared mission of rooting community and economic health in local harvests. This is ‘sustainability’ in its truest sense.”

Frankfort Independent’s Love Local Lunch gave Lexington’s FoodChain an opportunity to expand its reach. As Co-executive Director Leandra Forman explained, “FoodChain has been involved in farm-to-school activities for over ten years, and it is deeply meaningful to be able to grow new partnerships with other county programs. Being able to test small batch recipes with a smaller district like Frankfort means we can learn more about how to gain efficiencies to scale up, making farm-to-school efforts more accessible across the state. This is good for our farmers and for our kids!”

And what did the kids think? My granddaughter Emerson loved hers and said a friend, who hardly ever eats school lunch, devoured it that day. Another student who’d brought his lunch shyly slipped in to ask if he could have a piece of steak. And almost every child took some of everything, with a please and a thank you and a great big smile.

Amy wrapped it up: “I always want to bring more awareness to our food service. We have so many regulations – balancing a budget, following the rules, and trying to make food that our students want to eat.” To which Connie added, “We want to honor the FIS food service staff who make this meal and so much of our work possible. They go above and beyond to feed our kids, and work to make meals more nourishing and appealing even when it’s the harder path.”