Baltimore City Is First “Meatless Monday” School System

Published October 07, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT

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

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Comments (8)

This is a trend I want to see more of! I'm glad Baltimore is leading the way.

The person overseeing this program is one of Change.org's nominated Changemakers. If you think "Meatless Monday's" are a good idea, cast your vote for Anthony Geraci now!

http://www.change.org/changemakers/view/anthony_geraci

Posted by Matthew Slutsky on 10/07/2009 @ 08:19AM PT
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Great!

When I lived in the USA, I was shocked the quality of school food. Horrible horribe! There were NO options for someone wanting to eat healthy!

Posted by Phillippe de Angelus on 10/07/2009 @ 10:31AM PT
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Great!

When I lived in the USA, I was shocked the quality of school food. Horrible horribe! There were NO options for someone wanting to eat healthy!

Posted by Phillippe de Angelus on 10/07/2009 @ 10:31AM PT
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Matthew is correct above. The entire reason that Baltimore schools are headed in the right direction is because of Tony Geraci.

He's a former chef with an interest in sustainable agriculture. I think the reason that he is so successful is because he's not just telling kids, "hey, these fruits and vegetables are good for you, so eat them," he's also showing them how to grow these foods and why they are so important to a healthy lifestyle.

Geraci is a pioneer, and is certainly someone who is a Changemaker.

Posted by Greg Plotkin on 10/07/2009 @ 12:42PM PT
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We also have to thank Mayor Sheila Dixon. She has been working tirelessly on behalf of the people of Baltimore since she was elected mayor a few years ago. She takes her job very seriously, from fighting crime, speaking out for quality education, encouraging and helping to organize "green block parties".This woman is amazing, and her concern for the people of Baltimore is her driving force.

Posted by Barbara McNamara on 10/07/2009 @ 01:33PM PT
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I've been vegan for many years and my labs are all PERFECT including an overall cholesterol of 119 because I'm living off my own cholesterol. Your body makes all it needs and everything else is EXTRA it needs to get rid of. I do have meat eating friends but they all swear I put meat and cheese in my food, but it's all ANIMAL FREE - so they tell me it's just as satisfying as regular meat and cheese dishes. Meat is dead corpses. Why does America like to eat dead rotting things for? Just because it's refrigerated it's still rotting away. Our country is full of sick perverts who like to eat blood, guts and gore and it makes me puke to think about it.

Posted by L. Swa_ on 10/07/2009 @ 09:24PM PT
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Want to see more about the program? Check out the YouTube video from Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future's presentation of the 2009 Award for Visionary Leadership in Local Food Procurement and Food Education to the Baltimore City Schools' Great Kids Farm, featuring Maryland Congressman John Sarbanes.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f95MsVNaHds

Posted by Justin Herman on 10/08/2009 @ 08:59AM PT
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It was great to learn about the Meatless Mondays movement going on in Baltimore. Not only do I think that a vegetarian menu one day a week will help kids learn new ways to eat vegetables and plant-based meals, I'm also excited about how this is going to better the environment and help us move towards a sustainable America.

I've been reading Food Matters by Mark Bittman, and according to his book, "Eating a typical family-of-four steak dinner is the rough equivalent, energy-wise, of driving around in an SUV for three hours while leaving all the lights on at home... If we each ate the equivalent of three fewer cheeseburgers a week, we'd cancel out the effects of all the SUVs in the country. Not bad." Baltimore has over 200 public schools alone and feeds hundreds of thousands of kids, imagine the amount of energy they will help save by eliminating meet for just one day a week! I hope more school systems across the country will learn from Baltimore and hopefully join in on the campaign. Together the difference could be tremendous.

Obviously the American Meat Institute is staunchly opposed to what Baltimore is doing, claiming they do not have the right to not give students the choice between eating meat or not. I saw this segment on CNN in this morning:

http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/bestoftv/2009/10/20/sylvester.meat.mondays.cnn?iref=videosearch

I hope that politics as usual does not weaken what is happening in Baltimore's Public School System and the potential it has. Join the Meatless Mondays Movement in support!

Posted by kathryn f. on 10/20/2009 @ 06:57PM PT
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Katherine Gustafson is a freelance writer and editor with a background in international nonprofit organizations. Her articles, essays, and stories have been published in numerous magazines, newspapers, books, and Websites.