From the archive
8 Aug 2026
In the lunchrooms around Lake Tahoe, the queue is for a red, hairy fruit called a rambutan. On pozole days the pupils shout for seconds, and when the salad bar empties the staff are asked, over and over, to fill it back up. One middle-schooler, Gage Gautheier, delivered what the cafeteria crew took as the highest available compliment: "I have literally never heard anyone complain about the food."
The meals come through California's Farm to School programme, which since 2021 has paired local farmers, ranchers and other food producers with school districts to put fresh meals in front of pupils. Tahoe-Truckee Unified is one of around five hundred districts now feeding their students this way - food that arrives from nearby farms rather than down the usual supply chains.
This month the state expanded the programme and wrote it into the Department of Food and Agriculture as a permanent fixture - no longer a time-limited initiative but a lasting part of the department's work. What carried it there was not a white paper but a behaviour, repeated across five hundred districts: trays coming back empty, salad bars running dry, children eating the food.
A school or caterer elsewhere can start where this started: one nearby farmer supplying one real dish for the lunch menu, repeated weekly for a term, at whatever price the kitchen already pays. If the trays come back empty, add a second dish and a second farm.
Regeneration International · KQED · Read the source