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“You can’t manage with your heart”: risk and responsibility in farm to school food safety

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Abstract

Farm to School (FTS) programs aim to connect school children with local foods, to promote a synergistic relationship between local farmers, child nutrition and education goals, and community development. Drawing from 18 months of ethnographic research with a regional FTS project and interviews with child nutrition program operators (POs) implementing FTS across Georgia, we identify perceptions of food safety as an emerging barrier in efforts to bring local foods into schools. Conducting a thematic analysis of data related to food safety, we find that FTS participation may be hindered by discourses and perceptions of safety risks attributed to local foods—and to local produce in particular. We argue that this results, paradoxically, from a core tenant of FTS and other local food movements: forging personal relationships with farmers, through which POs confront the transparency of local food production, in contrast to the opacity of food procured through standard supply chains. Faced with unfamiliar production practices, and responsibilized to protect students as “at risk” subjects, POs may decide that buying local food is “not worth the risk.”

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Notes

  1. The names of informants and farms are pseudonyms.

  2. The United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service administers a wide range of child nutrition programs—from its flagship National School Lunch Program to others providing breakfast, milk, and fresh fruits and vegetables in schools, as well as summer food and other feeding programs for young children, older adults, and disabled persons. Although there are efforts to bring local foods into each of these programs, this article focuses specifically on programs bringing food into school-based nutrition programs, and especially into school lunch, where the bulk of these efforts have been concentrated (USDA 2015a).

  3. Like FTS programs of today, from the beginning the National School Lunch Program has sought to serve a number of disparate interests with a single program: to provide markets for US commodity agriculture and improve child health and nutrition, whereby strengthening national security (Levine 2008).

  4. Moore (2012) has suggested that schools keep these potential liabilities in mind when designing FTS programs, and consider having parents sign specific waivers before their children are allowed to participate.

  5. In fact, this relationship, illustrating the development of shared values and the mobilization of social capital, was at the center of the authors’ presentation at the 2014 Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association.

  6. A number of POs also voiced concern about the risk of using food from school gardens; however, an examination of this is beyond the scope of the current article.

  7. In the introduction to her comparison of food safety hazards in store-bought leafy greens grown in different systems, Barnhart et al. (2015, p. 2) suggests that intact roots present a potential food safety hazard; however, based on her data she concludes that “the presence of an attached root [across growing systems] was found to have no correlation with contamination potential at grocery stores in all tests.”

Abbreviations

GAP:

Good agricultural practices

FSMA:

Food Safety Modernization Act

FTS:

Farm to School

PO:

Program operator

USDA:

United States Department of Agriculture

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Acknowledgements

A Summer Research Grant from the University of Georgia, College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, supported this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Crop and Soil Sciences, University of Georgia, 3111 Miller Plant Sciences Building, Athens, GA, 30602-7272, USA

    Jennifer Jo Thompson & A. June Brawner

  2. Division of Biological Sciences, University of Georgia, 400 Biosciences Building, Athens, GA, 30602-2607, USA

    Usha Kaila

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  1. Jennifer Jo Thompson
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Correspondence to Jennifer Jo Thompson.

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Thompson, J.J., Brawner, A.J. & Kaila, U. “You can’t manage with your heart”: risk and responsibility in farm to school food safety. Agric Hum Values 34, 683–699 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10460-016-9766-4

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