PORT TOWNSEND — Port Townsend School District’s food program is ahead of the curve, cooking all of its meals from scratch, growing and processing many of its vegetables and teaching students the full life cycle of their meals.
In the coming weeks, a Salish Coast Elementary School-located greenhouse complete with heated concrete floors, a swamp-water cooling system and aquaponic tables, likely will cross the permitting finish line, said Shannon Gray, the district’s food service director.
The tables, purchased with an $8,000 grant from the Port Townsend Food Co-op, are expected to produce 150 heads of lettuce weekly throughout the winter. Also, the system will add to the schools’ basil production.
“We probably have over 200 pounds of basil that we have turned into pesto (this year),” Gray said.
Staff voluntarily choose to work on processing the basil over the summer, when they process it and freeze it.
The pesto, which will last the whole year, is a student favorite when served on whole grain pasta.
A recently published book on the district’s food system — “Interplanted: Growing Foodies from Scratch” — was compiled by Mary Hunt.
The book includes recipes in servings of 500 or five. The recipes include checkmarks for ingredients produced in the school district’s gardens.
The scaled-up pesto recipe, which includes sunflower seeds, parmesan cheese, olive oil and lemon juice, calls for 62 gallons of fresh basil leaves and a gallon and a quart of minced garlic, harvested from campus gardens.
While full-time school district production gardener Neil Howe and weekly volunteers from the Jefferson County Food Bank Association’s Food Bank Growers are responsible for harvesting crops, kitchen staff are responsible for processing vegetables.
In addition to expanding Howe’s hours to full time, the school district bolstered and expanded its food program when it became one of 264 subgrantees of the Healthy Meal Initiative (HMI) in 2023. The $150,000 grant is offered through a partnership between Action for Healthy Kids (AFHK) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Food and Nutrition Service.
Former county commissioner Kate Dean wrote the grant application, which allowed the school district to purchase a root washer, soil and fencing, a 5-gallon salad spinner, food processors, electric choppers and blenders, among other items.
When the district received the grant, the current location was bare ground. A house occupied the location at one point, Gray said.
“Taking that land and being able to make it into a garden has been very challenging,” she said.
The soil wasn’t great, so the district trucked in tons and tons of soil, Gray said.
So far this year, the garden has produced about 5,000 pounds of produce on roughly a quarter of an acre, Gray said. That’s down from last year, because of delays on the greenhouse.
In addition to food grown in the Salish Coast production garden, as well as at the high school’s garden, the school district purchases produce from local farmers.
The school district has purchased its beef from Westbrook Angus in Chimacum since 2018. It purchases its pork and breakfast sausage from One Straw Ranch in Chimacum.
The district also maintains a relationship with county food bank association. It provides the bank with excess food; the bank does the same in return, when excess food is available, Gray said.
The district moved to cooking all of its meals from scratch in 2016.
Gray, who worked as a baker prior to the district’s move toward cooking from scratch, was promoted to be the lead cook after the previous cook resigned.
The move to cooking all meals from scratch, motivated by then-Superintendent David Engle, was not an easy transition, Gray said.
“Half our staff quit,” she said. “You’re going from dumping in a pan or putting it in the oven to having to chop and dice and cook everything, for the same amount of pay.”
For Gray, the learning curve was an inspiring and all-consuming opportunity. Previous to the role, she did not consider herself a cook.
Early days of the cook-from-scratch program saw a dramatic drop-off in student meals being eaten, Gray said. But as staff dialed in what kids wanted, engagement increased. Now, more students than ever before are choosing to eat at school.
Of about 1,100 students in the district, 275 breakfasts and 675 lunches were served on Tuesday, Gray said. That’s about an average day, she added.
In addition to pesto pasta, high school students particularly love the salad bar, which — complete with kitchen-made dressings — can never be stocked enough, Gray said. Another student favorite includes some kind of Mexican dish on Tuesdays.
“Tacos and nachos are their favorites,” Gray said. “We do all of our cheese sauce from scratch.”
Pizza is another student favorite. Tomatoes from the garden are used for the scratch-made sauce.
Gray also likes to add a new recipe to the mix about once a month to expand the students’ palettes. Currently pinned to her office bulletin board is a recipe for posole, a Mexican soup with hominy, often served with pork.
Staff previously have received training from Arran Stark, Jefferson Healthcare’s executive chef, and now they go to Pike Place Market’s Atrium Kitchen in Seattle for training annually.
Gray recently traveled to New Mexico to tour an aquaponics facility with some of her staff.
Beyond the improved flavor and increased nutritional value the district’s approach offers students, the food program is an educational opportunity.
“It’s an incredible learning opportunity to be able to teach kids where their food comes from, what it looks like in all stages, to be able to look at a basil leaf and eat it in the garden and know that that’s getting transformed into a pesto that we’re going to eat for lunch,” Gray said.
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Reporter Elijah Sussman can be reached by email at elijah.sussman@peninsualdailynews.com.
