Lettuce and Yams for Students An Hour After Harvest: 30 Percent of Red Hook School Lunches Are Now Sourced Local


For the second year in a row, Red Hook schools meet the demanding threshold of 30 percent of food sourced locally (photo courtesy Larry Anthony).
In the cafeterias of Red Hook’s public schools, a small revolution is brewing. Where far-off frozen meats, peas, and canned peaches once dominated, students’ trays are now filled with a rainbow variety of locally sourced watermelon radishes, paired with locally made pasta and tomato sauce, and meatballs made of beef raised mere miles away.
This shift, in the making for years, is in part the brainchild of Red Hook Central School District Food Service Director Larry Anthony, a Hudson Valley native who has been on a mission to source locally at least 30 percent of the lunches of the three districts he serves. Red Hook is on deck to achieve the target for the second year in a row.
To Anthony, sourcing locally is simply “the proper thing to do, especially in this area,” chock-full of renowned farms. “Students and parents deserve to know where the food is coming from,” he said.
The 30-percent local initiative, commonly referred to as The 30 Percent, is not just Anthony’s personal goal, but part of a statewide effort. In place since 2018, the initiative incentivizes New York schools to source from New York farms, thereby promoting a stronger local economy and healthier meals for students. A 25-cent reimbursement for every school lunch versus the typical 6-cent remit, is provided to schools that meet the 30 percent goal. Each meal costs the district between $1.65 to $2 to produce.
Red Hook is among only 7 percent of all districts in New York State that have reached the 30-percent local sourcing benchmark. Anthony is among only six other food service directors meeting this goal in the Hudson Valley.

Larry Anthony is leading the charge in Red Hook to serve locally sourced foods in school lunches (photo courtesy of Larry Anthony).
After learning about the initiative when it debuted, Anthony worked for years to meet its stringent requirements, which require thorough documentation of every item in each lunch, from the milk – Red Hook’s comes from Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy, processed in Kingston – to the butternut squash, sourced through Germantown’s Hudson Harvest. All of this careful counting goes into the documentation Anthony sends to the state each year, which has to prove that he has spent at least 30 percent of total food costs on food produced in New York state. After meeting the 30-percent initiative in Red Hook last school year, and skating in just below the margin in Rhinebeck and Pine Plains, where he also runs the schools’ food programs, Anthony estimates that this year, at least 40 percent of his Red Hook menu is locally sourced, and the share is continuing to grow.
Anthony now juggles incoming crates of veggies, meats, and dairy from over 22 local producers to include in the 600 lunches his team serves to Red Hook students each day. Energetic by nature, he says that experimenting with what he serves keeps his, and his team’s, motivation, high. “Institutional food is not glamorous,” Anthony said, but “that shouldn’t take away from finding the freshest possible food we can.” A veteran and former cook for the Navy, and a cook at the Culinary Institute of America, Anthony found his way into school districts in the early 1990s and developed a love for working in schools and providing hands-on experiences with food for students. He has, for instance, become well-known for his tastings, through which he has introduced students to everything from fiddlehead ferns, a Northeastern delicacy that grows wild in spring, to live calves from local milk producer Hudson Valley Fresh Dairy of Arlington.
Sourcing locally, instead of through large food distributors like Sysco and the USDA is, by every measure, harder, said Anthony. Anthony juggles 22 suppliers to source his meals, while schools relying on the USDA for fruits and vegetables have just two. On top of this, Anthony has to balance a budget with more inputs due to more suppliers. Local food also inherently has higher costs than food from major distributors delivering canned vegetables or pre-packaged meals. A 2020 article in the agriculture news website, Civil Eats, reported that in Buffalo, the hot dogs and hamburgers sourced from small New York producers cost three times the price of commodity meats. Anthony also needs to find distributors or individuals to move crates of food from local farms to school kitchens, which adds cost, as well.
The economics of school lunch through the National School Lunch Program (NSLP) have always been complex and have relied on cutting costs by providing low-cost food. The NSLP was signed into law in 1946 to provide low-cost, or free, nutritionally balanced meals for students, and has the same aim today along with the same constraints around keeping costs low. Last year, the government spent $10.23 billion on school lunches, according to statistics from the Education Data Initiative. There is “a lot of the red tape here,” to procure food from outside of the NSLP, Anthony said. “It is disheartening how little priority [the government] puts into school nutrition,” he added.

Among the projects at Sam Rose’s Four Corners Community farm are programs where young growers learn to farm (photo courtesy of Sam Rose).
Just across the way from Red Hook’s youngest learners at Mill Road Primary School, Four Corners Community Farm aids Anthony’s mission to get fresh produce into the hands of students at Red Hook schools. Founded in the early days of the pandemic, Four Corners is a community garden that features 42 community garden plots for seasonal adoption by local residents. Rose, who has two children at Mill Road Primary, said that farming less than half a mile from the school motivated him to consider ways to get Four Corners’ produce into school meals.
In August 2023, Rose began dedicating parts of his garden to the production of salad greens just for Mill Road; he then harvested them and carried them down the road throughout last fall. “I literally go across the street and within an hour of harvest, they’re in the cafeteria,” said Rose. “It doesn’t get any fresher.”
Rose said he has found the process of supplying produce to Mill Road easier than he expected. Due to the small size of his farm, there are fewer legal barriers and regulations than a large, 1,000-acre farm or grocery store might have to supply food to schools. “It’s really hard to trace a contaminated bag of lettuce back to its source unless you have these regulations – bar codes, handling procedures, protocols for record-keeping and so on that actually allow recalls to happen,” Rose said. “In my case, I am across the street and public-facing. I have every incentive in the world to run a clean operation.”
Four Corners’ partnership with Anthony also has encouraged Rose to look for ways to expand his operation to increase food production for the school. “Last summer we got Larry on the property,” said Rose, and an even stronger relationship was born. Now, Anthony said, “I can call Sam and say ‘I’ve got money,’ to spend” and see what Rose might have on offer. “He’s a small farm, which is a huge reason why this generates a lot of excitement,” Anthony added. “A school district that can get their lettuce right across the street is unheard of.”

Farmer Sam Rose is supplying lettuce to the school district and hopes to expand production (photo by Kathryn Wheeler).
Local sourcing isn’t just a boon to schools, it’s an economic boost to farmers, a 2016 Cornell University study showed. According to the study, if schools were to source just one kind of New York-grown fruit or vegetable per week, this could increase cumulative yearly revenue for farmers by $9.2 million for vegetables and $5.3 million for fruit statewide In rural areas, this can be highly beneficial to local economies, according to the American Farmland Trust, an organization that advocates for local farmers nationwide. According to data from the Farmland Information Center online database, if 75 percent of New York schools reached the 30 percent goal, this would generate over $210 million in economic impact statewide and cost the state just over $94 million over five years in reimbursement and support. In 2023, the state allocated $134 for school lunches, 40 percent more than the projected cost of switching to 75 percent local sourcing.
Four Corners could be a benefactor as well as a contributor. Rose is now looking to Cornell Cooperative Extensions’s Regional Farm-to-School Coordinator, Katie Sheehan-Lopez, for technical assistance to apply for grants to expand his operation. Currently, Four Corners does not generate sufficient proceeds from school sales to financially justify the labor and inputs, said Rose, although, he added “I don’t think that’s the intention.” With additional grants or community donations, Rose remains optimistic about the potential of creating a local food pipeline from his farm to the school. “I would love to think that one day we could supply salad bars in every single school and have fresh ingredients all year long,” he said.
Now, Anthony is working with his staff to teach them how to wash and dice carrots that arrive with soil attached and how to prepare raw local chicken. This level of preparation, which requires spicing, tasting, and developing recipes from scratch, replaces plastic-covered, pre-cooked meals, said Anthony. The 40 staff members across the districts he manages, whom Anthony describes as “a handful of foodies that really enjoy preparing and cooking food,” also receive knife handling lessons and are trained in the highest level of food preparation through the ServSafe certification.

Lettuces grown at Four Corners are picked and transported for inclusion in school lunches on the same day (photo by Sam Rose).
Anthony says he finds delight in witnessing how students interact with his meals, which continue to be an experiment in coaxing vegetables, many a child’s worst enemy, into a delicious exercise. “If kids don’t like butternut squash, they don’t care where it’s coming from,” Anthony joked, but he noted there is growing enthusiasm now after the student taste testings. After all, he says hopefully, students’ palates can change over time.
Even fifth-graders have expressed enthusiasm about the initiative, far beyond the amusement of being taste testers. Cooper H. is among them. “New York is my favorite state, and [it] has a variety of resources that I can trust as it’s grown in our local area,” he told The Daily Catch through Anthony. As a gardener herself, Olivia H. agreed. “I like that we are purchasing from our local farms. The veggies are safe, fresh, and very good for us.” She said she raises chickens, ducks, and other birds, as well. “We also grow our own vegetables so I can appreciate the efforts.” For these students, trusting their food was front of mind. “I know I can trust our local products. It’s fresher than getting it from far away, the supply is close by,” said Arlo M., who added, “I can drive by the local farms and know that I am in good hands.”
Parents, too, have been surprised by the difference between Red Hook lunches and those they remember from their childhoods. “I grew up with the mentality of ‘Don’t eat school lunches,’ ” said high-school parent Dana Iova-Koga, who grew up in Asheville, N.C., and moved to Red Hook recently with her daughter, a high-school student. “I feel much more inclined to have my daughter buy school lunch knowing about this percentage of locally sourced ingredients,” she said. “There are so many farms around here. It’s a real asset to feed back into the community that way.”

Kate Sheehan-Lopez promotes the 30-percent initiative statewide (photo courtesy Cornell Cooperative Extension).
Anthony is now working to integrate even more plant-based replacements in what can often be a meat-based menu. He bases this move on a growing body of research about the benefits of a plant-based diet. Anthony is also looking toward legislative changes that would give districts benefits for providing locally sourced breakfast, which is currently not a part of the 30-percent program. This year, school breakfast is provided free in the Red Hook district through a $20,000 donation from the Ascienzo Family Foundation. This year 40 percent of Red Hook students eat school-provided breakfast versus 18 percent in the prior year.
To Sheehan-Lopez, who works to promote the 30-percent initiative in six counties, Anthony stands out. “There’s a wide range of levels of interest in farm-to-school because it is significantly more work to find these local products,” Sheehan-Lopez said. Anthony “has quite a lot of energy to talk to all these different local producers and distributors and to have the capacity to think about new and creative menu ideas.” Other districts have tried, Sheehan-Lopez continued, but to achieve the 30-percent benchmark remains a huge lift. “It’s a big accomplishment,” she said.
In February, Anthony is serving 12 of 19 meals using locally sourced ingredients, from cheeseburgers and pasta to tacos. He will also celebrate his thirtieth year working in the school lunch industry, where he says he continues to learn and experiment each year. There’s an “evolution and new perspective on where it’s going, and I don’t want to be chasing it,” Anthony said. I want to be “at least keeping up with it, if not ahead.”

Local vegetables abound in the Red Hook school lunch program (photo by Larry Anthony).
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