Better Grains for Growing Brains
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.
Photo by Matt Maenpaa, Grain School in the Field
May 15th, 2024
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. I often ate a bag of chips and a soda for lunch. 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, Colorado, and I have been baking professionally for over a decade and not once did I ever think about where the flour was coming from until we became vendors in our local farmer’s market. I was seeing all of 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. Throughout this journey, I also began 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, 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 participating in growing and harvesting food in school gardens as well as consuming fresh, locally grown produce. Chef Taylor of Nourish Colorado explains the change and success they’ve seen in their program:
Thankfully, change is already happening. Programs like Nourish Colorado, Farm to School, 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 participating in growing and harvesting food in school gardens as well as consuming fresh, locally grown produce. Chef Taylor of Nourish Colorado explains the change and success they’ve seen in their program:
“Our work started back in 2009 with the School Food Initiative where we partnered with over 60% of the school districts in our state through 2017. This work focused on increasing scratch-made meals and the usage of fresh fruits and vegetables. We launched LoProCO (Local Procurement CO) in 2018 with a goal to make farm to institution the norm in our State. Since then we have directly supported School Food Authorities across Colorado with their farm to school programs by providing support with menu planning, recipe development, marketing, procurement support, culinary skills and so much more. We also support our agricultural producers with connections, navigating school market channels, and growing their ability to enter those market channels. While our primary area of focus is in the K12 space, we also support Early Care and Older Adult Meal Programs with building their farm to institution models.
Our institutions have incredible buying power – allocating many millions of taxpayer dollars each year to purchase food – and can be drivers for positive change when it comes to creating a true food value chain by changing the food system from the institutional kitchen out!”
Dry Storage, a mill and bakery in Boulder, is on a mission to get local grains into schools. Nina Sohn of Dry Storage, kindly shared some insight into their initiative:
“Dry Storage contracts with local Colorado farmers to plant heirloom wheat seeds, which we provide. We chose varietals that historically do well in our climate, and work with farmers who grow regeneratively (with a focus on soil health).
We pay the farmers a premium such that it is worth using their acreage for our wheat versus growing a different crop.
The wheat is harvested, cleaned, and then milled at our small facility in Boulder. We utilize a slow, cold milling process, which preserves the original nutrition in the grain (this is how we can have such fine, soft flour that is still whole wheat). Traditional mills use high pressure and high heat to mill large volumes very quickly. This process strips the grains, which is why so many flours and bread products are ‘enriched’ - meaning additives are placed back in post milling to attempt to recreate the nutritional value that was compromised in the milling process.
As a result of the grain varietals chosen and our milling process, our flour has a much higher protein content and much lower gluten levels than traditional flours.
And - of course - the taste difference is tremendous!”
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! Chef Taylor recommends checking out the Nourish Colorado Guidebook for tons of information and resources. You can also become an advocate through Hunger Free Colorado and help impact communities and our state government: Support Healthy School Meals for All | Hunger Free Colorado. Farm to School is also a great place to start: Get Involved.
Nanna Meyer, owner of the grain-focused Pueblo Food and Seed Co. in Cortez, also teaches Grain School through UCCS, a course available to university students as well as community members (I’m currently enrolled!). She is tirelessly striving to educate people about the importance of local grains. The Good Food Collective in Durango is also a wonderful resource for information and education: Nonprofit Organization | The Good Food Collective | United States.
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.