Giving Compass' Take:

• Korsha Wilson explains how school lunches are being used as an avenue for tackling wealth inequality through programs that engage small farmers.

• How can funders support mutually beneficial arrangements of this nature?

• Learn about a school lunch program that educates students about healthy food. 

Farm-to-institution organizations such as Farm to School are pursuing local, state and national policies that exploit the enormous buying power of institutions such as hospitals and schools to help redistribute some of the wealth concentrated in large, private food companies.

The hope is that this redistribution will create equity for farms owned by women and people of color, and provide more nourishing food choices in communities that historically have had limited options.

“With regional and local procurement, our core values are around small and medium farms, even though we realize that all kinds of agriculture have a place in our food system,” Joshi says.

The idea isn’t to do away with large farms entirely, but to shift demand so that small and medium farms have an equal role in feeding local institutions. Raway says, “We serve about 20,000 lunches a day across the districts I work with, and when we work with local farms we’re stimulating the local economy.”

On the surface it seems simple enough: Just connect local farms with schools, universities, and hospitals, right? But procurement and distribution of farm goods is a complex system with layers of policy, funding, and information—and reams of red tape.

“There’s a lot of underground scaffolding that keeps our food systems the way that they are,” says Beth Hopping, co-founder of Food Insight Group, an organization based in North Carolina that uses research to create community-based solutions to problems in the food systems.

It helps small- and medium-sized farms navigate some of that scaffolding. For farms to begin distributing to local institutions, for example, they have to be inspected by government agencies, develop a distribution system that is efficient and timely, and their produce has to be properly cleaned, stored and served at the institution according to government guidelines. All of this can be a strain on small- to medium-sized farms that don’t have the capital or labor to get it all done.

Read the full article about school lunches and wealth inequality by Korsha Wilson at YES! Magazine.