Students at schools across the Thompson School District will be eating pulled pork tacos and fresh fruits and vegetables grown and raised organically from nearby farms this Wednesday.
While serving locally grown food is not new for the district as production chef Sarah Tomsic orders as much locally as she can, this is the first time Thompson will serve a full meal sourced from nearby farms, for Colorado Proud School Meal Day.
“We really want to share the word with our students that people in the community grow food, and it’s really delicious,” said Tomsic. “When it comes to you and doesn’t have to go as far in a truck, it is fresher and has more nutrients. It’s less of a footprint, and we’re supporting the local economy.”
The Colorado Departments of Agriculture and Education encourage school districts across the state to participate and to teach students about healthy eating.
Much of the produce that will be featured in Thompson’s salad bars on Wednesday is from Hoffman Farms in Greeley — a family farm that has a “Farm to School” program specifically with the goal of getting local, healthy produce into meals at school districts and universities in the region.
For the Wednesday meal, the Thompson school district ordered 200 pounds of cherry tomatoes, 200 pounds of multi-colored peppers, 50 pounds of beets, 1,000 pounds of watermelon and 1,000 pounds of honeydew melons from Hoffman Farms. Production staff are working this week to chop and prepare those fruits and vegetables for salad bars at all 30 schools in the Thompson School District.
“When I was in school, we didn’t have salad bars for lunch,” said Derrick Hoffman, who farms with his wife, Hanmei, and is providing the bulk of the produce for the salad bar on Wednesday. “Seeing that improved school lunch, I’m excited to be part of that. It’s cool.”
Students also will be served about 850 pounds, 34 cases, of peaches from Wacky Apple, a farm in Hotchkiss, a small town east of Grand Junction.
For the main dish, the district ordered 2,000 pounds of pork from Field to Front Door, a farm in Berthoud that specializes in healthy, quality food and ethical farming, according to its website. They offer meat deliveries throughout the region with a “vision to be known as a team that connects our community to healthy food,” the website states.
Over the past week, staff in the Thompson School District’s three production kitchens have been slow-roasting the pork, which will be shredded and made into tacos. All of the meals for the district’s 30 schools are made in three production kitchens, which prepare meals for about a third of the schools.
They are flavoring the pork with green chili and spices, and it will be served with cilantro-lime slaw, also locally sourced.
“We’re just kind of slow-roasting it, so it’s falling off the bone,” said Jennifer Gavin, production lead in the kitchen at Bill Reed Middle School. All students will have the option for the locally produced meal, and everything on the salad bar will be from Colorado farms.
“All of this produce is organically grown,” said Tomsic.
Gavin added, “And we’re supporting our local farmers.”
Providing produce to schools helps them educate students about locally sourced food, but it also helps the farmers.
For the Hoffmans, who grow more than 60 varieties, it what Derrick Hoffman described as “an untapped market.” They deliver local produce to school districts throughout the three-month growing season, though this week was the biggest delivery yet to Thompson.
Hoffman grew up in a farming family in the Loveland-Johnstown area before going into the information technology field, where he worked for 18 years for the Thompson School District before returning to farming. Reconnecting with the district as a farmer has been a positive experience, he said.
And for the students, it is, according to Tomsic and Hoffman, a chance to learn what grows locally and a tasty experience.
“When you do eat local, there’s an improvement in flavor,” Hoffman said, noting that produce traveling longer distances is picked greener for the travel time. “Being so close and local, there’s an improvement in flavor.”
