by Bjorn Bergman, Americorp Farm to School Member
Viroqua Area Schools Farm to School Program
The Viroqua Area Schools Farm to School Program has been very 
busy! Local veggies like beauty heart radishes, sweet potatoes, beets, spinach, and asparagus were featured in the cafeterias for Harvest of the Month Tastings. Also, the Vernon Area AmeriCorps Farm to School member taught numerous classroom lessons about various topics like local root vegetables, maple syruping, new fruit and vegetable tastings, wild rice harvesting in Wisconsin, and vermicomposting. Interested in getting involved with the program? Contact Marilyn Volden, Viroqua Area Schools Food Service Supervisor.
5th Season Training- August 24th, 2010
On August 24 from 8:45am to 3:30pm, Viroqua Area Schools is hosting a 5th Season Program Training for food service workers from Wisconsin, Minnesota and Iowa to learn about their local foods purchasing and processing program. The training features Chef Monique Hooker, Marilyn Volden, Food Service Supervisor for Viroqua Area Schools and Bjorn Bergman, the Vernon Area AmeriCorps Farm to School Member. The training includes sessions on local produce purchasing, processing equipment, roasting, freezing and storing, menu and recipe ideas for using local produce, and Farm to School activities ideas for introducing the new foods to students. It will be held in the Viroqua HS Cafeteria; the cost is $25 per person (includes materials and lunch). Limited space is available. Contact Marilyn Volden for more information or to register at mlvolden@viroqua.k12.wi.us or (608) 637-1645.
The 2nd Annual Harvest Challenge
The Harvest Challenge is a menu planning and cooking contest for Vernon County high school students highlighting the benefits of including fresh and nutritious local foods in school lunch programs. For the contest, each team is paired up with a chef mentor who advises them as they design a school meal that meets the National School Lunch Program nutrition guidelines, includes locally produced foods, and, most importantly, tastes great. On October 15th, 2010, teams will prepare and serve their meals for a judging panel, students and community members at the Harvest Challenge Tasting Gala in the Viroqua High School Cafeteria. As of early June, the Challenge will feature a team of students from Viroqua, Laurel, Westby, De Soto, and Hillsboro High Schools. Interested in being on the planning committee or volunteering the night of the event? Please contact Marilyn Volden, Viroqua Area Schools Food Service Supervisor at mlvolden@viroqua.k12.wi.us or (608) 637-1645.
Westby Area School District Farm to School Program
The 2009-2010 School Year has been a great year for Westby Area School District Farm to School Program. In the Fall of 2009, the Westby food service purchased hundreds of pounds of produce (potatoes, tomatoes, sweet corn, winter squash, green beans, cucumbers) from Sun Valley Gardens in Cashton and served them in the school lunches. Also, throughout the spring they featured Harvest of the Month cafeteria tastings of a variety of local vegetables, like roasted beets (Keewaydin Family Farms), creamy spinach dip (Snow Goose Farm) and asparagus (Slattery Family Farm). The local veggies in the cafeteria are a huge hit!
A group of parents is currently working on starting a school garden at Westby Elementary in the spring of 2011. The program is seeking more volunteers to help out with projects for next year. Interested parents or community members should contact Nicole Jones, the Westby School District Food Service Supervisor at jonesnic@westby.k12.wi.us or (608) 637-0180.
Westby School District students sampled Creamy Spinach Dip as part of the Farm to School Harvest of the Month taste testing. The spinach was grown and donated by a local farmer and prepared in the school kitchen.
Viroqua Middle School 5th Grade Garden hosted an open house on May 28th. The garden exists to connect children with fresh, healthy, home-grown food, teaching the “garden-to-table” cycle and is part of Mrs. Berg’s 5th grade curriculum in science and language arts.
5th Season Program Expansion
In late August of 2008 and 2009, Viroqua Area Schools purchased around 1000 pounds of local produce from area farmers (Organic Valley, Keewaydin Farms, and Ridgeland Harvest) and processed it into a variety of products for the school lunches, including Ratatouille (a roasted vegetable dish) for pizza, calzones, wraps and grated carrots and zucchini for Harvest Muffins. This August, the program plans to process more produce for Ratatouille and muffins, while expanding on their program to include a couple new foods that are currently under development.
The Crawford County Farm to School program is just finishing a 
second successful school year with some significant
accomplishments. Food service directors and staff, teachers and parents expanded the program at the Seneca Wauzeka-Steuben and Prairie du Chien School Districts this year with the help of AmeriCorps members, Kathleen Hein and Marty Green.
The Farm to School program “nourishes kids and communities” by exposing them to fresh, local food through some or all of the following activities: local foods used in cafeteria lunches, a healthy snack program, a “Harvest of the Month” program that allows students to taste local products and fun hands-on classroom lessons with a local farmer or community member, farm field trips and school gardens.
Donna Heilmann, the food service director for the Prairie du Chien school district, says the students eat more fruits and vegetables during lunch since the program began. This is largely due to her healthy snack program in which she serves a fresh snack such as carrots, broccoli, or fruit, to the students at B.A. Kennedy Elementary School twice each week. Students enjoy the fresh fruits and vegetables so much that for the last day of school, Donna served fresh local salad greens and strawberries in place of potato chips.
Students in Wauzeka praise Monica Krachey, their food service director, for the creative variety of foods she serves. Monica often incorporates foods featured in the “Harvest of the Month” program into her menus. For example, last October she featured a different local product each week. On Halloween, Monica baked pumpkin soup and served it directly from a hollowed pumpkin.
Seneca started their Farm to School program this past year with Harvests of the Month and a new school garden. Former Seneca graduate, Roger Reynolds, helped the students build a “lasagna” garden that incorporates layers of hay and cardboard. This gardening method cuts down on weeding and watering time during the summer. Next fall, the students will eat fresh vegetables from their garden in school lunches.
The program exposes students to healthy local foods as well as connecting them to the community. For example, radishes were the “Harvest of the Month” in May. Local farmers Carolyn and Brian Austin of Rush Creek Farm outside of Rising Sun, brought radish samples to the children and talked about their farm. That next Saturday at the new Prairie Street Farmers Market in Prairie du Chien, a handful of students brought their parents to buy radishes from the Austins.
The momentum and excitement around the Farm to School program
has been substantial. The Crawford County Farm to School program was awarded the “Standing up for Rural Wisconsin” award from the State Superintendent in February. The program was also one of three national Farm to School programs featured at the National Food Corps Summit in Detroit following the National Farm to School Conference in May.
For more information about the Crawford County Farm to School Program, contact Kathleen Hein at kdhein@mchsi.com.
by Bjorn Bergman,
Vernon Area AmeriCorp Farm to School Member
What are your thoughts when someone says the words ‘school 
lunch?’ Chicken nuggets, french fries, over-cooked veggies? What happens when you give students the challenge of designing and preparing a healthy school lunch? This is what a national competition called Cooking Up Change 2010 asked students from around the nation to do, and a team of local students from Laurel High School rose to the challenge. They designed a healthy meal that not only tasted great, but propelled the team to the final round of Cooking Up Change 2010 in Detroit, MI this past May.
Cooking Up Change 2010 is a national healthy school lunch cooking competition put on by the non-profit Healthy Schools Campaign from Chicago. For the competition, student teams go through a rigorous process of designing a school lunch that uses ingredients from a list of foods commonly available to food service programs, uses at least one local food (within 250 miles of the teams home town), meets nutritional guidelines based on recommendations from the National Institute of Medicine, and, most importantly, tastes great. 
Soon after learning about Cooking Up Change 2010 in early March, I approached students that had participated in The Harvest Challenge, our local healthy school lunch cooking competition about entering. Dylan Bruce, Kateri Burton, and Anders Lewis from the winning Laurel High School Harvest Challenge team were excited for the opportunity to be on a team for Cooking Up Change 2010. I paired the team up with local chef Frank Wildingway to provide culinary guidance and inspiration.
After a few meetings and a very successful cooking trial, the team had developed a beautiful school lunch menu consisting of a rice pilaf with tons of veggies and chicken, a spinach salad with roasted tomatoes, pinto beans, shredded carrots and raisins, and a mouth watering peach cobbler. In late March, the team submitted their entry for the first round of the competition to a judging panel of culinary experts in Chicago and we all crossed our fingers.
The competition features two tiers: a qualifying round and the finals. The qualifying round consists of teams developing and nutritionally analyzing recipes and them submitting them, along with a nutritional report on their meal, a series of supplementary questions and photos documenting the whole process.
The panel of judges combs through the submitted documents from each team and rates them with specific judging criteria such as: According to the team’s analysis, does the meal meet the nutritional guidelines? Do the ingredients complement each other? Does the recipe show creativity through the combination of ingredients, cooking process, etc.? From the qualifying round, the top three entries would be chosen to prepare and serve their meal for a prestigious panel of judges at the Cooking Up Change 2010 finals in Detroit, Michigan on May 17th, 2010.
Two weeks after the team submitted all the competition paperwork, I received a call from Healthy Schools Campaign – our Laurel High School team had been selected as one of three in the nation as a finalist for Cooking Up Change 2010. We were going to Detroit in May! Hooray!
Fast forward to Monday, May 17th. The previous day the students 
and I flew into Detroit and now were at breakfast with Monique Hooker, a local chef from DeSoto and Farm to School volunteer extraordinaire. The team was nervous yet excited to get in the kitchen. Soon we were on a shuttle over to Southeastern High School in Detroit for the competition.
After going over the kitchen space with the contest organizers, the team jumped right in and began preparing their meal. Each student tackled one of the dishes. Kateri masterfully put together the peach cobbler, Anders whipped up the spinach salad and Dylan sliced, diced and cooked for a good hour before he completed the delicious rice pilaf.
While the team was working their magic, the two other finalist teams were also preparing their meals in the same kitchen. The St. Paul Community Design Center Culinary Crew from Minnesota prepared a meal of crunchy pesto chicken, polenta pizza, and Minnesota Slaw, while the Tohono O’odham Community Action Cooking Club from the Tohono O’Odham Native American reservation in southern Arizona prepared a delicious meal of tepary bean quesadillas, Baby Spinach and pear salad with carrot vinaigrette, and yogurt peanut butter dip.
After two hours of cooking in the hot and cramped high school kitchen, it was time for the teams to present their meals to the judges. The Laurel team plated up tasting portions of their lunch and served them to a prestigious panel of 21 judges, including Karen Duncan, wife of U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan and Christie Vilsack, wife of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack. The food looked and tasted great and the judges were clearly very impressed.
After all the teams presented their meals to the judges, they gathered in the kitchen and shared their leftovers with each other. The food and the company was fantastic. I was extremely impressed with the lunches that these talented high-schoolers had prepared.
After about an hour, the students left to relax back at the hotel for a few hours. But on everyone’s mind was the announcement of the winning team and school lunch the following morning.
The next morning during the opening plenary of the 5th National 
Farm to Cafeteria Conference, the students from all the teams gathered at one table at the front of the ballroom hall to eat breakfast and await the results of Cooking up Change 2010. Rochelle Davis, executive director of Healthy Schools Campaign was joined by Margie Saidel, from Chartwells-Thompson Hospitality and Chris Ely, from Applegate Farms to announce which team had prepared the winning school lunch. And the winner is... Tohono O’odhan Community Action Cooking Club!
While the Laurel High School team did not take home the top honors, each student from the team received a cookware set from T-fal and many accolades from conference attendees, including Ann Cooper, the Renegade Lunch Lady.
Later that afternoon, the conference lunch featured one item from each team’s meal that made it into the final round of Cooking Up Change 2010. The Laurel Team’s peach cobbler was served to all in attendance and it was a huge hit. During the lunch the team spoke in front of all the conference attendees (over 700 people) about their meal. It was really a powerful and amazing experience.
I am so proud of Anders, Kateri and Dylan for taking on a direct role in what is fed to them in their cafeteria and to others around the nation by getting involved in healthy cooking competitions like Cooking Up Change. It is so powerful to see them having an effect on school lunch reform at the local and national level.
A special thanks goes out to the team’s sponsors, Viroqua Food Co-op and Organic Valley. We couldn’t have made this happen without them. The team would also like to send out a big thank you to Frank Wildingway and Monique Hooker for culinary guidance and Bev Buss for embroidering the team’s chef whites.
For more info on the competition visit the following websites:
http://healthyschoolscampaign.org/event/cookingupchange/2010/welcome.php
http://healthyschoolscampaign.typepad.com/healthy_schools_campaign/2010/05/qa-with-cooking-up-change-national-finalists-laurel.html