Buying Local Food for Schools

Floor Speech

Ms. PINGREE of Maine. Mr. Speaker, today I introduced a bill that will make it easier for schools to buy local food. In America, we have slowly moved further and further away from feeding our children healthy, nutritious food in school. At the same time we have watched while thousands of family-run farms have literally disappeared.

In Maine, many of our schools go out of their way to purchase food from local farms. But dwindling school budgets and competing priorities have resulted in less money for local food options in cafeterias.

My bill frees up money for schools to buy locally produced food by giving them the option to spend 10 percent of what they receive for government commodities on food from local farmers. This will not only bring healthy, high-quality food into our schools, it will also pump more money into our local economies.

On average, an apple travels 1,500 miles from farm to school. This bill gives schools the freedom to buy apples from their neighbors and keep every dollar spent in the community instead of traveling across the country and back again.

I look forward to working on this bill with my colleagues, and I thank those who have already supported it.

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