Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today we have an opportunity to sit down with Denise Tapley Proctor, the Food Service Director for RSU 89 in Stacyville, Maine, to talk about the positive impacts of their farm to school program on students and families and their award-winning scratch cooking, which recently received the 2024 USDA Innovation in Preparation of School Meals award. Welcome Denise, and congratulations on your award.

Denise: Thank you. It's fun to be here.

Denise: Okay. My name's Denise Tapley Proctor. I'm the Food Service Director at RS U 89, and we are connected through the Maine Farm and Sea to School Network. We were one of the original schools that was invited to join the Maine Farm and Sea to School Institute, which led us on this path towards the Healthy Meal Innovation grant and towards all of these recognition awards and all of our dealings with the local farmers. So we're really excited about this program.

Dinah: Before we jump into hearing about your work and program, how would you describe Farm to School to people who might not be familiar with the term?

Denise: Well, we're taking local farmer food and we are incorporating it in our school programs and advertising it to our community. So I feel like it helps out our local farmers and the revenue in the local area. Plus it also helps make our food more nutritious and healthy for our students. And it forms community bonds, which is very important when you're dealing with local schools and the community itself.

Dinah: And why do you think farm to school is so important?

Denise: I believe it's very important because local farming is our future and if we don't support all of their products and the infrastructure, then we might actually lose our farmers. So it's important to our students as well to show them what Maine farming is all about.

Dinah: So you recently won the 2024 USDA Innovation in Preparations of School Meals award. Can we talk about the scratch cooking you do and how do you make scratch cooking happen when you have so many students to feed and clearly such little time to prepare foods?

Denise: Yes. The Healthy Meal grant was very instrumental in us being able to do more scratch cooking. Part of the grant from the USDA was that we would be able to support a five hour position a day. So that helps us with doing the produce and actually doing more scratch cooking because we now have that extra individual that the school wouldn't have been able to provide us with. So that's really helpful and we really, really enjoy making all these new recipes for the kids. So, it's super fun. We do local Maine mashed potatoes, homemade gravy, homemade spaghetti sauce with local meat. Now we're doing our homemade french fries with the local potatoes as well, and we're doing roasted squash that went over really well in our community meal from Keep Ridge Farm. So we're just trying all kinds of new recipes for the kids.

Dinah: How do you come up with recipes and how do you ensure that students are going to enjoy what you serve? Do you do any kind of taste testing with students before an item appears on the menu?

Denise: Yes. We try to do at least one a month, and if it gets over a certain percentage, then we will tell the students that approval rating, that we will put it on the menu for next month. So they get really excited about it.

Dinah: Do you ever have any student or family input on the recipes that you're cooking up?

Denise: Yes, we do. We actually do a community meal once a year where we invite our local– this year we did also a local farmer flour expo in the cafeteria as well, so they could meet the local farmers and then they would come into our cafeteria and we would showcase all of the local products that we are using in our recipes. So we did a local meatball and local meat spaghetti sauce, and we did all of the salad bar items that we get from our farms. We had Salted Butter Farm come in, they’re a local restaurant, and we had them do a Maine blueberry cobbler for our desserts. So the adults all got to try it. And then we also do our annual Thanksgiving meal where we have the parents come in and sit with their students and tell it –when we show them what our next Thanksgiving meal is and they seem to really enjoy it and they give us feedback.

Dinah: Can you paint a picture of your community? How big is your district? What is the community like? How many students do you have?

Denise: Okay. So we typically have about 300 total give or take a bit all from preK right through to 12. So on each side there's about 150 students on each building, and the students are very, very enthusiastic. The parents do like to have a hand in everything, so it's nice. We have the community food pantry here as well, so they get to come over and do the food pantry with us. We're very rural, so there's a lot of local towns that are involved in our school district. We have, I would say a total of probably six to eight different towns that come here. We are literally outside of the Mount Katahdin region, so we are really close to Baxter State Park. We are closest to the northern most entrance for Baxter State Park and about 45 minutes away from the Canadian border.

Dinah: Do you procure a lot of the food from local farms? And do you have a lot of farms around you?

Denise: It was a little struggle to try to find the ones that were willing to help us with the procurement because a lot of them are on a smaller scale, but we've been really lucky. Part of working with the Maine Farm and Sea to School Institute– we were allotted a coach and it just happened one of the things that we wanted to do was to bring senior farm share back into our community because a lot of the seniors really liked the local food and the fresh produce, but they couldn't afford to travel 45 minutes to a local farm. So in part of that, G was our coach, and they hooked us up with the local farmers in the area. And that was also through our food core partner. So it was really like a community effort, but we ended up hooking up with Keep Ridge Farm who is in Benedicta.

So Liz, I'll email her, she will send me a list of what they have available, and then she will actually deliver it to the school. So that's amazing. So we have gotten kale, squash, beets, radishes, especially during salad bar season when it's all fresh mixed greens, she will give us that. And the kids do prefer it because as much as we order from Cisco and Dennis by the time it ends up coming in, it's kind of a rusty quality sometimes, which no one can blame. I mean, it moves so much through so many different transportations, but it's so nice that Liz will pick 'em fresh herself, wash 'em off in her kitchen and bring 'em over to me, and then we serve it on the line. And then we work with Chiron Farms who does the farm share for the seniors, and they're out of Chester Maine.

And we've tried lots of products from them, from their fresh maple sausages to their hams. They do a lot of nice stuff that way. And then in Island Falls is Hatches Custom Meats. So he's a local butcher that uses only local Maine farm meat. So we order from them a lot and it does make a difference. You can taste the difference in the meat and the kids, they're like, oh, this is the really good sauce. They can taste it. So that makes it helpful. But without the Farm and SeaTo School Network, I really don't believe we would've made the connections we did, which then led us to the Healthy Meal grant, which led us to more funding, which led us to the recognition awards. And then we also did a local training. It's called Let's Go Culinary Training by Maine Health. And they helped us with a lot of the recipes, the healthy school meal recipes.com. And now with the Healthy Meal grant, there's the Chef Ian Foundation, the Lunchbox. So we get all these nice recipes that we can try with our scratch cooking.

Dinah: Scratch cooking for hundreds of students must take a lot of time and energy. How do you plan for this? How do you keep everyone excited and morale going to put in this effort?

Denise: Yeah, it is a lot of effort, but what we usually do is- I am also the one that plans the menus. So what a lot of times what we do is– it's just a process of planning our week out. And I will jump in a lot of the times in the kitchen three days a week trying to help prepare and help with the produce. But if we can say we're planning a big meal on a Thursday, then we know the homemade rolls we could actually do the day before. If it's a pizza and salad bar day, the potatoes we can peel and have 'em ready to go in the steam oven. There's lots of things we can do to prep ahead. So that's usually what we do or make the dessert the day before. But as long as we plan, that's the key to everything I would say is plan. And if you're going to plan on a big day or two big days, then make it every other day is like a lighter day for them so they don't feel so pressured. It is a lot if you're peeling 150 pounds of potatoes, that in itself takes a while.

Dinah: So in addition to planning and having some vision forward, do you have any other advice for food service staff and educators in other schools or districts who might be interested in starting more scratch cooking?

Denise: Yeah, I would reach out to all of the great resources that are out there. The Institute of Child Nutrition is a great one, and they could show you different programs. Your farm to school networks are awesome. Food Corps is awesome as well. And Food Corps has that awesome program, which also helped us. They had let us use the Food Corp lady that we had for three years, but then they helped us implement a position which we have in the school now that's called the All About Food position. We're currently looking for someone, but the lady that we had in here was amazing. And she was originally from Food Corp, Ms. Gabrielle, and she would plan lessons around what we were cooking in the kitchen. So it was nice, the kids would learn education on what was happening in the kitchen and learn about the farming that was done, the Harvest of the Month club, and then she would help with the taste tests. So just use your resources and I would say start small and then just keep building because once you do it a couple times, then it becomes repetitive and then the next time you could push it a little more and a little more so that you add more and more every day and your cooks don't get overwhelmed that way, too.

Dinah: Do you have a school garden in any of your schools?

Denise: Yes, we do. Actually, we, it's on a smaller scale right now. We're hoping to expand that once we get the All About Food position filled because that person will be taking care of our garden. But we did do some amazing things with it, when Ms. Gabrielle was here. They grew the tomatoes out in the garden, and then the afterschool program made their own salsa and it went over so well, they asked us to make it in the kitchen, so they would pick the local garlic and the tomatoes out of their garden and bring it in, and then we would make it into a salsa. So the kids were super excited about that.

Dinah: And what's next for you after winning this 2024 big award? What comes next?

Denise: Well, as part of that, we get to fly to Las Vegas, me and another school partner, and we get to go out and learn more. A lot of the– I would recommend if you're a Food Service Director, go to the Farm and Sea to School Institute. If you can go to the trainings, go to all these workshops whenever you see one, because you make all these connections with people that you might not know a local farmer, but the district over might have somebody that you can use. Three of us went last year to the Let's Go Culinary Training by Maine Health and Let's Go. And this year three more went. So they got to experience working with Chef Sam and Chef Kathy and learn how easy it is to incorporate scratch cooking, incorporate scratch cooking, and it takes just as long to open those packages of pre-processed chicken as it does to open the raw chicken and put your spice blend on it, and cook it in the stove and it's healthier for the kids. I think it's pretty exciting when they're like, well, what is that? And they've never had meatloaf before or an actual barbecue rubbed chicken thigh instead of a chicken nugget. I think it's exciting for them to try that stuff.

Dinah: It sounds like your students are very fortunate to have your energy and passion and interest and engagement in farm to school. Is there anything that I didn't ask you that you would want to share?

Denise: I just think that everybody needs to realize how important food is to children. It can make or break their day, even. If they're hungry, they can't focus. And if you give them the proper vitamins and minerals with the fresher, more local food, then they're more apt to learn and have a better day overall. We had one little boy, he didn't, he's usually one that doesn't have a good day a lot, and he was super excited one day and he came to the school nurse and she's like, look at how you're smiling. And he's like, well, we had watermelon. Watermelon makes me think of summer and my family, so it makes me happy. Or if you know of local students that aren't getting food at home, you know when you give them the more local and fresh produce and products that they're getting the minerals they need even at school, even if they can't get it at home. And they get excited, I just love when they come through and they're like, this was the best lunch. Can you send my mom the recipe that makes us feel good, like we're doing something right.

Dinah: You absolutely are doing everything right. Thanks. I know that your time is busy. Thanks so much for coming and sharing and doing the work that you're doing.

Denise: Anytime.

Dinah: This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to Northeast Farm to school.org.