Baltimore City Is First “Meatless Monday” School System

Well, I will eat my hat. Baltimore City Public School system (BCPS) — of all places! (Have you seen The Wire? If not, why not?) — has received an award for pushing its school food program toward farms and gardens. If this problem-riddled school system can get its kids eating right, then what’s the matter with the rest of us?

Not only has BCPS been sourcing lunch ingredients from local farms, it has become the first school system in the U.S. to institute a Meatless Monday menu in all its schools, according to Forbes. As if that weren’t enough, the system has created a teaching farm, Great Kids Farm, and is organizing an effort to grow a garden at each of its more than 200 schools.

BCPS is certainly headed in the right direction. I wrote the other day about American’s distaste for the foods that can be grown most sustainably — that is, fruits and vegetables. As some of my commenters rightly pointed out, part of the problem lies in our school lunch program. We are teaching our kids bad habits early by loading up their daily diets with rafts of burgers, French fries, pizzas, tater tots and other processed concoctions (are there, in fact, any potatoes in tater tots? I think not).

It won’t shock anyone, then, that U.S. high-school students’ intake of fruits and vegetables was ranked as “poor” by a recent CDC study, according to the Wall Street Journal. The study found that fewer than 10 percent of teenagers eat their recommended daily allotment of plant foods. This is hardly surprising; if we’re not demonstrating the importance of healthy eating to kids in lower grades, of course they won’t start enthusiastically munching salads as soon as they hit high school.

So the 2009 Award for Visionary Leadership in Local Food Procurement and Food Education, presented to BCPS by the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future, is a needed light in the darkness of dietary deficiency. Awarding school systems that are working to help kids learn the value of a healthy bite is a sure way to raise awareness and encourage more to follow suit.

And if the system winning the award is more famous for violence and dysfunction than anything else, that just serves to put a little more heat on everybody else. If Baltimore City Schools can do this, anyone can do this. All that’s stopping us is the will to change — and of course the big agribusiness dollars that stomp that will into submission.

Photo courtesy of back_garage on flickr