Bountiful Harvest

The rural nature of life on the South Fork is under siege, and has been for a long time, but there is one place where you can still see the benefit of living atop some of the best agricultural soils on the planet: in local school cafeterias.

One of the great movements locally has been the effort to support farmers by purchasing locally sourced food for school cafeterias, which has the added benefit of giving young people a healthy taste of what’s grown around them. Recently, the East End Food Institute received a $100,000 state grant to support its East End Farm-to-School program, which began in 2020 and includes schools in Southampton, Tuckahoe, Riverhead, Bridgehampton and Westhampton Beach.

It’s the third year the institute has gotten the grant from the state, which recognizes successful programs, and it’s in line for continued federal support as well. The program takes the region’s bountiful harvest and distributes a portion of it to the schools by allowing farmers to list their produce in an online catalog, which school food service directors use to make purchases — a simple system, but one that is necessary to connect the farms to the school cafeterias.

The program does more: it highlights seasonal crops to encourage cafeterias to add them to school menus, provides local food tastings to students, trains cafeteria workers in preparing meals from scratch using local ingredients, and supports school gardens and new kitchen equipment.

The East End Food Institute began as the Amagansett Food Institute and moved into commercial kitchen space based on the Stony Brook Southampton campus. Recently, it opened the East End Food Market in Riverhead, creating retail space for its products, and it could serve as a developmental hub for small companies looking to market local food products.

But its Farm-to-School Project is a true success story, with benefits abounding. The farms have a new market to serve, one that’s easy to deliver to. Schools get access to fresh, healthy produce, and an opportunity to encourage students not only to eat better but to develop more of a connection to the agricultural community surrounding them, and to even get their hands into the soil themselves.

It would be difficult to find a better use for $100,000, or to reap a bigger bounty from that investment.