The webinar, Incorporating Traditional Foods in Child Nutrition Program Menus, from April 2016 discusses practices for incorporating traditional foods into child nutrition programs. Traditional foods were defined by Alaska State Director of Child Nutrition Programs, Jo Dawson, as food that have traditionally been prepared and consumed by an Indian tribe. Today, if there is a way to save money, we typically lean in that direction. MPRO Farm to School Lead, Bob Gorman pushed that instead of paying to have food prepared and shipped to schools, local farming and hunting groups are great ways to save money. Gorman continued by giving an Alaskan traditional meal, but surprisingly enough his other example of a traditional meal was from Georgia. This included local chicken, egg corn squash, corn bean soup, a roll, and some lettuce and looked a lot better than I remember my options being in grade school.
Jo Dawson helped start “Let’s Eat More of Alaska’s Traditional Foods!” This project was funded by the US Department of Health and Human Services and pushed to keep Alaskans healthy by sharing local hunted and gathered foods to food service programs, senior meals, food banks, schools, and hospitals. Their flyer was easy to understand and clearly displays what is acceptable and unacceptable to donate.
“Fish for Kids” gave local commercial fisherman the opportunity to participate in a monthly donation day, since 2007 has averaged 12,000 pounds of fish per year. They are able to build community pride by eating the donated fish once per week with their children at school and even share with a senior center another school district. Dawson noted that many districts in Alaska have partnerships with local fish processing plants. State and Federal Regulations and supply were the top two barriers for incorporating traditional foods in schools.
Nutritionist, Jenny Montague, gave the presentation with the most takeaways for those not living in Alaska. She highlighted techniques for food substitutions, including growing traditional food, and using traditional ingredients and recipes. Another substitution technique was by meal component, which focused on finding alternative sources of protein, grains, fruit, vegetable, and carb/starch and then from those five categories, individually looking to find healthier, locally available options that could be substituted in. This approach is easily adaptable for any state/district.
The climate, region, and weather all play a role, but many schools can grow and cook local, traditional options that they can eat. Doing so will help save money, but can also bring the community closer together and allow students to work and learn about this field. Grants, partnerships, or funds of any kind certainly help these kinds of projects because startup resources or donations are necessary. With all of the agriculture and farming in the state of Georgia, I am sure that many districts have local partnerships to help incorporate healthy, traditional foods in our school lunches.
It would be interesting to see how most schools could incorporate this since most of the traditional foods from the “Let’s Eat More of Alaska’s Traditional Foods!” were procured from donations. I can’t imagine many schools can receive enough from donations to provide native foods, especially since they are usually much more expensive. It would also be interesting to see if, instead of donations, native tribes could be paid for the food they produce. Many tribes in America face high rates of poverty and unemployment, so it’s possible this could become a program to not only provide traditional foods to schools but provide assistance to native tribes.