Episodit
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School lunch is about so much more than tater tots and chocolate milk. In this episode, youâll discover how local food in schools not only improves nutrition for kids, but also fuels Iowaâs economy, supports independent farmers, and strengthens rural communities.
Youâll hear what made the now-defunded Local Food for Schools (LFS) program so successfulâand why proposed legislation like SF 525 threatens to undo that progress. We dig into whatâs at stake and what you can still do to protect real food and real farms in Iowa.
[You can read the transcript below.]
Featured Voices:
* Jessy Sadler â Food Service Director, Urbandale Schools
* Julie Udelhofen â Food Service Director, Clear Lake Schools
* Chelsea Krist â Farm to School and Early Care Specialist on Iowa State Extension's Farm, Food and Enterprise Development Team
* Teresa Wiemerslage â Local Food Systems Specialist, ISU Extension
* Chris Schwartz â Executive Director, Iowa Food Systems Coalition
Take Action Now
1. Support the Choose Iowa Food Purchasing Program
Ask the Agriculture & Natural Resources Appropriations Subcommittee to invest $3 million in the Choose Iowa Food Purchasing Program to replace lost federal funding and strengthen Iowaâs local food economy.
đ Senate Switchboard: (515) 281-3371đ House Switchboard: (515) 281-3221
Senate Subcommittee Members:
* Sen. Tom Shipley (R, District 9) â Chair
* Sen. Annette Sweeney (R, District 27) â Vice Chair
* Sen. Art Staed (D, District 40) â Ranking Member
* Sen. Mike Zimmer (D, District 35)
* Sen. Dan Zumbach (R, District 34)
House Subcommittee Members:
* Rep. Norlin G. Mommsen (R, District 70) â Chair
* Rep. Helena Hayes (R, District 88) â Vice Chair
* Rep. Sami Scheetz (D, District 78) â Ranking Member
* Rep. Sean Bagniewski (D, District 35)
* Rep. Chad Behn (R, District 48)
* Rep. J.D. Scholten (D, District 1)
* Rep. Craig Steven Williams (R, District 11)
* Rep. Devon Wood (R, District 17)
* Rep. Derek Wulf (R, District 76)â
Also Contact:
* Sen. Tim Kraayenbrink â Senate Appropriations Chair
* Rep. Gary Mohr â House Appropriations Chair
2. Oppose SF 525: Contact All State Senators NOW
SF 525 threatens to rewrite school nutrition standards to favor commodity crops like corn, pork, and dairyâprioritizing corporate profits over kidsâ health and local food access. It could also jeopardize federal funding for school meals.
đ Call your Senator today and urge them to vote NO on SF 525.
đ Find your Senator: Iowa Legislature Contact Page
đ Resources & Links:
* Iowa Food Systems Coalition
* Procurement Team
* Policy Team
* Choose Iowa Food Purchasing Program (School applications open until April 7)
* Iowa Local Food for Schools (LFS)
* Find Your Iowa Legislator
* 2024 Choose Iowa Food Purchasing Pilot Report
Swarm of Birds (ID 1835) by Lobo Loco is licensed under a Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Music also by Chris Schwartz
Transcript
School Lunch Script
This is At the Iowa Farm Table Podcast, brought to you by the Iowa Food Systems Coalition. I am your host, Beth Hoffman.
Iâve reported on food and agriculture a long time, but Iâve never done a story about school lunch. It seemed, well kind of boring to be honest, a lot of talking heads going on nutrition and cost. And politics, so many politics around school lunch. And there is gobs of that, as we will see in this episode. The Trump Administration and the Iowa legislature are dramatically impacting school lunch as I speak.
But I was surprised to learn why that mattered so much. School lunch, I learned and you will too in this episode, is a major economic driver, a massive lesson in logistics, and a place to celebrate some pretty amazing people.
But letâs start withâŠthe lunch itself
[Sounds of lunch room]
Jessy Sadler is not someone you would call a lunch lady. She is a school chef, crafting tasty and nutritious meals for 2600 students a day in Urbandale, Iowa.
There are the three hot options and the grab and go saladâŠ
The fruit choices today are kiwis, canned pineapple and apples.
You will see the kids at Urbandale crunching apples. They absolutely love fresh apples.
Of course, school lunch should first and foremost be about the kids. The students at Urbandale seem happy with the lunch offered too.
I like it most of the time and think it is healthy.
I think there is a good variety. I really like the vegetable options and the fruit options. There are a lot of athletes at this school and I like that they have options for those types of people.
Over the past three years, Sadler started buying more locally grown foods.
âŠIf it's going to benefit the farmer near me, especially in Iowa, then why wouldn't I source that way? If we have any local vegetables that are fresh, we promote it. We have our own little design for local-we created it.
She got the fresh local products through a federal program called the Local Food for Schools (or LFS) Program.
We were very lucky to be able to apply and get the LFS grant multiple years. We started with produce at first, we did, you know, the lettuce and the tomato.some cucumbers. And then as the grant grew and as we were able to be like, okay, we're more comfortable now with local, then I started incorporating more cheeses, more yogurts, and get a little bit more dairy on top of the produce.
Food hubs were the key to the program. They brought together products grown on small and medium sized farms in Iowa. The schools ordered produce, meat and dairy from the hubs, and the hubs handled all the logistics, like storing the food, putting orders together and even delivering it. Julie Udelhofen is another school lunch wizard who runs food service in Clear Lake, Iowa. She explains that for her district, the program worked really well.
It was beautiful. You just had to sign up. The food hubs made sure that the farmers were signed up, they managed the money and actually tracked itâŠThey did the deliveries, they collected all the foods that we needed.I can't say enough wonderful things about the food hubs because they performed.
So schools are effectively the largest restaurants in the state. They serve hundreds to thousands of kids every day.
Thatâs Chelsea Krist, a farm to school manager at Iowa State Extensionâs Farm, Food and Enterprise Development Team. She explained that the major challenge in getting local farm products into schools is not actually the price.
Cost is not the number one challenge anymore. It's availability, it's connections, it's getting the right partnerships in place to make it doable.
This surprised me. It turns out the price of local foods in season is actually comparable to products that come from far away. The problem for the schools is that over the past many decades, a system has developed where schools have to buy through contracts with big distributors and subsidized commodities that come from government agencies. They arenât free to make their own choices about what to buy.
I don't think most people know that schools don't function in a free market economy. They're not just purchasing. They're not making food decisions the same way that we do when we're at the grocery store. They have a whole system set up.
This is a really important point about school lunch. The rules around what schools can buy have excluded local products for many years. And because of this, there was no infrastructure in place in Iowa to get food from farm to school. No refrigerators to store food, no place to put hundreds of pounds of grain. No trucks. No workers available to deliver.
What LFS did was provide us an opportunity to bring that back, to look at the infrastructure that it takes to provide the trucks, the cold storage, the manpower to be able to pull orders together and get that food moving in all directions.
Thatâs Teresa Wiemerslageâa local food system specialist at Iowa State Extension. She explained that school food directors donât have the time or money to buy from each individual farmer when you are serving hundreds or thousands of meals a day. You need infrastructure in place to move larger amounts of food.
But I couldnât help but wonder why. I mean its nice to have local, fresh food on the table for kids. But at the end of the day, isnât a carrot from Oregon the same as one from Iowa? Wiemerslage explained, itâs a huge missed economic opportunity for Iowa if we donât source at least some of the food from Iowaâs smaller farms.
I look at it from an economic perspective. Our state agriculture is all about the export market, right? That's our, that's our role in agriculture. And that [00:19:00] makes, that makes sense. And [But that means] we have to import 80% or more of the food that we eat because so much of what we grow here leaves the state. But we also need to recognize that, 80% is a lot of food and the school market is no different. So when a school has a $500,000 budget to serve food to kids, and they're bringing in almost all of that food from out of the state. That means that school money is now leaving the state.
In 2022, Iowans spent $12.6 billion on food and beverages, meaning that more than $10 billion (80%) left the state. Even food grown in Iowaâlike field corn and hogsâthose products are marketed and sold by multinational companies, and the money again is syphoned out of the state to their corporate offices. Local purchases of food grown on smaller scale farms means a better return on investment for the millions of tax-payer dollars spent on school lunch.
After the LFS round one, I did an initial evaluationâŠFor every dollar spent by the LFS program, it generated almost another dollar of economic activity.[00:20:00]
All that activity would've been gone had we just stuck with the traditional food supply system for schools. To me the biggest, the biggest impact is the sheer fact that school dollar, that property tax dollar that's funding our schools is now staying in the state and replicating throughout those communities.
Sounds like what efficiency should look like, right? Tax dollars being spent to feed kids more nutritious food while doubling the return on investment. And having the money stay in rural communities. Sounds like a no brainer to me.
But LFS and LFPAâA similar program that supplied food banks and pantries with locally grown foodâwere recently cut by the Trump Administration. Meanwhile, numerous programs still exist to subsidize the rest of school lunch.
So the Iowa Food System Coalition was excited to hear about a bill in the Iowa legislature that sounded like it might help put the focus back on local foodâexcept that it wonât. SF 525 seeks to have Iowa set its own nutritional standards, with lower whole grain requirements, higher sodium, and a focus on corn, pork and dairy. How this would impact national funding is anyoneâs guess. And then these standards would be taught in schools. Chris Schwartz is the Executive Director of the Iowa Food System Coalition.
This seems to me to be a classic case of what we call greenwashing or the co-opting of a message or a movement. They're trying to put through this bill that, you know, local is going to include the giant hog confinement supplying Smithfield or supplying Tyson. That's not local. âWhen you ask anybody what, what is your idea of local food and, uh, and supporting local farmers, they're not talking about the big corporate entities that are owned by out of state millionaires and billionaires. They're talking about supporting family farms that are truly struggling and as they try to provide us with quality food.
MUSIC
IâM NOT GOING TO LIE. This story was a bit of a bummer to produceâthere were a lot of things going well for Iowaâs school lunch that nowâŠwell, we just donât know how it will turn out. What it is looking like, is that if the Trump Administration and Iowa legislature have their way, kids wonât get as many vegetables and fruitsâand local food will become harder and harder to include in meals. Once again, smaller scale farms Iowa will again be getting the short end of the stick.
But I also did learn that the amazing people involved in school lunch in Iowa are committed to the cause. Teresa Wiemerslage and Chelsea Krist of Iowa State Extension, and the superheroes serving the foodâŠpeople like Jessy Sandler and Julie Udelhofen. They are not going to turn away from this workâlocal food just makes nutritional and economic sense for our state and our kids. Again, here is
I think Jessy Sandler, the Food Service Director in Urbandale, put it best.
I gotta take it day by day. Sometimes I have to remember it's out of my control, but that's not gonna stop me. Like, it's not gonna stop me from sourcing local. It's gonna hinder our program. And instead of purchasing a lot, I'm gonna purchase a little bit, but I'm still going to source it. It's not the farmer's fault. It's not the student's fault. We'll find a way.
How can you help? Please visit our show notes and Substack page for more information on how you can get involved.
This is At the Iowa Farm Table. A very special thanks to the Iowa State Extensionâs Farm, Food and Enterprise Development Team. Mallory DeVries edited this piece and Chris Schwartz and Lobo Loco wrote the music. Iâm Beth Hoffman with the Iowa Food System Coalition. Thanks for listening.
This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit attheiowafarmtable.substack.com -
The Iowa Food System Coalition had a great idea: to start a podcast featuring our amazing partners (there are more than 40 of them!) and to dive into the topics we care about. So here it isâthe first episode, explaining a little bit about why Iowa is so important when we think about farming in America and how we can improve agriculture here and elsewhere.
Please share widely and let us know your thoughts! For more information on the Iowa Food System Coalition, please visit our website.
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This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit attheiowafarmtable.substack.com -
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