Does the School Locavore Movement Make Life Difficult for Farmers?
Continued from here and here. Pt. 2: Insurance Policies – Even when cafeteria-service companies buy local, they often prefer the bigger farms I guess my interest in cafeteria sustainability and local food – particularly in Amherst – comes from the following: 1.) Aside from the supermarket, the cafeteria is the only venue where ‘going local’ is tested on a large scale. 2.) The Amherst farmers and community care about this stuff. Last year, food at Amherst Public Schools was served by the food services company Chartwells (which was the vendor for 40 Mass. school districts as of March, but was replaced at Amherst by Whitsons Food Service that same month), and Hampshire College contracted their cafeteria services out to Sodexo. While the Advocate reports this week on local produce in a school in Holyoke, whose food services are run by Chartwells, when I first started doing interviews, Mass. Farm to School’s Kelly Erwin said that Wellesley, ARPS and Hampshire were the only other schools in
