Lettuce Joins Short List Of Local Ingredients Served In Public Schools
May 6, 2022 (Civil Beat) by Brittany Lyte
Local lettuce will augment the short list of Hawaii-grown food products incorporated into student meals across the state’s 257 public schools next year.
For three years, the Hawaii Ulu Cooperative supplied the state’s public schools with tens of thousands of pounds of breadfruit, sweet potato, banana and papaya.
Then the Covid-19 pandemic hit, and student meals changed to rely more heavily on mainland imports. And the ulu co-op, which had been selling approximately 60,000 pounds of food a year to the DOE and started growing some new crops specifically for the department, saw its business with the public school system plummet to zero.
