For the upcoming school year, HFI identified ingredients in existing menu items that could be purchased locally in order to secure the grant. Other than “tweaking” the choices — to take advantage of the different kinds of potatoes available from local farmers, for example — and upgrading the ingredients on the salad bars, the existing menus will remain intact. However, in future years, changes are planned to take better advantage of what is available locally.

“We're going to try to make the seasonality work for us,” Mattfield-Beman says. “This July, we'll begin menu planning for the 2010-11 school year and then we'll meet with farmers next January on planting schedules to minimize storage needs and maximize processing. A lot of this is simply working out the logistics.”

To prepare for the menu changes, HFI recently conducted a recipes-from-home contest for district children in which they submitted favorite meals from home (they had to be limited to eight ingredients including at least one main one that was Missouri-grown). The candidates were evaluated by representatives from Les Dames d'Escoffier, who pared the 50 submissions down to five.

Les Dames chefs then worked with students to prepare the recipes in volume. They were then taste-tested by district students. The top three will be on the menu this fall at all three school sites. The winners were a strawberry-spinach salad, a sweet potato casserole and sweet potato fries (baked in olive oil).

Mattfield-Beman says the program's biggest obstacle is the federal commodity program. “It's hard to compete with free,” she says. Nevertheless, she is optimistic that the initiative can establish a sustained, mutually beneficial connection between local growers and the schools “Our goal is to support the farmers, to let them know there's a solid support there so that more of them may be interested in establishing relationships with us.”