Colorado Proud School Meal Day is bringing agriculture to schools with its annual school meal day celebration on October 1. Preschoolers and K-12 students throughout the state learn about healthy eating and where their food comes from at events hosted by the Colorado Departments of Agriculture and Education.
“‘Colorado Proud School Meal Day puts a shining light on all of the local produce, animal protein and other products that are served in our schools,” said Danielle Trotta, Colorado Proud program manager. “We just really like to take the day to appreciate how the food got there, recognizing all our local agricultural producers, food manufacturers, our school nutritionist and school nutrition planners who help curate all the meals throughout the year.
This year, to celebrate, over 300 schools will incorporate locally grown and raised products into the lunches of 170,000 Colorado students. Schools collaborate with Colorado farms, food manufacturers and food hubs to provide students with these locally sourced lunches.
“Getting those local foods to our students is important because a lot of our students don’t know where their food comes from—it’s just not something that we stop and think about very often,” said Carlynn Fitzgerald, Aurora Public Schools Farm to School Project Lead. “It’s important information for our students to have so they can start making that connection between the food they pick up in the grocery store and how it got there.”
Aurora Public Schools will be serving its 60 schools a “Colorado Proud Taco” with locally raised beef and tortillas from Denver-based Raquelitas tortillas, served with a side of locally grown fruit and Colorado-grown refried beans. Throughout the month, they will be highlighting different local produce each week with fun facts and recipes to keep the agriculture conversation going.
“We get our pears from Fuller Orchards [Palisade, Co]; our watermelon is coming from Hoffman Farms [Greeley, Co], and our corn for Colorado Proud Day is from Tuxedo Corn in Olathe,” Fitzgerald said. “We reach out to the smaller farms, our partners at the food hub, the aggregators and produce distributors and really lean on them.”
Each participating school has its own approach to celebrating this fun agricultural day. Some schools will display agriculture commodity maps in the lunchroom, while others will hold agricultural activities in the classroom, go on field trips to farms and harvest produce from gardens to help students learn. Whatever way the schools choose to celebrate, the staff ensures that their students have a good time while learning.
“Our staff does a great job getting the kids excited,” Fitzgerald said. “They do get excited when they see the local produce and will talk about their food and say, ‘This was grown here in Colorado!’”
In April, the USDA Food and Nutrition Service announced updated school nutrition standards. The new standards reduce the amount of added sugars in school meals, offer healthy proteins at breakfast and emphasize fruits, vegetables and whole grains to provide a balance of nutrients.
Aurora Public Schools is bringing local products to their school lunches and plans to incorporate more local proteins as well as grains like quinoa to their menu. According to Trotta, schools are working with the Department of Education on a project to purchase local foods for their menus.
“We have a lot of recurring schools; there are some schools that really believe in promoting local foods in their nutrition menus and their school menus for the year,’ Trotta said. “It’s becoming an important part of what a school has to offer.”
A marketing program developed by the Department of Agriculture in 1999, Colorado Proud works to help consumers, restaurants and retailers identify and purchase Colorado food products. Its mission is to support the Colorado economy, including local farms and ranches. With this program, they hope to highlight what Colorado does well, the efforts being made to keep the industry sustainable, and the job opportunities available in the agricultural industry.
“Colorado is always very proud of everything that comes from its state,” Trotta said. “Colorado Proud in general, the program has always been really popular because that seems to be the ethos of the state—folks want to support locally as much as they can.”
Colorado Proud invites schools across the state to participate in School Meal Day and collaborate to provide locally grown and raised products in their students’ lunches.
“We want everyone to make sure they feel like they can be involved if they want to, no matter how small or big that is,” Trotta said. “Just the importance and excitement around what Colorado has to offer and also, are the students interested in a career down the road that might lead them to be in agricultural, food or food science and so it’s just a great day to share all those things.”