Go Local with Farm to School

Edible Education: Slicing up Inspiration for Your Menu and More! Looking for a little inspiration to help boost your menu cycle? Welcome to our column featuring bites of nutrition knowledge and insight for your team’s menu creation needs. Here you can digest four menu recipe categories to customize, create and expand your cycle menu for improved customer satisfaction. How about an easy to use cookbook with “Harvest of the Month,” “Simply Fresh,” “Global Trends,” and “Comfort Classic” recipes to fill your team’s idea basket? These recipes are sure to help inspire dishes that students will love and can easily be created in your kitchens to increase participation.

OUR LOVE LANGUAGE: Getting local foods into schools!

Farm to School is truly our LOVE LANGUAGE here at Pisanick Partners. Getting local foods into schools can help local economies and farmers, have beneficial environmental impacts, connect students to food systems, and best of all - it often just tastes better! It takes a village to truly succeed and sustain your local food impact on your program. We have been tenacious in our efforts to create and build resources and access in our community. We even held a nutrition summit that focused on strategies to increase local food in schools. Whether you are looking to take your first steps with getting more local items on your menus, or you want to increase the footprint of local items on your menus, there are many resources available that can assist you with your goals. Join our call to actions to help you join the movement. Properly procured local items take time and effort - but a cooperative buying group can help! Finding a local aggregator and distributor can help you avoid the administrative time to gain quick and easy

access to local foods in your area. Feed Our Future in Ohio helps support these activities and offers great resources to support buying local efforts. Reach out to these partners in your area and become a part of local initiatives. As a founding board member for the Feed

our Future non-profit group, Maureen Pisanick, encourages schools to “take the pledge” and gain resources that can be utilized to market use of local foods in their cafeterias. Alison Patrick, program manager for Feed Our Future, reports that her favorite part about Feed Our Future is that it was created side-

by-side with school nutrition professionals, education stakeholders, and community advocates to ensure that the turn-key solutions they provide increase the capacity for their partners to drive farm to school implementation in their local communities.

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