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Vol.:(0123456789)
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Agric Hum Values (2018) 35:193–206
DOI 10.1007/s10460-017-9815-7
Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy
forfood sovereignty
LisaJordanPowell1,2 · HannahWittman1,3
Accepted: 3 July 2017 / Published online: 18 July 2017
© Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2017
farm to school movement has contributed toward realizing
goals of food sovereignty through two main mechanisms:
advocacy for institutional procurement of local and sustain-
able foods and mobilizing food literacy for increased public
engagement with issues of social justice and equity in food
systems.
Keywords Food sovereignty· Food literacy· Farm to
school
Abbreviations
BC British Columbia
BCAITC British Columbia Agriculture in the
Classroom
BCMA British Columbia Ministry of Agriculture
BCME British Columbia Ministry of Education
BCMH British Columbia Ministry of Health
BCMHLS British Columbia Ministry of Healthy Liv-
ing and Sport
BCSFVNP British Columbia School Fruit and Vegeta-
ble Nutrition Program
CBO Congressional Budget Office
CHSF Coalition for Healthy School Food
EYSP Edible Schoolyard Project
F2SGV Farm to School Greater Vancouver
F2SVA Farm to School Vancouver AreaRegional
Hub
G8 Group of Eight Industrialized Nations
HGSF Home-Grown School Feeding Program
OME Ontario Ministry of Education
NGO Non-governmental Organization
PHABC Public Health Association of British
Columbia
USDA United States Department of Agriculture
Abstract Farm to school programs have been positioned
as interventions that can support goals of the global food
sovereignty movement, including strengthening local food
production systems, improving food access and food jus-
tice for urban populations, and reducing distancing between
producers and consumers. However, there has been lit-
tle assessment of how and to what extent farm to school
programs can actually function as a mechanism leading to
the achievement of food sovereignty. As implemented in
North America, farm to school programs encompass activi-
ties not only related to school food procurement, but also
to the development of student knowledge and skills under
the framework of food literacy. Research on farm to school
initiatives has largely been conducted in countries with
government-supported national school feeding programs;
this study examines farm to school organizing in Canada,
where there is no national student nutrition program. Using
qualitative fieldwork and document analysis, we investigate
the farm to school movement in British Columbia, in a con-
text where civil society concerns related to education and
health have been the main vectors of farm to school mobi-
lization. Our analysis suggests that, despite limited institu-
tional infrastructure for school meals, the British Columbia
* Lisa Jordan Powell
lisa.powell@ubc.ca
* Hannah Wittman
hannah.wittman@ubc.ca
1 Centre forSustainable Food Systems, University ofBritish
Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
2 Agriburban Research Centre, University oftheFraser Valley,
Abbotsford, BC, Canada
3 Institute forResources, Environment andSustainability,
University ofBritish Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada
194 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
USDA FNS United States Department of Agriculture
Food and Nutrition Service
VSB Vancouver School Board
Introduction
There is a growing scholarly and public dialogue taking
place around food systems transformation, with divergent
views around current and future roles for government,
civil society, and the food and agriculture sector itself.
Food sovereignty is one framework for shaping policy sur-
rounding these roles, and has increasingly become part of
global, national, and regional initiatives to restructure food
markets to achieve ecological sustainability, health equity,
social justice and food security. Defining food sovereignty
is not a straightforward task; there are numerous, and in
some cases conflicting, definitions (Patel 2009). The frame-
work of food sovereignty can be summarized as “the right
of peoples to healthy and culturally appropriate food pro-
duced through ecologically sound and sustainable methods,
and their right to define their own food and agriculture sys-
tems” (Nyéléni Forum for Food Sovereignty 2007). While
the specific mechanisms for food sovereignty are often
defined locally to meet the needs of local populations and
in relation to local social and ecological contexts, some
broad goals are common across the movement, includ-
ing supporting farmer livelihoods, alleviating hunger and
malnourishment, improving agricultural sustainability and
social justice, and strengthening local food systems. Early
food sovereignty scholarship often focused on the context
of rural populations and the Global South, but there has
now been considerable work emphasizing its relevance to
urban populations and the Global North (Wittman et al.
2011; Alkon and Mares 2012; Desmarais and Wittman
2014; Laidlaw and Magee 2014; Cidro etal. 2015). In the
urban context, a primary issue of consideration has been
the relationship between food sovereignty and movements
for food access and food justice (Block etal. 2011; Clend-
enning etal. 2016).
Among other forms of food system restructuring, the
food sovereignty movement advocates for changes in how
governments support their domestic food and agricul-
ture sectors, particularly by influencing, or “mediating”
how markets can contribute towards the achievement of
social and environmental goals (De Schutter 2014; Witt-
man and Blesh 2017). “Mediated markets” is an umbrella
term referring to a range of food systems interventions
designed to support domestic agriculture sectors, improve
agriculture-related environmental outcomes, and improve
food security and diet-related disease incidence through
managing relations of supply and demand. In socially
mediated markets, governments facilitate exchange
relationships and the creation of new market structures
and hybrid structures of governance, particularly in the
provision of food security and other social welfare needs
(Rocha 2007; Soares et al. 2013). In addition to such
efforts as price supports for producers, government regu-
lation of food prices, and establishment of food reserves,
examples of mediated market interventions include pub-
lic procurement and/or social assistance programs, school
feeding and “farm to school” programs, public nutrition,
and food banks. While public procurement programs
have been positioned as key tools by the food sovereignty
movement, there has been limited assessment of how and
to what extent such programs are functioning as pathways
toward food sovereignty (Quaye etal. 2009, 2010; Witt-
man and Blesh 2017).
Farm to school programs focused on public procurement
are part of social “infrastructures of provision” (Seyfang
2011) that utilize the power of institutional purchasing for
schools, hospitals, and other public programs to support
agricultural development and other social and environmen-
tal goals (Buckley etal. 2013; Conner etal. 2014). Also
known as home-grown school feeding programs (HGSFs),
in their most widespread form farm to school programs
aim to increase the locally-sourced share of food procured
by schools (Joshi etal. 2008; Izumi et al. 2010b; Conner
et al. 2011; Bateman et al. 2014; Bontrager Yoder et al.
2014; Lyson 2016). These programs provide a localized
alternative to traditional supply chains for sourcing food
for schools and other institutions that typically involve
multiple actors between farms and the institutions, includ-
ing packers, shippers, processors, and wholesale distribu-
tors. Distributors operate at scales ranging from regional to
multinational and often offer discounts for purchasing large
volumes and multiple products, which can be attractive to
public institutions working with very limited budgets. Gen-
erally, traditional institutional supply chains aim for overall
cost minimization by emphasizing efficiencies at all stages
(Feenstra etal. 2011).
Prior work on farm to school supply chains has analyzed
how they differ from traditional institutional food sourcing
models, including the facilitation of closer relationships
between farmers and schools and farmers and consumers
based on a set of a shared community values. Evaluations of
farm to school supply chains have also addressed how they
can be more successful by restructuring traditional aggre-
gation and distribution centres to meet local procurement
goals (Feenstra etal. 2011; Heiss etal. 2014). By linking
sustainable production and consumption systems, farm to
school programs are argued to provide expanded and more
stable markets for local agricultural products, particularly
those grown by small- and medium-scale farmers, who may
be struggling to remain financially viable (Bagdonis etal.
2008; Conner etal. 2008; Izumi etal. 2010b).
195Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy forfood sovereignty
1 3
As implemented in North America, farm to school pro-
grams encompass interventions not only in school food
procurement, but also in the development of student knowl-
edge and skills surrounding both individual food behaviors
and food systems, under the framework of food literacy.
The food sovereignty literature has only recently begun to
engage with consumer and urban perspectives on sustain-
able consumption and accessibility of healthy food, with
fruitful intersections with the developing body of work
on food literacy. As Cullen et al. (2015) have described,
for individuals, food literacy is “the ability to make deci-
sions to support the achievement of personal health and a
sustainable food system considering environmental, social,
economic, cultural, and political components” (p. 143).
At a more structural level, food literacy encompasses the
knowledge, skills, and practices that enable citizens to par-
ticipate more effectively in the construction of a sustainable
and equitable food system, including through food choices
and waste management, as well as through participation
in the development of food policy (Vidgen and Gallegos
2014; Cullen etal. 2015). Food literacy as a mechanism has
been criticized for being perhaps too narrowly focused on
stimulating individual behavioural change at the expense of
a broader consideration of the structural constraints to food
system sustainability (Kimura 2011; Sumner 2013); how-
ever, as programs and scholarly discourse surrounding food
literacy have further developed, the concept is now being
reframed as an avenue for social change leading to food
systems transformation (Valley etal. 2017).
Cullen et al. (2015) emphasize that an ecological
approach, which includes environmental and social con-
text, is necessary to develop food literacy and food systems
engagement. Sumner (2013) further argues, “food literacy
aims for individual and social change by encouraging peo-
ple to read the world in terms of food. In addition, food lit-
eracy includes an engagement with power relations in its
full-cycle understanding of food” (p.87). Increased social
mobilization towards programs that address concentrations
of power in food value chains and promote access to cul-
turally appropriate, healthy, and sustainably produced foods
align with goals of food sovereignty, which aim to change
structural conditions in support of more just and sustaina-
ble food systems. Developing individual food literacy skills
can lead to support for structural change through deepened
food systems engagement, which may manifest in actions
ranging from shifts in individual consumption patterns to
collective political organizing.
Work on farm to school initiatives has largely been con-
ducted in countries with national school meal programs,
such as the US and Brazil (Joshi etal. 2008; Izumi et al.
2010a; Sonnino etal. 2014; Kleine and das Graças Bright-
well 2015). In this article, we examine farm to school
organizing in Canada, which does not have a national
school food program. Farm to school initiatives in Canada
have emerged from the “bottom up,” in a context where
food literacy concerns and nutrition education by civil
society have been the main drivers of mobilization. We ask
how activities of the farm to school movement in British
Columbia (BC) have contributed toward “mediating mar-
kets” for food sovereignty through advocacy for institu-
tional procurement of local and sustainable foods, but also
through mobilizing food literacy as a consumer education
mechanism. We begin by providing background on farm to
school mobilization in North America, highlighting differ-
ences between the US and Canada. We then describe the
scope and methods of our research and include results from
our qualitative fieldwork and document analysis involving
the BC farm to school movement, particularly considering
how the BC movement has engaged with school food pro-
curement and food literacy. We conclude by analyzing how
the movement has contributed to food sovereignty goals
and highlighting potential pathways for the future.
Farm toschool inNorth America
During the Great Depression of the 1930s, agricultural sur-
pluses and poor child nutrition motivated the US govern-
ment to begin widespread school food programs, building
on a limited number of school feeding programs that had
existed since the 1930s (Allen and Guthman 2006). School
meal programs had been developed in cities in the first dec-
ades of the twentieth century, initially driven by charita-
ble societies concerned about children’s welfare, but later
supported by school boards. In 1946, the US government
passed the National School Lunch Act, which remains in
effect today. Through this act, US schools serve at least one
meal each school day, for which they receive remunera-
tion and donations of agricultural commodities through the
USDA (Rutledge 2009).
Concerns began emerging in the 1990s that US school
meals were unhealthy and potentially contributing to child-
hood obesity, with grassroots and public policy responses
emerging in terms of nutrition regulation and in the form
of alternative programming for food literacy, framed for
the first time as “farm to school.” Early farm to school
programs included a group of farmers in northern Florida
forming a cooperative to sell fresh fruits and vegetables to
school districts in the state in 1995. In California in 1997,
a parent worked with a school food service director to
start a farmers’ market salad bar program, which eventu-
ally became a financially viable operation in all 15 schools
in the Santa Monica-Malibu Unified School District (Joshi
and Beery 2007; Lyson 2016). The Edible Schoolyard pro-
ject began operating in Berkeley in 1995, developing a gar-
den on a portion of unused ground at a middle school to
196 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
support cooking classes and other food literacy education
efforts (EYSP 2016). National legislation in 1994 set nutri-
tion standards for school meals; in 2004, the Child Nutri-
tion and Women, Infants and Children Act furthered school
food nutrition standards and increased funding for includ-
ing fresh vegetables and fruits in school meals (Lyson
2016).
The 2010 Healthy, Hunger-Free Kids Act both signifi-
cantly changed nutrition guidelines for school meals, and
established the USDA Farm to School program to assist
in the implementation of farm to school programs that
improve student access to local foods at school. These
activities included procurement of local foods for school
meals; staff training; purchasing of equipment for handling
fresh local foods; school gardens; community partner-
ship development and outreach; school garden curriculum
development; and program evaluations (Benson etal. 2015;
Lyson 2016). The “cornerstone” of farm to school pro-
grams in the United States has been programs that explic-
itly link local agricultural production to school food service
through institutional procurement (Allen and Guthman
2006). The 2015 US Farm to School Census determined
that US schools purchased $789million in local foods from
farmers, ranchers, and food processors/manufacturers dur-
ing the 2013–2014 school year, which represented 4.8%
of the total $16.4billion budget for the national lunch and
breakfast programs in 2014. As indicated by the Farm to
School Census, 62% of schools with farm to school pro-
grams have salad bars, which are often locally stocked, and
44% of the school districts surveyed have school gardens
(CBO 2015; USDA FNS 2016).
The Canadian context
Canada is unique among comparable (G8) countries in that
it does not have a national school feeding program (Koç
and Bas 2012). Despite Canada’s considerable agricultural
commodity surpluses throughout much of the twentieth
century, the country did not look to school feeding pro-
grams as a destination for these surpluses as other coun-
tries did. Canada has in the past donated some of this sur-
plus to programs that support school feeding programs in
other countries, including the United Nations World Food
Programme’s school feeding programs in Africa (Rutledge
2009).
While Canadian provinces have provided assistance to
children through supports to their mothers since the 1870s,
federal benefits began in 1944 when the Family Allow-
ance Act began to provide universal support for children
regardless of need. These “baby bonuses” were designed
to encourage women who had joined the workforce dur-
ing World War II to return home by helping to replace their
incomes (Finkel 2006; Rutledge 2009). Though it has not
been consistently in place since the 1940s, a version of this
program exists in Canada today, with per-child payments
commonly known as “milk money” ranging from $60 to
$160 per month, depending on the age of the child (Bat-
tle 2007; Hopper 2015). In the post-war era, baby bonuses
and other policies that supported women staying home and
raising children were viewed as an alternative to a proposed
national school lunch program, under the rationale that
every child was receiving government support, and that
mothers would assume responsibility for their child’s mid-
day meal using the baby bonus subsidy (Rutledge 2009).
However, recent reports indicate that more than 17% of
Canadian children (percentage not including BC data),
and more than 15% of children in BC live in households
affected by food insecurity (Tarasuk et al. 2016; Li et al.
2016).
Since at least the 1990s, the creation of a national school
feeding program has been part of Canadian grassroots
and policy advocacy for combatting childhood poverty
and malnutrition, despite critiques that charity programs
run by civil society organizations were not only not meet-
ing the goal of feeding hungry children, but also drawing
political attention away from underlying causes of hunger
related to social inequality (Raine etal. 2003). Within the
last decade, however, federal legislators have developed a
political vision for expanding grassroots civil society pro-
grams into a universal, national school meals strategy,
identifying the constitutional pathway to school food leg-
islation and advocating for political mobilization to enact
a program (Leeder 2011). Arguments for the school food
program included advocating for children’s rights and for
economic prosperity through improved school performance
and graduation rates, and contributions to the agricultural
economy (Duncan 2012). The Coalition for Healthy School
Food has assembled in recent years with leadership from
Food Secure Canada (a national NGO) and includes over
30 additional national, provincial, and local organizations.
The Coalition is lobbying for.
an investment by the federal government in a cost-
shared Universal Healthy School Food Program that
will enable all students in Canada to have access to
healthy meals at school every day. Building on exist-
ing programs across the country, all schools will
eventually serve a healthy meal or snack at little or
no cost to students. These programs will include food
education and serve culturally appropriate, local, sus-
tainable food to the fullest extent possible (CHSF
2015).
The constitutional division between provincial and fed-
eral responsibilities has consistently been provided as a jus-
tification for the federal government not becoming involved
in school nutrition. In 2014 a representative from Health
197Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy forfood sovereignty
1 3
Canada, the federal health department, stated that “the
provision of food in schools is a provincial and territorial
responsibility” (quoted in Hyslop 2014). Each Canadian
province has some form of school food policy and/or pro-
gram, as do two of the three territories (Hyslop 2014). The
policies primarily focus on setting nutritional standards for
what food is available in schools from a range of sources,
including private vendors or meal programs run indepen-
dently by individual schools or school districts, rather
than on universalizing or increasing access. For example,
Ontario issued a “School Food and Beverage Policy” in
2010 that sets nutrition standards and evaluation criteria
for food sold in schools, but excludes most special occa-
sions and fundraising (OME 2010); British Columbia has a
similar policy, discussed further below. Manitoba’s school
and nutrition guidelines, updated in 2014, are designed to
“assist schools as they make plans to improve school nutri-
tion environments,” and provide checklists and worksheets
for different areas where schools often provide for students,
including meal programs, cafeterias, vending, sporting
events, and special occasion meals (Manitoba Government
2014).
Though school food-related policies and programs exist
across Canada, they are inconsistent and do not provide
universal meal services for students. In the absence of a
national level school meal structure, diverse strategies have
emerged both for feeding students and for providing food
literacy education, but little analysis has been conducted
to date regarding the potential of these programs to serve
as a structural mechanism for sustainable food systems
transformation towards food sovereignty. In response, we
undertook a case study of the provincial farm to school
movement in British Columbia as an entry point to under-
standing how advocacy for procurement of local foods for
school meals and educating consumers through food liter-
acy interventions may serve as mobilizing mechanisms for
food sovereignty. In what follows, we provide an overview
of food systems in British Columbia, including both the
school food and farm to school landscapes in the province.
We conclude by discussing the potential of grassroots-initi-
ated farm to school programming to support goals of food
sovereignty, in the absence of universal policy support, by
connecting both production and consumption aspects of
local food systems through food literacy training.
The British Columbia food system
A large and diverse collection of actors are involved in
food systems transformation initiatives in British Colum-
bia, including numerous civil society organizations. Four
municipal and regional food policy councils exist in the
province, and provincial and regional public health authori-
ties have taken interest in food security and food systems
issues, primarily from a human health perspective (Mun-
del 2013). The origins of many of these organizations are
rooted in concerns about regional food security due to
the province’s limited supply of agricultural land, most of
which is located in peri-urban areas under intense develop-
ment pressure (Newman et al. 2015). Despite the limita-
tions, the presence of suitable farmland aligns with favora-
ble climatic conditions in highly populated areas of the
province, in particular the Fraser Valley area of the Lower
Mainland, parts of Southern Vancouver Island, and the
Okanagan, and enables British Columbia’s farmers to grow
a wide variety of commodities, much of which is exported
(BCMA 2016). While framed around increasing total reve-
nue, including in the export sector, the 2015BC Provincial
Agrifood and Seafood Strategic Growth Plan includes goals
for increasing domestic markets through public procure-
ment. The strategy includes the goal of increasing within-
province purchases of BC products by $2.3billion (or 43%)
by 2020, with a proposed action for achieving this goal to
“encourage the development and adoption of buy local pol-
icies for food retail, food services, and public sector institu-
tions” (BCMA 2015).
Farm toschool activity inBC
Programs explicitly framed as “farm to school” have been
operating in various forms in different parts of the province
since at least 2007; other initiatives that bear characteris-
tics of farm to school programs have also been operating
without the label. These projects did not originate from
a single source or coordinating organization, but rather
from diverse actors scattered across the province. JoAnne
Bays, a provincial and national leader in farm to school
and farm to institution initiatives, credits a 2006 presenta-
tion in British Columbia by FoodShare, a Toronto-based
community organization, as having galvanized the first
initiative branded as a “farm to school” salad bar program
in the province (Bays 2010). Since the 1990s, FoodShare
had implemented salad bars in several schools, mobilized
municipal funding to support student nutrition programs,
and advocated for a national school food program for Can-
ada, as well as having initiated a suite of other efforts to
promote more localized food economies (Friedmann 2007;
FoodShare 2016).
Building on the enthusiasm for farm to school pro-
grams in the province, Farm to School BC was established
in 2007 as a network that “promotes, supports, and links
Farm to School activity, policy and programs across the
province,” and is administered by the Public Health Asso-
ciation of British Columbia (PHABC), an NGO which has
multiple funding partners, including the Ministry of Health
(PHABC 2017). PHABC, the BC Healthy Living Alli-
ance, and other organizations supported several salad bar
198 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
and produce availability-focused farm to school expansion
initiatives throughout the province between 2007 and 2014
(Bays 2010). In the fall of 2014, Farm to School BC began
a 2-year project entitled Growing Farm to School to foster
the development of 50 new farm to school programs across
the province and the development of three pilot Farm to
School Regional Hubs in three urban centres. Goals for
the Hubs program included increasing the number of
schools involved in farm to school initiatives; building and
strengthening existing farm to school programs; establish-
ing networks and resource groups providing support for
establishing and maintaining Farm to School programs;
communicating about Farm to School initiatives to the gen-
eral public; and establishing a Regional Hub model that
might be applied throughout British Columbia, and else-
where in Canada, while remaining flexible enough to meet
the needs of different communities.
Methods
Our characterization and analysis of the farm to school
movement in BC is based on document analysis and quali-
tative fieldwork conducted from 2013 through mid-2016,
which included a participatory, community-based evalua-
tion of the Farm to School Regional Hubs program. Docu-
ments included materials produced by Farm to School BC,
Farm to School Regional Hubs, and by other groups and
individuals involved in organizing farm to school activities
in the province. Our qualitative field work involved struc-
tured interviews and focus group interactions with two
groups of farm to school actors in the province: participants
in farm to school “Learning Labs” and stakeholders and
coordinators of the three Farm to School BC Regional Hub
pilot programs. We also attended events which were either
organized by Farm to School BC or which featured speak-
ers involved in farm to school organizing in the province.
Learning labs
In 2012, a group of stakeholders who had coalesced to form
a community of practice called Farm to School of Greater
Vancouver (F2SGV) decided to focus on food procurement
in a large urban school district in British Columbia. To
work toward this goal, F2SGV decided to take a “Learn-
ing Lab” approach, defined as an ongoing process of stake-
holder collaboration and consultation that involved activi-
ties linking purchasing and food service leaders within the
district’s school board and individual schools with distribu-
tors and with other area stakeholders. The series of activi-
ties that comprised the Learning Lab occurred in 2013
and 2014. Facilitators contracted by F2SGV conducted
interviews with seven district purchasing and food service
leaders and held two learning lab discussions, including a
“test kitchen” event with local food systems actors includ-
ing chefs, teachers, public health officials, and representa-
tives from a food distribution company. The Learning Labs
aimed to develop promotional materials and to bring stake-
holders “together in a collaborative process to increase the
availability, procurement, and consumption of local food in
schools” (F2SVA 2016, p. 23).
Regional Hubs focus groups
Our research team conducted a process evaluation of the
Regional Hubs pilot program in 2015–2016, which con-
sisted of two focus groups (in fall and spring) conducted
with each of the three Regional Hubs (Vancouver, Capital/
Victoria, and Kamloops). A total of 23 individuals partici-
pated across the six focus group sessions. Though the Farm
to School BC Regional Hubs pilots began in 2014, many
who participated in the focus groups had been involved in
some form of farm to school work for several years prior to
the initiation of the Regional Hubs program; for example,
many of those who supported the formation of the Vancou-
ver Regional Hub had been involved in F2SGV. All mem-
bers of steering committees for each Regional Hub were
invited to participate in the focus groups, and included
public health officials, school district representatives, and
leaders from other community food organizations. Two
urban farmers participated, both of whom also held other
roles in farm to school organizing (one as a parent and one
as a community food systems activist). Our research team
also participated in meetings between Farm to School BC
provincial-level leadership and Regional Hubs coordina-
tors; sat in on steering committee meetings for each hub;
and attended events that each hub hosted in its respective
community.
Results
Farm to school programs have the potential to support
goals of food sovereignty as a structural mechanism to
reshape market relationships and political engagement in
local and regional food systems. We sought to understand
the development of the farm to school movement in Brit-
ish Columbia, where there is no universal school feeding
program, but where various forms of farm to school initia-
tives have existed for nearly a decade and involve a wide
variety of actors from civil society and public health and
education sectors. In this section we characterize farm to
school organizing in BC, in particular tracing how food
literacy training has emerged as the dominant framing for
farm to school activities. We identify challenges that have
significantly shaped attempts to implement farm to school
199Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy forfood sovereignty
1 3
programming focused on public procurement, which sug-
gest large-scale implementation of mediated markets for
school food in the province will require longer-term struc-
tural and policy transformation.
Procurement framing
In its vision, goals, and overall discourse, the farm to school
movement in BC has drawn substantially on the interna-
tional farm to school focus related to sourcing food from
local farms for school meals. Emphasis on local procure-
ment was found in overview documents and guidebooks for
farm to school activities in the province; in program pro-
posals and justifications; and in goals and objectives stated
by provincial farm to school actors.
For example, the second edition (2012) of A Fresh
Crunch in School Lunch: The BC Farm to School Guide, is
regularly referenced by Farm to School BC, who prepared
the document, as well as by other farm to school actors in
the province. This guide lists benefits of farm to school,
which it defines broadly as “a school-based program that
connects schools (K-12) and local farms” (p.2), based on
research on US farm to school programs (PHABC 2012).
For children, the guide lists benefits surrounding healthier
options in school cafeterias, increased food and agricultural
literacy, healthier lifestyle choices, and enhanced mental
and social development. For farmers, the guide lists mar-
ket diversification, positive relationships with the school
and broader community members, opportunities to explore
processing and preservation for institutional markets, and
establishment of grower cooperatives to supply institutional
markets. While the guide goes on to discuss school gardens
and other types of programming that fall under the farm
to school umbrella, there remains a significant emphasis
on purchasing and serving food produced by local farmers
throughout the guide, including general tips for schools on
how to find local farmers to work with and how to develop
menus around what is produced locally.
The Farm to School Vancouver Area Guide, produced
by Vancouver’s Regional Hub and released in Spring 2016,
draws on the 2012BC Farm to School Guide while provid-
ing information specific to the Metro Vancouver region.
This guide includes a section with step-by-step instructions
on how schools can buy from farms, a farmer directory,
and a “Focus on Farmers” profile of several local farms, in
addition to recipes centered on foods grown in the Metro
Vancouver area. The guide also includes some information
on school gardens, primarily though discussions of how to
incorporate farm to school into school-led curriculum and
pedagogy and through quotes from students about their
experiences with school gardens (F2SVA 2016).
The movement’s interest in school meal ingredient
procurement from local farms was also reflected in the
Learning Labs, which were designed with procurement as
their central focus. Collaboratively, a group of school rep-
resentatives and F2SGV stakeholders set four goals during
their discussions: (1) increase procurement of local and/or
sustainable food; (2) procure foods that model sound nutri-
tional practice for students; (3) create a knowledgeable and
engaged school community for local, healthy, and sustain-
able food; and (4) provide training and support to develop
capacity to procure local, sustainable food. Three of these
goals explicitly focus on procurement, though one primar-
ily concerns building food literacy (F2SVA 2016, p. 22).
The BC school meals landscape
Although neither a national Canadian nor a provincial-wide
school meals program currently exists in British Columbia,
the provincial government provides some funding for feed-
ing students in schools, through CommunityLINK (Learn-
ing Includes Nutrition and Knowledge). For the 2016/2017
school year, this funding will total $52million CAD, dis-
tributed across all 60 school districts in the province. An
additional $11.2million of provincial funding will be dis-
tributed across 25 of the school districts to meet the needs
of the growing numbers of socioeconomically vulnerable
students in those districts. Considering there are approxi-
mately 554,000 students enrolled in public schools in BC,
this $63.2 million funding represents a $114 expenditure
per child per school year (BCME 2016). CommunityLINK
funding is designed “to support the academic achievement
and social functioning of vulnerable students,” and while
many schools use the funding to support feeding programs,
it can also be used to provide other services such as aca-
demic support (BC Government 2016). Some school dis-
tricts also support student nutrition programs through addi-
tional funding sources, including charitable donations and
municipal allotments (e.g. VSB 2015).
To establish guidelines for the use of funding for pro-
viding food in schools, the province developed a School
Meal and School Nutrition Handbook, last updated in 2010.
There are seven principles on the list of “Guiding Principles
for School Meal and School Nutrition Programs,” includ-
ing Healthy Eating, Food Safety, Respect for Students and
Families, Respect for School Diversity, Cost-Effectiveness,
Partnerships, Food Security, Food Experience (social inter-
action), and Education. As part of the Food Security prin-
ciple, the handbook states that “Programs will contribute to
food security in British Columbia by increasing students’
access to healthy foods and, where possible, by offering
locally grown foods” (BCME and BCMHLS 2010, p.5).
In 2013, the province released Guidelines Food & Bever-
age Sales in BC Schools, which defines minimum nutri-
tion standards for foods and beverages sold to students as
mandated policy for schools, and includes suggestions and
200 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
tools for implementing the guidelines (BCMH & BCME
2013). Theguidelines document lists using farm to school
programs to teach students about local food systems as an
example of a possible teacher action to support the policy,
and includes using seasonal fruits and vegetables “to sup-
port local BC food producers” as a way to encourage com-
pliance in school bake sales (p.75).
While the school nutrition programs funded by Commu-
nityLINK focus on delivering food to vulnerable students,
some schools provide food services for both these students
and the general student population. Schools with no kitchen
facilities, which include many elementary schools in the
province, often rely on contracts with private catering com-
panies to provide the provincially supported meals for vul-
nerable students, and in some cases for other students as
well. Some high schools have student culinary instruction
programs, and the participating students may prepare meals
for others at their school or for students at nearby elemen-
tary schools. Schools may have kitchen staff and cafeterias
that market food to the general student population.
In addition to this diversity in how food is prepared or
provided within schools, there is considerable variance
among school districts in British Columbia in sourcing the
ingredients. In some school districts, purchasing is central-
ized at the district level, typically via district-wide con-
tracts with large suppliers such as Sysco. In other districts,
schools independently make purchasing decisions or form
purchasing groups with other nearby schools. As noted by a
Learning Lab participant, for secondary schools with teach-
ing cafeterias, sourcing is “Curriculum driven… can buy
local apples if it meets goals of curriculum.” Even when
under contract with a larger supplier, schools often have
some leeway to purchase foods outside of the contracts for
use in the cafeteria, and some actively choose to purchase
from local farms.
Province-wide programs also supply food to schools as
a means of increasing student fruit and vegetable consump-
tion and promoting the agriculture sector in the province.
The BC School Fruit and Vegetable Nutritional Program
(BCSFVNP) launched in 2005 with 10 schools involved,
and by the 2015/16 school year had grown to include almost
universal coverage, with programs in 1464 K-12 public and
First Nations schools reaching more than 549,000 students.
The program provides a serving of BC-grown fresh fruit
and vegetable snacks every other week during the school
year (13 times). The BCSFVNP is currently piloting a pro-
gram that would additionally offer servings of BC milk to
children in grades K-5. The BCSFVNP receives financial
support from the Ministry of Health and administrative
support from the Ministry of Agriculture and Ministry of
Education, and is managed by the BC Agriculture in the
Classroom Foundation, a non-governmental organization
which functions as a registered charity, and which also
receives substantial support from producer organizations
such as the BC Dairy Association (BCAITC 2016).
Challenges toscaling uplocal food procurement inBC
schools
The infrastructural limitations of BC’s school feeding land-
scape foreground many of the reasons that the programs
implemented by the farm to school movement in the prov-
ince have struggled to scale up food procurement from local
farms as a primary component of farm to school. Further-
more, prior to recent developments such as the formation
of the National Coalition for Healthy School Food, much
of the discourse surrounding school feeding programs in
Canada has been focused on alleviating poverty-based
food insecurity, rather than around nutrition for the total
student population. A 2014 news article asking whether
Canada needed a national school meal program began
with, “When you think of breakfast and lunch programs
at public schools, it usually brings to mind kids and youth
whose parents can’t afford to keep their pantries stocked
with enough food for three meals a day” (Hyslop 2014).
This focus on school feeding primarily as a poverty allevia-
tion program, rather than as a component of education and
health for all students and coupled with an agricultural eco-
nomic development strategy, is one of the discursive ten-
sions within the nascent mobilization of a large-scale social
movement seeking a national school feeding program.
Participants in our focus group discussions and Learning
Labs identified several other challenges to implementing
local procurement programs with institutionalized relation-
ships to the local farming sector as part of farm to school
activities in BC. Even when meals are served in schools,
there are several barriers to increasing the amount of local
food in the supply chain. Schools often request food safety
documentation, which is primarily handled through trace-
able food safety practices built into operations of large
institutional suppliers. Individual local farmers or smaller-
scale local suppliers may have difficulty providing the
documentation needed to demonstrate that they are meet-
ing similar food safety guidelines. School meal programs
also rely on other aspects more characteristic of large-scale
distributors, including the consistency in availability of
food items at sufficient quantities to meet the needs of the
schools over the course of a school year. Learning Lab par-
ticipants shared their perceptions that they may not be able
to get sufficient quantities of preferred, and often prepared
or processed, food ingredients directly from local farmers,
and commented on the seasonal limitations of local produc-
tion. As one participant stated about local food, “most of
the great seasonal stuff doesn’t coincide with school year.”
Securing local food through the existing large-scale dis-
tributors can also be a challenge; some large institutional
201Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy forfood sovereignty
1 3
suppliers list the geographic origin of food on their order-
ing forms, while others do not.
Participants also discussed challenges encountered
by school staff and operational facilities as limitations in
local sourcing of school meal ingredients. Many schools
have kitchen facilities with limited equipment and storage,
especially freezer space. Whether cafeteria staff are hired
directly through schools or through catering contractors,
there are often not resources available to train them in pre-
paring cost-efficient recipes using available local ingre-
dients. Learning Lab participants noted that the process
of tracking down, ordering, and managing local food on a
regular basis can be time-consuming, and there are rarely
dedicated personnel for food purchasing and supply over-
sight at either the school or district level, with the respon-
sibility typically being one of many job duties of a single
staff member.
A different focus: farm toschool asfood literacy
The farm to school movement in BC comprises a large
number of independent organizations and stakeholder
groups involved in multiple networks. An important role of
the Regional Hubs, in particular, has been to bring together
these individuals and groups to discuss shared goals, val-
ues, and priorities for local food systems transformation.
As an organization convening the Regional Hubs, Farm
to School BC outlines three component-goals of farm to
school programs: (1) bringing healthy, local food into
schools, (2) hands-on experiential learning opportunities
for students, and (3) fostering school and community con-
nectedness. Most focus group participants associated the
word “farm” in “farm to school” with hands-on experiences
such as growing food and with fostering healthier lifestyle
habits, including eating fruits and vegetables and being
active, and not exclusively with the procurement of local
food. Participants identified the Ministry of Health funding
provided for the Regional Hubs and for the more general
Farm to School BC Growing Farm to School campaign
as “legitimizing” evidence of support from the provin-
cial government for farm to school programming oriented
towards a food and health literacy framing. Participants
further described a range of components and motivations
for “farm to school” based on their own backgrounds and
prior work, including food literacy, garden- and food-based
curriculum development, school nutrition, broader food
system transformation, and local procurement. Local pro-
curement was the least frequently mentioned among these,
whereas aspects of food literacy were the most frequently
mentioned.
While documents show that all three of the above com-
ponent-goals have been included in the framework of Farm
to School BC since its earliest days, several long-term
stakeholders in BC farm to school efforts who participated
in the Regional Hubs focus groups viewed the focus of pro-
vincial farm to school organizing as having shifted over
the past decade. An earlier focus was in-school salad bars,
stocked as much as possible with locally-grown produce,
whereas the broader focus now includes experiential food
literacy education and strengthened connections between
school programming and community-based food systems
work. One focus group member, a school district represent-
ative, identified that while a locally-sourced school meal
program may be a long-term goal, other farm to school ini-
tiatives, such as school gardens, can serve as “low-hanging
fruit” to build momentum for eventual structural changes
that could provide a framework for expanding local food
procurement.
While Farm to School BC recommends and supports
a range of programming options, school gardens have
emerged as the most popular type of initiative implemented
under the farm to school umbrella in BC. These gardens
work toward supporting the goal of bringing healthy, local
food into schools, though as described above, the amount
of food that can be produced in the gardens is very lim-
ited, and the opportunities for it to be consumed in schools
can be further constrained by lack of kitchen facilities and
contexts for regular student meal programs. Participants
discussed the role of school gardens in supporting school
and community connectedness through working with local
businesses to secure garden materials, consulting with
experienced gardeners or other knowledge resources, and
involving parents and other community members in con-
structing and maintaining the gardens.
School gardens are most oriented toward providing stu-
dents with opportunities for hands-on experiential learning,
with the goal of increasing food literacy through develop-
ing student skills in growing and preparing food and under-
standing multiple aspects of food systems (production,
processing, consumption, and waste management), as well
as introducing unfamiliar vegetables and fruits. School gar-
dens in BC have developed in diverse forms, as both stand-
alone projects and as part of suites of farm to school initia-
tives at schools. For example, Smithers Secondary, a school
in Northern BC which received a grant under the Growing
Farm to School program, developed school gardens and
greenhouses to address both the issues of food insecurity
in a remote region with a short growing season, and to
teach students about food systems. Farm to school activi-
ties at Smithers incorporate lessons about climate change,
relationships between food consumption, health and well-
being, and relationships between air and water quality and
food production, transportation, and waste. Students and
staff produce over 35 types of edible plants, which are both
used for student consumption and for sale to local commu-
nity members; the local community also assists in tending
202 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
the gardens when school is not in session in the summer.
As noted in the school’s 2016 progress report, “This project
has provided a basis for teaching the key social responsibil-
ity concepts of sustainability, self-sufficiency, and healthy
living” (Smithers Secondary 2016).
The Queen Elizabeth Annex elementary school in Van-
couver, also a Growing Farm to School grant recipient,
started with a focus on nutrition education and food skill
building. In support of these goals, students, staff, and par-
ents have constructed and maintained an edible garden,
which teachers credit for increasing student openness to
trying new vegetables, and for students sharing their inter-
est in healthy foods with their parents at home. The farm to
school team at Queen Elizabeth Annex has also constructed
bee and butterfly gardens for helping develop student
understanding of pollination, and has implemented school-
wide composting (Larrivee et al. 2016). At Wildflower
Elementary in Nelson, BC, instead of building an on-site
school garden, teachers used the Growing Farm to School
grant to develop a food literacy curriculum with modules
on food geography, food culture, food as fuel, food as medi-
cine and food systems. Teachers partner with local farms
and gardens, where students participate in both planting
and harvesting during visits; students also visit area com-
mercial food processing facilities. According to Wildflow-
er’s 2016 self-generated progress report, in regards to stu-
dent outcomes, “They learned that we are a part of complex
food systems, and that these systems are integrated with
many other systems, all with far reaching impacts” (Wild-
flower Elementary 2016).
Some schools have incorporated emphasis on foraging
for wild plants and on cultivating native and traditional
plants used by Indigenous populations in school gardens.
These activities involve working closely with elders and
other traditional knowledge keepers in the communi-
ties surrounding the schools. For example, Skeetchestn
Community School near Savona, BC, on the Skeetchestn
Reserve, installed a garden and greenhouse on school
grounds with the help of the Chief and Council and with
support from a Growing Farm to School grant. Students
are growing traditional tobacco for ceremonial offerings
to elders and to the land, in addition to vegetables. Com-
munity elders are teaching students how to use traditional
plants, and local fishermen and hunters have worked with
Health Authority representatives to share harvested foods
with the school (Zutz 2016).
Focus group participants from several stakeholder
groups emphasized how school garden programs under
the farm to school program umbrella were meeting the
goals of their organizations related to food systems trans-
formation. For public health officials, student health pro-
motion is the primary motivation for establishing farm to
school programming. As one public health official noted,
“From a public health perspective, we have a very large
focus around healthy schools, and looking at the whole
school environment, and the context that kids learn. Food
is a really important part of that. Kids need healthy food
to learn and to be successful, so the food literacy piece of
farm to school is really important.” School district repre-
sentatives identified school gardens as aligning with pro-
vincial education mandates. Across the province, models
and priorities for school curricula are shifting to include
more emphasis on experiential, inquiry-based, and project-
based learning; district representatives saw farm to school
as naturally fitting into these new curricular priorities, with
a strategic link to food literacy objectives, primarily healthy
eating and developing food skills. For example, a school
district in Kamloops has adopted project-based learning
as a key framework for its curriculum in the coming years,
and farm to school programming will help fill the mandates
of this curriculum, since initiatives such as school gardens
can be incorporated into lessons across multiple subjects
and students are involved in all stages of their creation (e.g.
from researching appropriate species to plant, to scaling
up recipes for cooking harvested vegetables). District rep-
resentatives see this curricular connection as being key to
maintaining and building support for farm to school activi-
ties among school district administrators and teachers.
Discussion: farm toschool andfood sovereignty
inBC
Farm to school programs have the potential to contribute
to goals of food sovereignty by taking the critical step of
connecting primarily consumer-focused concerns around
healthy eating and food skills to the need for structural
changes in the food system as a whole, including by sup-
porting local farmers through mediated markets, improving
the quality of food available to school children, and estab-
lishing social infrastructure towards broader food literacy
and public engagement in food systems. When situated
within broader discussions of structural change in food
systems, farm to school initiatives around food access and
justice, traditional cultural food practices, school gardens,
harvesting wild foods with community members, and food
preparation can not only build individual skills but also
contribute to food literacy oriented toward food sovereignty
by creating links between individual eating choices and
skills and broader community and structural food security
challenges.
In countries that have universal school meal programs,
the opportunity to insert social goals into institutional pur-
chasing contracts can provide a framework and influential
leverage point to support increased purchasing from local
farms. Leveraging public procurement spending has the
203Farm toschool inBritish Columbia: mobilizing food literacy forfood sovereignty
1 3
potential for substantial economic impact for local produc-
ers; worldwide, budgets for public procurement range from
6 to 12% of GDP, and governments have long “used their
purchasing power to achieve important redistributive and
developmental goals” (De Schutter 2014, p.2). However, in
British Columbia, for farm to school to function in a medi-
ated market role to support regional food production, struc-
tural policy changes are needed at the provincial and/or
national level. The lack of a comprehensive and universal
provincial or national government-sponsored school lunch
program means that the way food is handled in schools in
BC is both diverse and inconsistent. Many schools do not
have the capacity to purchase local food for school meals,
as they have few or no resources or facilities for any sort
of food service, which creates a structural limitation to the
role of farm to school in increasing support for local agri-
culture, at least in the short term. However, the “discursive
turn” towards food literacy as a mechanism to increase con-
sumer engagement with food systems transformation may
bear fruit in the longer term. The group of non-govern-
mental organizations that has assembled nationally as the
Coalition for Healthy School Food, and the work of some
government leaders, indicates that a Canada-wide move-
ment for a comprehensive school meal program is build-
ing. Such a program, built with knowledge of the history
and current trajectory of the national school meal programs
in other regions of the world, would likely be designed to
include a focus on incorporating locally-sourced food into
school meals.
Even if a federally-support school meal program is
not implemented in the near future, there is potential for
increased support for mediated markets at the provincial
level through grassroots mobilization for food literacy. The
steadily increasing amounts of funding in recent years for
school feeding programs for vulnerable students through
CommunityLINK, combined with the BC Ministry of
Agriculture’s focus on local procurement in its Strategic
Plan, have the potential to generate increased purchases
from local producers to supply what food is served in
schools. Realizing this potential will require such meas-
ures as support for more farmers to gain the necessary cer-
tifications to supply to large distributors and institutional
purchasers, or to develop their own collective distribution
models and traceable food safety documentation practices
that satisfy school needs. Our BC case study highlights the
shared responsibilities and cooperation required among
government, community organizations, and private produc-
ers and consumers in order to implement mediated market
interventions in support of meeting food sovereignty goals
(Desmarais and Wittman 2014).
Though farm to school programs in BC are limited in
the degree to which they can fulfill the role of support-
ing local farms as the principal supplier of school meal
programs, they are laying groundwork for other contribu-
tions to food sovereignty goals. Stakeholders in BC agree
that farm to school programs are fostering food literacy in
the students who participate in them, not only through indi-
vidual skills development and opportunities for healthy eat-
ing, but also increased understanding of the structural and
political context of food systems, environmental impacts of
food production, community food security, and cultural sig-
nificance of traditional and wild foods. Food literacy exists
at a confluence of individual knowledge, skills, access, and
beliefs, where they interact with policies, programs, avail-
ability, and culture (Cullen etal. 2015). The food literacy
work that students—in collaboration with their parents and
community organizations—are developing in elementary
and secondary school thus has strong theoretical potential
to lead to increased social and political engagement in food
systems throughout their lives. For example, these initia-
tives may affect how future citizens direct their consumer
spending in relation to more “healthy,” “sustainable,” and/
or “local” foods; lead students and their families to become
directly involved in food production; or lead them to sup-
port policy initiatives over time related to the food system
at large. British Columbia’s farm to school movement is
thus one pathway helping to support the transformation
of the food system, emphasizing the potential for broader
citizen involvement in supporting food sovereignty goals
(Block et al. 2011; Clendenning et al. 2016). Our work
highlights the need for ongoing assessment of farm to
school programming, in particular in relation to outcomes
of mediated markets such as institutional procurement for
supporting local producers, for short- and long-term out-
comes for student and other participants, and in relation to
broader policy mobilization for food sovereignty.
In conclusion, our examination of farm to school organ-
izing in British Columbia demonstrated both challenges
and opportunities for farm to school initiatives to function
as a mechanism towards food sovereignty. Our study con-
tributes to the growing body of literature examining food
sovereignty in urban and Global North contexts (Wittman
etal. 2011; Alkon and Mares 2012; Desmarais and Witt-
man 2014; Laidlaw and Magee 2014; Cidro et al. 2015),
while also illuminating barriers to realizing the benefits of
increased public food procurement for local farmers when
there is no or limited state-supported infrastructure for
school meals—a situation that has the potential to expand
to other G8 countries if funding for nutrition programs is
reduced as part of government spending cutbacks. While
the lack of a Canadian national school meal program is
a major hurdle that limits the potential of farm to school
programs to support local producers, there are both oppor-
tunities for increasing local procurement within the exist-
ing framework and growing public momentum for policy
changes that could lead to universal school meals. Even
204 L.J.Powell, H.Wittman
1 3
when they do not involve the procurement of local food for
school meals, education-focused farm to school programs
in BC and other areas are building food literacy in school
age children who will have significant future economic and
political power. As populations in the Global North wres-
tle with wide-ranging food systems challenges, including
ongoing unequal access to healthy and culturally-appro-
priate foods; increasing financialization and degradation of
farmland; and uncertainty about export markets and import
consistency due to changing trade policies, increased
food literacy education can help close the discursive gaps
between concerns of consumers and producers, with food
sovereignty serving as a uniting framework.
Acknowledgements We are grateful for research assistance from
Winie Vasconcelos and Ricardo Barbosa, and farm to school program
support from Vanessa Perrodou and Amber Cowie. This research was
partially funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research
Council of Canada and the Public Health Association of British
Columbia.
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Lisa Jordan Powell PhD is a postdoctoral research fellow jointly
appointed at the University of British Columbia and University of the
Fraser Valley. Her research focuses on food systems, farm to institu-
tion, food literacy, and agricultural land use.
Hannah Wittman PhD is Associate Professor and Academic
Director of the Centre for Sustainable Food Systems at the Univer-
sity of British Columbia. She conducts community based research
related to food sovereignty, land reform, and sustainable agricultural
transitions.
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