Bravo for PPS Local Lunch!

Did you hear about how PPS is evolving the Harvest of the Month program to Local Lunches? For this school year, the cafeterias of PPS will serve meals once a month that feature local products. Their definition of local includes Oregon, Washington and California (north of San Francisco). While I loved the idea of Harvest of the Month, with a kid who wasn't keen on produce, it was hard to support the program last year. This year, it should be an easy sell. Here's the schedule and menu  for Local Lunch:

• October 22: Cheese quesadilla featuring Tillamook cheese and Don Poncho tortillas
• November 19: BBQ Draper Valley Farms chicken
• January 8: Country Natural Beef cheeseburgers
• February 25: Truitt Brothers Chili
• March 18: Grilled cheese sandwiches featuring Tillamook cheese and Shepherd's grain flour
• April 23: Roadrunner pizza featuring Shepherd's grain flour
• May 27: Zenner's hot dogs and Kettle chips

We try to eat locally as much as possible, so I'm please by this improvement in school lunches (although I'll not that we pack cold lunch 90% of the time). In any case, I feel this is a step in the right direction, and will help guide the days we do buy hot lunch. Not only do Local Lunches support local food producers, we know where the food is coming from, it's high quality and yummy, and doesn't rack up excessive food miles.

What do you think about Local Lunches? Are you buying it?

Comments

[Zoe]

I think that's great but are they still serving the food on those styrofoam trays?

[Renee]

Zoe - I believe a handful of PPS schools bought durable trays. Here's a link about that:

http://www.enviromom.com/2008/02/hip-hip-hooray.html

I know the idea has been suggested at Mary Rieke to use non disposable trays, but like most projects, I imagine it will need someone to spearhead it, figure out how to pay for and clean the trays.