We Are What We Eat

Good food purchasing to support healthy, delicious, locally sourced BPS meals

I’ll never forget that moment of wondrous epiphany years ago, when, still new to Boston, I tasted my first apple picked from the tree at a local orchard. The pucker of tangy sweetness and juicy crispness flooded my senses with delight, then shock. How could I have lived for so many years thinking those other apples were as good as it gets?  

The apples of my childhood were textbook Red Delicious picked from big piles at the grocery store and coated in that waxy film that didn’t quite wash off—slightly squishy, slightly sweet, consistently deep red and bland.

When I was pregnant for the first time, poor dad-to-be drove through torrential rains to the orchard to satisfy my craving for farm-fresh apples. In the years after, it’s become a treasured family tradition to visit the orchard and load up for the fall.

One of many fun apple-picking outings with the fam

This year, apple-picking season and back-to-school are directly connected: for the first time, all apples served in Boston Public Schools lunches will be fresh and locally grown. 

Boston has long been a leader in treating food access as a foundational part of students’ readiness to learn—offering free breakfast during the school day since 2012, free school meals to all students without any paperwork since 2013, and fresh meals cooked and served on site at a growing number of schools. This year, the Governor and state legislature included a landmark budget investment to guarantee universal free school meals in all school districts statewide.

For many of our students, school meals are providing up to half of their daily calories. Guaranteeing universal free school meals ensures a reliable source of nutrition, destigmatizes free lunch, and saves families cost and stress. We’ve also made strides in ensuring culturally appropriate foods, including kosher and halal options, and menus with a range of cuisines that reflect the rich cultural diversity of our school communities.

But focusing on food justice means taking it beyond affordable and accessible. Good food should be nutritious, delicious, local, and sustainable too. As a City Councilor, I worked with a big coalition to author and pass Boston’s Good Food Purchasing Ordinance, which requires any City spending on food to prioritize nutrition, local production, fair labor, animal welfare, environmental sustainability, and equitable purchasing. Now fully implemented and integrated with Boston Public Schools food purchasing contracts, Good Food Purchasing is delivering real impact this school year.

Visiting Eastie Farm at one of their summer opening events (via Eastie Farm)

This year’s BPS menus will include more than 20 local products grown in New England, representing more than 10% of our food budget as we move quickly to reach our goal of 30% local spend.

For these meals, all 353,875 pounds of apples served in BPS schools will be New England grown, from eight different farms or farm collectives. More than half of the 1,320,000 whole apples in school meals will come from Pine Hill Orchards in Colrain, Massachusetts, with the rest grown from JP Sullivan growers collective, Mountain Orchard, and Blue Hills Orchard. And another 1,875 pounds of sliced apples will come from Plain View Farm, Farm Fresh, Three River Farmers Alliance, and Lyman Orchards.

To meet federal school lunch standards, school districts must serve at least 3/4 cups of red or orange vegetables per week for elementary students and 1 1⁄4 cups for high schoolers. Many school districts meet the requirement with baby carrots (nearly all of which are processed in California). BPS will surpass this requirement with local butternut squash, local carrots and local grape tomatoes. Our 19,000 pounds of butternut squash (the weight of four elephants!) will come from Czajkowski Farm in Western Massachusetts.

Another required component is dark green vegetables, which many districts meet by serving romaine lettuce from Arizona or California. New this year, Boston will serve local broccoli (and exceed the requirement with local lettuce in our salad bars) in chicken and rice dishes, pasta dishes, in the salad bar, and as a side dish—grown by Circle B Farms in Caribou, Maine. That’s 1,577,880 servings of broccoli supporting local agriculture in New England!

Buying local means flexing our spending power to reshape food supply chains and strengthen farmers following healthy growing practices right in our region. Cutting down the shipping distance by buying local also attacks emissions from one of the most harmful industries for climate change.

Right now, 86 of our 125 BPS schools are cooking healthy and fresh meals from scratch, compared to just 30 schools cooking last year. By November, that number will be up to 108 schools as we ramp up staffing. The other schools that don’t yet have kitchens are served by our wonderful local food partner, a Black-owned, employee cooperative business based right in Roxbury, City Fresh Foods, who also provide the after-school snacks and other food options at some of the scratch-cooking schools as well. By keeping all our dollars as local as possible, we’re prioritizing nutrition, supporting our local economy, and building wealth directly in our communities.

Superintendent Skipper & I joined students to sample City Fresh’s delicious lunches (City of Boston Mayor’s Office Flickr)

Our office of food justice has an ambitious agenda to expand access, opportunity, and connection through food. We’ll keep growing these efforts throughout Boston, from neighborhood farmers markets and restaurants, to BPS schools and the local farms in our good food purchasing ecosystem.

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P.S. Welcome to our Kindergarten and Pre-K students and families arriving for their first day at BPS today! Here’s a fun news story showing some of our Countdown to Kindergarten programming, with a special big little visitor.

Little Amal joined our Countdown to Kindergarten in East Boston to welcome incoming kindergarteners and families (City of Boston Mayor’s Office Flickr)