Kent School District Nutrition Services will celebrate the National School Breakfast Week with fresh, healthy breakfast items featuring Washington grown blueberries and apples from local farms.
School cafeterias across the country will celebrate National School Breakfast Week and Kent School District is joining the national celebration by expanding their Farm to School effort into breakfast.
On March 5, during breakfast students at Emerald Park, Horizon, and Martin Sortun Elementary Schools sampled a potential new breakfast recipe “Golden Muffin with Apple & Oat” made with fresh apples from Okanogan & Chelan Counties. Today, the district will serve pancakes with blueberry sauce made with blueberries grown in Rochester.
Kent School District serves approximately 4,000 breakfasts every school day across the district’s 40 schools.
With support from Communities Putting Prevention to Work (CPPW), the federal stimulus grants that Public Health – Seattle & King County received from Department of Health and Human Services in 2010 to promote Healthy Eating and Active Living, students in the Kent School District have the opportunity to eat more locally grown fruits and vegetables featured on the district’s menu. With CPPW funding, Kent School District is developing a Farm to School Model Program working with the Washington State Department of Agriculture.
Since the beginning of the grant, KSD’s Nutrition Services Department has developed relationships with several Washington farms and purchased over $30,000 of Washington-grown produce, including varieties of apples, pears, Asian pears, and plums for lunches. KSD has also been serving varieties of fruits and vegetables for the Fresh Fruits and Vegetable Program including different varieties of apples, beets, kiwiberries, nectarines, peaches, peppers, rainbow carrots, sunchokes, and Hubbard squash.
Farm to School is not just produce – all the milk in district breakfasts and lunches are from local dairy, Smith Brothers Farms, based in the Kent Valley; and breads are made with wheat grown and milled in Washington.
For more information, visit www.kent.k12.wa.us/.
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