When Marissa Bell started working for the Lake Travis Independent School District in Austin, Texas in 2020, she didn’t know the food supply chain was about to be turned on its head. 

As the dietitian and marketing coordinator for Lake Travis ISD, Bell is responsible for ensuring students have medically and culturally appropriate foods to eat from the school cafeteria. This means ensuring meals are safe for students with allergies and dietary restrictions, as well as appropriate for students with religious and cultural restrictions on certain foods. 

While many of the pandemic supply issues have been resolved, there are still hiccups in the food chain. Lisa Quinn, director of child nutrition at Deshler High School in Tuscumbia, Alabama, says many schools are still dealing with this problem. 

“I may order wheat bread, but they ship us white bread or no bread at all,” she says. “That forces us to either change our menu or go to a local grocery store with a purchase order to get what we need to meet those government nutrition guidelines.” 

To deal with these ongoing challenges, Bell’s school district decided to join a local nonprofit called the Sustainable Food Center and the Good Food Purchasing Program, which allows smaller schools to join together, pooling their resources and purchasing power. 

Bell says the school’s big purchases can support the local economy, turning money that previously had been funneled to producers far away from Texas into fuel for the nearby community. 

“We’re spending lots and lots of money as a school district on food compared to a family that goes to the store. Schools have the opportunity to really use their big budgets for public good.”

While the benefits of buying local help school staff do their jobs better, there are also benefits for students. These benefits go far beyond putting calories in kids’ stomachs. 

“School food is a huge lever for change, because almost everyone goes to school. Our most vulnerable populations are funneled through the school district at some point, and it’s an opportunity to capture those students and make sure that they have the same access to healthy and good food that everyone else has access to. It’s really a foundation of health equity,” says Bell. 

She remembers an encounter with a student at the grocery store after one of the school’s regular fresh fruit and vegetable tasting days in the lunchroom. One of the vegetables offered for students to try was sugar snap peas. 

“I heard these little footsteps running up to me, and one little girl just jumped right in front of me, and she said, ‘I saw you today, and we were tasting fruits and vegetables and guess what? I’m here to buy sugar snap peas,” says Bell, describing a student interaction at the grocery store. “That was probably the most enlightening moment I’ve had in this role thus far. These kids, they go home and they bring it to their families, and it changes family dynamics. That’s the potential of this.”

While changing school food at Lake Travis has been beneficial for both students and the school, Bell says there’s a long way to go to making school lunch more sustainable and more nutritious. 

The regulatory barriers in place keep schools from being able to simply buy food from local farmers. For Lake Travis, this means buying food in collaboration with other local school districts. This way, schools can get bulk discounts on foods and ensure that the food they are buying meets regulatory standards. However, this method of purchasing limits the school’s options. 

“Larger school districts can specify things like a geographic preference, or somewhere within a certain mile radius, or they can ask for organic options. In our situation, if we’re the only school district asking for that option, and among 100 other school districts, that product is not going to make it on the bid,” says Bell. 

Looking forward, Bell says the school will continue to interact with community farmers about becoming school food suppliers and working with organizations such as the Good Food Purchasing program to meet those regulations. 

“We find that a lot of the local vendors also support these other values in the Good Food Purchasing program. And it’s easier to justify the local purchase because it’s an initiative of the government,” she says. “Until the system of purchasing changes, or until our regulations allow us to prioritize local purchases, it’ll be programs like Good Food Purchasing that’ll be really what helps us get it on the menu, but we still have a long, a long way to go.”

Quinn hopes to receive more funding to buy and prepare delicious homemade, healthy meals for students. She says she hopes Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s promise to “get processed food out of school lunch immediately” will lead to more funding for food and more employees in school lunchrooms. 

This school year, Quinn has challenged her staff to pitch one new homemade meal every week and to create a plan for how to prepare it for school lunch. 

“I have them tell me one meal every week, and then we decide who will be in charge of the meal,” says Quinn. “They tell me the ingredients they need to prepare it and I make sure those ingredients get purchased.”