The day after spring break, a line of hungry students quickly formed in Petersburg’s middle and high school cafeteria to grab one of the more popular school lunches: a build-your-own smoked salmon sushi roll.
“It's just really good,” said freshman Ashlyn Sakamoto Quezon after stepping off the lunch line. “I think I just really like the Alaskan salmon in general.”
Senior Laughlin Pegoda also took a sushi roll and said Petersburg’s school lunches are a big improvement compared to her last school.
“Before this, I went to school in Texas and the school lunches were awful,” she said. “There was, like, nothing fresh. There were no healthy options. And I feel like it's so much better here.”
Past meals from the district’s lunch rotation have included rockfish tacos, carrot-top pesto with black cod, and moose meat spaghetti.
The program has been a passion project for Carlee Johnson McIntosh, the district’s food services director. She’s spent the last decade slowly adding fresh and local ingredients to the menu. The partnerships she’s forged between the school district and local organizations to build the program have benefited kids and businesses alike.
She said she hopes eating these lunches will give kids lifelong nutrition skills.
“When they're in college and they think, ‘oh, I should eat a carrot,’ then I've won,” she said.
The district has received multiple awards recognizing the quality of their school meals, and Johnson McIntosh has received awards for her work teaching other school districts how they can bring fresh food to their students.
Johnson McIntosh said she didn’t take an all-or-nothing approach, and that was key to Petersburg’s success.
“The mindset of ‘everything has to be farm-to-school or you can't do it’ has held some schools back from being able to incorporate it,” Johnson McIntosh said. “When you could just do little bit here and a little bit there, and it makes a large impact throughout all your students.”
Not every meal the district serves is made with completely local products. A lot of items are seasonal, and some products are too expensive to ship to Petersburg. Some foods you just can’t source in Alaska
You’ll also still find frozen pizza and chicken nuggets on the menu.
“It's not like I don't have processed stuff, because we do,” said Johnson McIntosh. “It's just not every single day. It's not every single week. It's usually once or twice in that six-week cycle.”
She said buying processed food can initially cost more for the district, but requires a lot less labor. Meanwhile, cooking from scratch can be cheaper, but requires a lot more work to prepare. It takes a balance, and some foods just pencil out to be too hard to make.
Petersburg is on an island, so getting fresh ingredients still isn’t cheap. Johnson McIntosh has to get creative.
“I apply for every single grant I can get, because the cost of food just keeps going up,” she said.
She has a long list of grant awards stretching back over a decade. Some of that money has been used to help the district grow their own food with school gardens and hydroponics. In March, the school harvested 9 pounds of homegrown lettuce.
“The more you can grow your own, the more you can reduce your cost,” she said.
In addition to calculating costs, Johnson McIntosh has spent years building relationships with many suppliers.
“All the relationships haven't just always been there. It's been slow to build,” she said.
The smoked salmon they serve comes from a local processor, kelp salsa comes from a business in Juneau, plants for the school gardens come from Wrangell, and some produce comes from Farragut Farm, an off-the-grid farm about 25 miles north of Petersburg.
When the district first started their partnership with Farragut Farm, Johnson McIntosh would buy leftovers from their farm stand. Now, the farm grows food specifically for the district.
Marja Smets is one of the farmers behind Farragut Farm, and said supplying the school district has been a big benefit for the business because they can focus on growing large amounts of a select few crops.
“We knew that Carlee and the school district were up for buying large quantities of whatever we could produce,” she said. “So that was an incentive, like, hey, even if we grow more carrots than maybe customers in Petersburg want to buy, we could sell hundreds and hundreds of pounds to the school.”
She said there’s also the added benefit of being able to feed Petersburg kids.
“Part of why we decided to be farmers is because we wanted to be able to provide healthy, locally grown vegetables for our friends and neighbors in town,” she said. “Even better if it can end up on the lunch tables of all the kids in school.”
Johnson McIntosh hopes other school districts will consider following Petersburg’s lead and add more fresh food to their menus. She recognizes that districts deal with a lot of obstacles and red tape just to feed their students, so she now mentors other districts on how they can get one step closer to bringing fresh food to their menus.
