Hawaiʻi schools are buying less local food during the pandemic

“I feel like we’re at an impasse,” said state Rep. Amy Perruso. “It’s bizarre because we have this synergy, we have this public understanding about the need to move to local food purchases for our local institutions, including schools, prisons and hospitals, and frankly what I’ve seen is the department pushing back hard.”

In October the DOE finalized its menu for the 2022-2023 school year, but advocacy groups have not seen it and it’s unclear how much local food will be consumed by students at school next year, said Daniela Spoto, director of anti-hunger initiatives at the Hawaiʻi Appleseed Center for Law and Economic Justice.

“I think a lot of people had high hopes that Farm to School was going to happen before the pandemic and now it seems like the furthest thing,” Spoto said. “We’ve been trying to be supportive and it just seems like they’re really struggling.”

Rather than move local food from one market to another, it’s crucial that the farm-to-school program actually helps Hawaii grow its agricultural economy and, in doing so, benefits farmers of all sizes, according to Hunter Heaivilin, a food system resilience consultant with the Hawaiʻi Public Health Institute and a longtime food system planner in Honolulu.

“You can easily give a larger operator here another thousand acres and a state contract, and we could get the local food on the plate,” Heaivilin said. “But does that meet the goals that are held by the farm-to-school community? I don’t think so. And so there still needs to be better systems in place to ensure that our focus is less on calories and more on livelihoods because, up to this point, it’s about things getting produced, not who benefits from the growth of this industry.”