SARANAC LAKE - Lunch was a lot more local, and a lot more fresh, in the Saranac Lake Central School District on Wednesday.
As part of National Farm to School month, students were treated to a meal that featured fresh food from local and regional farms. Cafeteria staff worked with students in the culinary program at Paul Smith's College to prepare the food for the roughly 600 high school, middle school and elementary school students who were served that day.
"It's basically about trying to get school districts to use as many farm-fresh products from as close to the district as they can," said Ruth Pino, the district's food service director and a nutrition professor at the college.
Wednesday's lunch menu included shepherd's pie, which was made with 100 pounds of ground beef purchased from White Stone Farm in Burke, 100 pounds of potatoes from Tucker Farms in Gabriels and 160 ears of corn from Rulf's Orchard in Peru. A tabouli salad was also made using tabouli purchased at Nori's Village Market, and a bushel of tomatoes and three-quarters of a bushel of cucumbers from Rulf's. Apple crisp, using three bushels of McIntosh apples harvested from Rulf's orchard, was also on the menu.
Students were surveyed about the meal after lunch, and Pino said the overwhelming majority of kids liked it.
"They thought it was great, and they thought it was cool that we were doing something different," she said. "High school students in particular said they liked that it was all fresh food."
Pino said she developed a plan for the district's Farm to School Day by working with fellow PSC professor Kevin McCarthy and the students in his American gastronomy class, who served the food to the students Wednesday. Pino said she connected with local and regional farmers by working with Cornell Cooperative Extension.
But trying to figure out just how much produce and beef she needed wasn't easy, Pino said. It was also fairly late in the growing season when the program came together.
"This was my first real adventure into this," Pino said. "Next year, I'm going to start in the spring working with farmers, and I think I'll be able to get some more Romaine and different greens. There's not going to be a very long season that I can get it right now, but I think if I plan ahead I'll be able to do a lot more next year."
McCarthy said he'd like to see local farm goods incorporated in schools on a more regular basis.
"The next step is more than just once," he said. "More than just the Farm to School program being a special event, it should be a standard. Hopefully one day it will become that, but nothing changes overnight."
Pino said the cost of the farm-fresh food she purchased was "pretty competitive" when compared to the district's usual sources. The biggest obstacle to making this kind of change more permanent is time and labor, she said.
"If we weren't working with Paul Smith's and I brought in three bushels of corn on the cob and said 'We've got to shuck it and cut it off the cob,' it would have been way too daunting," Pino said. "We all love to have the freshest, most nutritious vegetables, but it's not always, on our tight time schedule and budget, feasible to do."
Pino is planning to integrate fresh, farm-grown food in the district's menu throughout the rest of the month. On Thursday, students were served carrots from Tucker's Farm. In two weeks, she plans to serve a butternut squash bisque using squash from Shipman Farm in Burke.
"The goal is to have the kids start really making a connection that food comes from a farm, not from a box," she said. "It's healthier for them, it's more nutritious and it supports the local community."
Petrova Elementary Principal Josh Dann called Wednesday's meal an important education piece for his students.
"We have kids here that live on farms in our town and in our area," he said. "It's a good experience for them to sit down with their friends and talk about how they grow some of this stuff. I just think it's an awareness piece: kids knowing where their food comes from, and what healthy food looks like."
