We send our children to school to learn. To learn mathematics, language arts, history and geography. But what about food? If you ask me, teaching children about nutrition and how food is grown is just as essential as learning to read.
When I was a kid growing up on the Front Range, our school lunches consisted of sad burgers and floppy pizza. As I moved into middle and high school, the choices were broader but certainly not better. It wasn’t until I was a young adult attending a nutrition class in culinary school that I learned anything about nutrition. And it wasn’t until two years ago that I really started learning about local grains.
I am a bakery owner in Durango, and I have been baking professionally for more than a decade, and not once did I ever think about where the flour was coming from until we became vendors in our local farmers market. I was seeing all this beautiful produce and incorporating it into my pastries, and I began thinking about the flour we were using. As a pastry chef, I’ve naturally been drawn to alternative flours over the years – buckwheat, rye, almond flour and others – for the sake of variety in my creations. Every Saturday I was having conversations with folks about these other types of flours, and I kept thinking about people who say they can eat bread and pastries in Europe but cannot eat the same foods here in the United States. My mind started reeling, thinking about what we’re doing wrong with our wheat in the U.S. I began researching, which opened the door to a whole history of flour and grains that I never knew about (glyphosate, yikes!).
I enrolled in Grain School with Dr. Nanna Meyer and haven’t been able to look at flour the same since. She has packed my brain with so much information about grains. I also recently became a business member of the Colorado Grain Chain, a nonprofit dedicated to cultivating a community centered grain economy of Colorado. Throughout this journey, I have been connecting with other bakeries and trying to learn how to source more local grain. This has been a big hurdle. My bakery is also very small and maintaining approachable pricing while incorporating better and more expensive grains has also been a major challenge.
This whole journey has ignited a fire in me to be a bigger part of the changing landscape of food education, and I believe that it needs to begin with the people who will be able to make the biggest impact on the future – our children.
Thankfully, change is already happening. Programs like Nourish Colorado, Farm to School, Dry Storage and Hunger Free Colorado are working hard to incorporate more local foods in our school systems. Children attending these programs are becoming educated about their food, often participate in growing and harvesting food in school gardens as well as consuming fresh, locally grown produce.
What can we do to help get more local grains into schools? The best place to begin is to educate yourself as well as your children. Becoming a member of the Colorado Grain Chain has helped me learn so much about Colorado grains and the people and businesses behind this cause.
There is so much good work being done and the ripple effects are resounding – from the children to the farmers to the communities. Let’s all do what we can to continue these efforts and support in any way that we can.
