Farm to school champion and celebrity chef Alice Waters visited Boyne Falls Public School in Charlevoix County on Friday, Sept. 22, to witness firsthand how food service director and chef Nathan Bates is using locally-sourced produce in the cafeteria and how Boyne Falls is promoting local food in the curriculum.
Groundwork does a substantial part of its work by being solutions- oriented and sharing positive models for community resilience. The best model we found for structuring farm to school programs was the Three C’s: Cafeteria, Classroom, and Community.
Nathan Bates and Boyne Falls Public School are a shining testament to the impact of northwest lower Michigan’s flourishing farm to school movement. It is a movement that is benefiting schoolchildren both nutritionally and academically and, at the same time, is giving small and mid-size farmers a growing market for their crops and helping them stay on their land.
Read individual stories that we excerpted in our September 2017 report, “Health Kids, Thriving Farms” which covers Groundwork’s 15 years of building the Farm to School movement in northwest Michigan.
Groundwork Center for Resilient Communities honors Cherry Capital Foods owner Chip Hoagland -the “Warren Buffet of northern Michigan foods” -with Milliken Leadership Award during annual Harvest at the Commons celebration.
If you read “Cooked,” you’ll salivate. You’ll learn interesting history and science and anthropology and philosophy. Cooked, in many regards, is about getting back to the enjoyment inherent in preparing our own meals, and the sense of self-sufficiency that comes when we know how. It’s about realizing how important cooking has been in our evolution as humans, and what we might lose as a culture if we continue our trend of “outsourcing” our cooking to industrial food companies.