Food Files: Tony Geraci on Local School Lunches

Change.org Changemaker Tony Geraci is director of food and nutrition for Baltimore City Public Schools, where he is spearheading a local-food revolution. His work is drawing attention from all levels of government.

Geraci has started sourcing fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms and converted a 33-acre abandoned city-owned farm into the Great Kids Farm, where students grow food and learn about agriculture. Geraci is also in the process of opening three Great Kids Restaurants, which serve food grown on the farm and are operated by students as part of their curricula.

I spoke with Geraci about the difficulties and joys of approaching his work in such an innovative way, including the best thing about his job (the kids), the most challenging thing (the adults) and why relationships are at the core of everything he does.

How much local food have you managed to integrate into the lunch program in Baltimore City schools?

So far this year I’ve spent $1.3 million in local produce purchasing.

What portion of your total budget is that?

Well, my department budget is about $35 million. But we wrote the first request for proposal in Maryland history calling for only Maryland-grown fruits and vegetables to be purchased by the school district, so that was the first step on this thing.

What have the challenges been?

Everything. Procurement, logistics, processing. This was a complete shift in the paradigm, so it’s all new. You kind of have to make it up as you go along sometimes.

I’ve been doing this a long time, as a chef and as a restaraunteur and as a food service director in other districts, and you have to begin at the beginning. You have to create relationships. Like anything that is worth doing in life, it begins with a relationship.

You just have to spend some time with the local farmers and talk about their needs and your needs and craft an arrangement that takes care of each others’ needs. If the relationship is mutually beneficial, it will survive. If the relationship favors one side of the other, it’s destined for failure. It has to be something that works. I’m real up-front and honest about my expectations, and I encourage them to do the same.

As an example, this farmer that I do a lot of work with out in Carroll County, Maryland — the first day I met him, we just drove around his farm all day in a pick-up truck and went from field to field and talked about what happened in each field 25 years ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago.

I really got a sense of who he is as a person, as a farmer, as a community member. It was only after we’d warmed up to one another that we went back to the packing shed and hashed out our business arrangement.

I heard the things he was saying and his concerns, but also I heard his willingness to help. That I think is universal. There are a lot of people, big corporations included, in America that want to do the right thing, that are willing to do the right thing, but they don’t know what the right thing is. Sometimes you have to hold their hand and walk them through that process.

It sounds like you’re saying part of the reason local food is good is that it puts relationships back at the center of things.

Oh yeah. As an example, in Maryland 100 years ago, 95 percent of the food was sourced from Maryland. Today it’s less than 3 percent. The land hasn’t changed. Farmland has been reallocated to other uses, but the resources still exist. You need to step back and say "so how do we recreate something that we know worked in the past and do it in a way that makes sense?"

That $1.3 million that I’ve spent so far this year, that’s $1.3 million that stayed in Maryland. That’s not money that was put on an express lane to go out of the state. That’s the other thing; people need to understand that buying fresh and buying local is not only good for all of the obvious reasons but for the reason that you just indicated.

It’s about rebuilding, reconnecting communities. It’s about making people aware that food didn’t come from a bag at the local grocery store, that some family somewhere produced that.

Are you finding that the children in the schools you’re working in are starting to get that more and more?

Totally. In the beginning two years ago it was like giving them a peach grown in Maryland was novel and newsworthy. We had a giant article in Gourmet about it. It was newsworthy. But now it’s an expectation.

How have the kids and the parents reacted to that change?

Good. Positive. We’re a long way from this being fixed. I want people to understand that this is a work in progress. Like in many other school districts in America, it’s about the steady cadence, the drumbeat of change.

Every month we do something new. Every month we incorporate new best practices that are novel at first, then become an expectation. Meatless Mondays — novel at first, but now everybody goes "oh, Monday, meatless."

Is your Great Kids Farm fully operational?

Oh yeah, it has been for over a year. It’s really cranking. We’re doing a good job. In fact, I was just out there today with the Undersecretary of Agriculture for the U.S. Government and the head of the Maryland Department of Education, Dr. Grasmick, and a whole entourage from the USDA and Arne Duncan’s office.

People are looking at this, kind of drop-jawed, going “wow! You did this with no funding, with the resources that were available to you and you’re doing it in a way that is sustainable. How can we do this around the country?”

How about the Great Kids Restaurants?

Yeah, doing great. In fact, I had my turkey club on rye today with Great Kids Farm tomatoes and lettuce on it. It was pretty good. We have one, but we’re about to open the other two. The first one is at the [school district's] central office building and we’ll roll another one out this summer and another in the fall.

How are the kids involved in the restaurant?

They run it. It’s their business. They cook, they plan, they source. They use the Great Kids Farm as a product source. Our little chickens lay our eggs that make our omelettes that they sell in the café. Pretty cool stuff.

It’s all integrated into curricula. It’s all about teaching green, sustainable food systems but also teaching entrepreneurial experience. It’s one thing to teach a kid about all this stuff, but it’s also important to teach them that there are careers out there that are directly linked to this.

What’s the most enjoyable thing about your job?

The kids. Straight up. The kids.

What’s the most challenging thing?

Adults. It’s the adults. If the kids were in charge of this, we would be light years ahead of where we are.

What is the most important thing people should know about our country’s food system?

That if we redefine it we can sustain ourselves. If we continue in the direction that we’re going with these giant corporate farms that churn out fat, salt and sugar, we will kill ourselves and never get the benefit from the richness that is America.

Photos by Dennis Drenner