Live Oak School District’s farm-to-cafeteria nutrition program gets students involved and eating healthier

For many Americans, school lunch conjures memories of sloppy Joes and individually wrapped and reheated burritos. But in Live Oak School District in Santa Cruz County, things look a little different: think organic kale pesto pasta, grass-fed burgers and organic heirloom apples from the local farmers market. 

For the past two years, a team of 20 educators, dietitians and students, headquartered at the district’s central kitchen at Del Mar Elementary School in Live Oak, has worked to create a more nutritious meal program for more than a thousand elementary, middle and high school students at all six schools in its district, plus two nearby schools that purchase their meals from LOSD. To do that, they developed relationships with local farmers market organizers in order to incorporate seasonal produce into the menu, and to turn those ingredients into from-scratch foods with the help of the students themselves. 

This unconventional program is spearheaded by Kelsey Perusse, a registered dietitian and director of child nutrition for the district, and Sanra Ritten, the district’s child nutrition manager, who manages the central kitchen that produces all of the meals for its schools. The goal, they say, isn’t just to create a healthier breakfast or lunch; they want to educate students about how their food is grown, how it gets from the garden or farm to the kitchen, and how it can be prepared. 

“We’re focusing on slowly building a program where we integrate nutrition education, culinary education and [agriculture] education, and just trying to serve really, really good food to kids,” says Perusse.

After completing medical school to become a dietitian and nutritionist, Perusse went to culinary school at the Natural Gourmet Institute in New York in order to understand the science behind food and how to create meals that supported health. She, Ritten and another school dietitian, Juliette Siu, all started working at LOSD within a week of each other in 2021. Together, they have built on the district’s reputation for scratch cooking and have created a collaborative environment with one overarching goal: feeding kids well. 

“We’re trying to raise healthy eaters. By doing this work, my goal is to change the health of a community and make kids feel nourished, feel well and feel like they’re set up for success for learning,” says Perusse. 

LOSD is currently mired in a budget crisis that has resulted in a long list of dramatic cuts, including the layoff of seven elementary school teachers, a school psychologist and one full-time special education instructional aide, as well as recess coaches and instructional aides for reading and math. But the funds for the nutrition program comes from a different budget, and will not be affected by the crisis; likewise, funds from the nutrition program cannot be drawn to support other budgets within the district. 

“The Child Nutrition Services department, in every district across the country, is in a different fund,” explains Perusse. “The money in our fund is protected, and it’s only here to serve up the kids.” 

Schools throughout the county have made strides toward more nutritious school lunches, thanks in part to a groundbreaking statewide Universal Meals Program. The program launched during the 2022-23 school year and requires schools to offer a “nutritiously adequate” breakfast and lunch to all students for free. If the schools meet the state’s nutritional standards, it reimburses the schools for each meal. California gives a higher reimbursement than the federal government, and the state’s reimbursement alone allows LOSD to purchase more farm-to-school produce. “The more kids who love to eat our food, the more reimbursement we get, which makes our labor more cost-effective,” says Perusse. 

But Live Oak School District has been able to reach its goals faster, says Perusse, because of Ritten’s background working in farm education. 

Ritten comes from a culinary family. She’s married to chef Diego Felix of Fonda Felix and Colectivo Felix, and moved to Santa Cruz County to help her sister, Linda Ritten, and brother-in-law, chef Brad Briske, establish Home restaurant in Soquel. Before Ritten came to LOSD, she worked for The Abundant Table in Ventura and Pie Ranch in Pescadero, two farm education organizations that had strong connections with schools. 

“I got very interested in the procurement angle,” says Ritten. “I just thought, if all of our public institutions were using their funds in this way, we could be supporting such better food systems.”

Since she became the nutrition manager at LOSD, she has forged a partnership with Santa Cruz Community Farmers’ Markets and now purchases bulk ingredients seasonally from the Sunday Live Oak farmers market, which are delivered directly to the school’s kitchen. 

Ritten and SCCFM also collaborated with Life Lab, a Santa Cruz-based nonprofit that encourages garden-based learning, to establish Dia de la Familia, held at the Sunday farmers market in Live Oak. Once a month, anyone associated with the district is invited to the market and given $10 to spend on fresh fruits and vegetables. The market also hosts an art table, a market hunt game and information about other resources from the district. Dia de la Familia was created to encourage families associated with the district to explore their local farmers market, and around 40 to 75 families attend each event. 

Ritten also works with the Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association, an organic farmers cooperative in Salinas. “For the past two years, we’ve only been serving organic, local strawberries that we’re sourcing from an ALBA farmer,” says Ritten. “And now we’re going to start sourcing ingredients for our kale pesto pasta next week from a graduate from ALBA, which is really cool.”

One of the reasons Ritten is able to source whole ingredients from farms is because she has extra labor from student cooks to process them. The Food Lab program is an elective class for students at Cypress High School, whose campus is next door to Del Mar Elementary, where the central kitchen is located. Eleven students attend two and a half classes a week, typically completing time-consuming cooking projects like mixing and fermenting whole wheat pizza dough for breakfast pizza or scrubbing and pureeing whole beets for chocolate beet muffins, which have the texture and color of red velvet cake. 

This extra labor helps the ingredients go further and allows them to be incorporated into the menu in ways that are too time-consuming for the full-time kitchen staff to take on. And whole ingredients typically cost less than processed foods, which is beneficial for the program’s budget.

This year, the staff also piloted a Food Lab class for the fifth graders at Del Mar Elementary on Friday afternoons. In both of these classes, kids will also develop and workshop new recipes that can then be integrated into the central kitchen and produced on a larger scale for the rest of the students in the district. 

“One of our priorities is, if we’re getting produce from the garden or from a farm, if we can let the kids interact with it, that’s what we want to do,” says Perusse. “We want the kids to have that experience where they see that it came from a garden or farm, this is how it turns into food, and then this is how you get to eat it.”

The Food Lab was created by Siu, another current dietitian, while she was still an intern with LOSD. She developed the program proposal as her final project. It was inspired by Pacific Elementary School in Davenport, where, for the past 40 years, all of the fifth and sixth grade students have helped prepare organic meals for the students and staff in the school’s kitchen. On a visit to Pacific Elementary, the founder of that program, Stephanie Raugust, told the Live Oak contingent that they were the first school to try to copy Pacific Elementary. 

“We are the only other school in the county to create a Food Lab where we have kids in the kitchen cooking and actually producing the food that we serve on the line,” says Perusse. 

Another positive outcome from the Food Lab class, Ritten and Perusse say, is that it creates a sense of ownership among the students who made the food, and that positive association can ripple across their classmates. 

“You get kids that say, ‘I cooked that! I cooked that! Come try my food.’ And so then there’s this big pride that this is what they created,” says Perusse. “You also start getting a much louder student voice where they tell you how they feel. It gives us more direction on how we write and create menus.”

The team also takes care to make culturally appropriate foods for its student body, which is 50% Hispanic. This past winter, the kitchen launched pozole, a hearty Mexican soup made with hominy and meat, at their elementary schools, and it was wildly popular. In order to prepare the students, the nutrition team made a flyer that explains what the different components of the dish are, and why it’s an important dish in Mexican culture. 

Many of the students were already familiar with pozole, and that helped other students who weren’t familiar with it get excited about trying a new food. “We ended up keeping it on for an extra month, longer than we anticipated, just because it was so popular,” says Ritten. “It’s so nutritious. It’s so delicious. You know, it was just an all-around win.”

Just getting kids to think about the food that they’re eating is an accomplishment, says Siu. “If you look at the health trends in our country, it’s not always the best trend,” she says. “I think school is really one of the best places to start changing that course of action.”

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