Baltimore Goes Meatless on Mondays!

The city of Baltimore is taking significant steps towards local, sustainable and healthy school lunches. Tony Geraci, the system’s new director of food and nutrition, is working to get frozen, TV dinner-style meals out and fresh food in. Maryland grown fruits and vegetables are showing up in cafeterias,  and meat has been taken off the menu on Monday’s in all Baltimore public schools. Assistant White House chef Sam Kass and officials from the  U.S. Department of Education recently visited Hampstead Hill, a public charter school,  and were very impressed by what they saw (and ate)! Hopefully this will push them to get healthy, local food into all public schools in conjunction with the upcoming renewal of the Child Nutrition Act.

Local, Vegetarian Food Comes to City Schools

A minor revolution, in the form of cheese lasagna, had come to the cafeteria at Hampstead Hill Academy, but the struggle had only just begun.

Kitchen staff accustomed to heating pre-made meals had to wrestle with sticky pasta noodles, then brace for balky eaters on this, the first “Meatless Monday” for Hampstead Hill and other Baltimore public schools. On Mondays throughout the year, cafeteria menus will be all vegetarian – a first for city schools and, it’s believed, any large school system nationwide.

Meatless Mondays and the “assembly cooking” involved in putting together meals such as that lasagna are just two of the lunchtime innovations in city schools this year. Local produce is in, thanks to bid specifications calling exclusively for Maryland fruits and vegetables. Highly processed “pre-plate” meals and commodities from the U.S. government are on the way out.

“It’s … a work in progress and, yeah, we have glitches every day,” said Tony Geraci, the system’s director of food and nutrition. “But now it’s no longer a novelty. It’s an expectation.”

Geraci has larger ambitions. He has built a fleet of refrigerated trucks and plans a big central kitchen and even a fish farm at the district’s organic garden.

Read the full article here.