Jennifer Siebel Newsom: What California Got Right About School Food

Food with Mark Bittman

In this episode, Mark and Kate Bittman interview Jennifer Siebel Newsom about California's groundbreaking universal school meals program. Th

Key takeaways

California is the first state in the nation to pass universal school meals legislation, ensuring all public school children have access to two free meals per day.
Over 54% of students are beneficiaries of a farm-to-school grant program that prioritizes locally sourced ingredients.
The initiative supports regenerative organic agriculture by creating a stable market for small and medium-scale farmers.
Investment in infrastructure includes building scratch kitchens and establishing apprenticeship programs through the Chef Anne Foundation.
LA Unified is a major driver of this movement, moving toward purchasing only local products to serve hundreds of thousands of meals daily.

Main topics

Universal school meals legislation
Farm to School roadmap
Regenerative organic agriculture

Notable quotes

California was the first state in the nation to pass universal meals legislation.

Conclusion

The episode demonstrates how intentional policy and community partners

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:02) I'm Mark Bittman, co-host of this podcast, along with my daughter, Kate. Speaker 4 (0:07) I'm Kate Bittman, and our podcast is about food, but really it's about everything else you can think of, too, because that's the way our conversations go. If Speaker 2 (0:16) you like what you hear here, you should also check us out online. We've got a great newsletter that touches on many of the things we talk about here. Plus, we've got lots of recipes. Find us at The Bittman Project on Substack or BittmanProject.com. Speaker 4 (0:50) For today's Things We Like, I am going to hand my portion over to my child, Holden, who is going to tell you. What he liked. Speaker 2 (1:02) Really? Speaker 4 (1:03) So please hold. I bet I can guess. Holden. Hello. Speaker 2 (1:08) What'd you like this week? I'm sort of betting I can guess. Let's see if I'm right. Speaker 3 (1:13) Okay. Speaker 2 (1:14) But you tell me and then I'll tell you if I was right. I'll be honest. Speaker 3 (1:20) Me and my mom, we baked a... these hot fudge lava cakes on Saturday. Speaker 2 (1:27) That Speaker 3 (1:28) was pretty fun. And we had carbonara too on Speaker 2 (1:33) Saturday. Speaker 3 (1:34) That was good. Speaker 2 (1:36) You're into carbonara now? Speaker 3 (1:38) Yeah. Speaker 2 (1:39) I love it. Speaker 3 (1:40) I mean, I've always been into carbonara. Speaker 2 (1:42) I'm not sure that's true, Holden. It Speaker 3 (1:45) is. I mean, like eggs and noodles and bacon. What's better? Speaker 2 (1:51) And Parmesan cheese. Speaker 3 (1:53) That too. But yeah. No, Speaker 2 (1:55) nothing's better. Nothing's better. I'm glad you don't remember the days before you were into carbonara. That's good. Uh. Speaker 3 (2:04) I had some pretty good blueberries. Speaker 2 (2:07) Tell me about those fudge cakes. What were those? Speaker 3 (2:10) So the lava cakes were from How to Cook, I think. My mom just told me. I'm pretty sure this is like some sort of sponsor or something. Sponsor. That's cool. What did you like this week? Speaker 2 (2:28) Well, I like very much that you're cooking and eating all those exciting foods. And I love that you're walking to school. I think that's so exciting. That's really great. Speaker 2 (2:41) And in my life, what I like this week. I got nothing. Speaker 3 (2:48) You have nothing? I Speaker 2 (2:49) got nothing. I have to think. Get out of Speaker 3 (2:51) here. Bye. Speaker 4 (2:57) So after our interview with the fabulous Mara Fleischman, co-founder of Chef Anne, we heard from the team of first partner Jennifer Siebel Newsome, and they were wondering if we would be interested in having her on to talk about her experience with school food. And of course, we said yes. First Speaker 2 (3:18) partner of Governor Gavin Newsome of California, who... Five years ago, signed into law universal school meals. Universal school meals. First in the nation effort ensuring all public school children all have access to two free meals per day. Sorry for the emphasis, but that's a big deal. Speaker 4 (3:39) It is a big deal. Breakfast and lunch. Speaker 2 (3:41) Right. Speaker 4 (3:42) As of June 2026, California has served nearly three and a half billion. I feel like Austin Powers right now, but Billion. Free school meals from the universal school meals program, that is. Speaker 2 (4:00) And the farm to school program works in tandem with universal school meals to ensure that more California students have access to two free school meals that are locally sourced and healthy. So at this point, not only do all kids in California have two free meals per day, more than half of those meals are farm to school. Speaker 4 (4:22) Incredible. It's really amazing thinking. I mean, to think about that in relation to where we were 20 years ago. I mean, that's real progress. Speaker 2 (4:31) Five years ago. Speaker 4 (4:32) Five years ago. Yes. It's hard to express, too, just how much of this work, at least in California, and hopefully soon in other states, how much of that work is due to the efforts of Jennifer Siebel Newsom. In 2019, she went on a listening tour of California, where she met with students, farmers, parents, educators. and school cafeteria staff. And the result of that was California's first ever farm-to-school roadmap, a roadmap to ensure that more California kids could benefit from that state's amazing farms and ranches. And Speaker 2 (5:07) there's more. This conversation covers a lot of it, and we hope that it can offer some, well, hope that there are people out there who are doing awesome things for our kids and our food system. Jennifer. It's fantastic. It's a great conversation. She's certainly one of those people. Speaker 4 (5:24) Here we are. Speaker 2 (5:26) We're here in the fabulous Acast Studios. It's our first time in the Acast Studios, isn't it? With the first partner of California, Jennifer Newsome. And we're going to talk about school lunches in California. Sounds Speaker 1 (5:39) great. Yay. Grateful to be here. So fun to be with both of you. Thank Speaker 2 (5:43) you for coming. Speaker 1 (5:44) Yeah. Now I miss my dad. Speaker 2 (5:46) Oh, I miss my dad. Oh, Speaker 1 (5:49) do you? Speaker 2 (5:51) We'll get into that later. We've done, what, half a dozen, ten podcasts about school lunches. Everybody always loves it when we do school lunches because in a way it's like a positive story. Or it's becoming a positive story. It's not entirely negative anyway. And you've been working, this is a pet project of yours in California. And you've been doing some really great stuff. So we're going to talk about that. Speaker 4 (6:23) Yay! Speaker 2 (6:24) Okay, you want to start? We love Speaker 4 (6:25) school food. Oh my goodness. Speaker 4 (6:29) This says that nearly half of California's public school students are now getting fresh, locally sourced meals to a day. Speaker 3 (6:36) Over half. I think it's more than Speaker 4 (6:37) half, though, right? Yeah, Speaker 3 (6:38) 54%. Because at the lunch Speaker 1 (6:38) yesterday, Speaker 4 (6:39) 54%. Yeah. Two a day, so breakfast and lunch. Right. Sometimes three. Which Speaker 1 (6:43) is a Speaker 4 (6:43) big deal. It's Speaker 1 (6:44) huge. Speaker 4 (6:45) When I think about what it was like when I was a kid, that was definitely not the case. Speaker 2 (6:51) Listen, 10 years ago, there was a huge struggle in New York City about whether kids should be getting breakfast. Huge. People argued against it. Oh, it's messy. They're going to do it in the classroom. Speaker 1 (7:04) Breakfast is the most important meal of the day. My mom always used to say that. Well, it's just like this conversation Speaker 4 (7:11) is so hard because there's always so much to talk about. When I think about free lunch, we talked about this yesterday. You threw a beautiful lunch. For Climate Week, we talked about the stigma that was attached. to free lunch when I was a kid, for sure. I Speaker 1 (7:27) don't know about you two, but yeah. Speaker 4 (7:30) And so now with the two meals a day, there's no stigma because everyone's getting free lunch. Right. But I guess so you're saying 54 % of kids get two free meals a day. Speaker 1 (7:42) No, no. 100 % of kids get. two free meals a day. 54 % of kids are experiencing farm to school inaction. They're beneficiaries of our farm to school grant program. So California was the first state in the nation to pass universal meals legislation. And we married it with farm to school because I wanted to ensure that California children were benefiting from California being the largest agricultural producer in the country, the fifth largest in the world. We produce a third of the nation's vegetables, three quarters of the fruits and nuts, 20 % of the milk. And if I'm feeding my kids healthy whole, more often than not, organic food, I wanted to make sure that California kids were all benefiting from the bounty. of organic regenerative food in California. And it was also a back door, a back way in to moving agriculture towards regenerative organic ag, because still such a small percentage of California farms are organic, even though the demand has increased 21 % between 2019 and 2023. So we created a roadmap to marry farm to school and universal meals so the kids were getting fresh, delicious, seasonal, locally sourced food, breakfast and lunch. And again, 54 percent of California public school kids are benefiting. Speaker 2 (9:12) So universal breakfast, universal lunch, half are getting this sort of farm to school program. Yeah. Speaker 1 (9:20) Some schools have their other funding and are doing it. have been doing it on their own. My kids, sadly, in Marin County, which is, you know, an affluent district, although there's, you know, inequity and there are communities that are under-resourced, my kids are still getting this horrific, like, greasy, plastic, you know, covered pizza, right? I think it is not ideal. Speaker 2 (9:50) That's good for the Speaker 1 (9:50) governors. Yeah, no, Speaker 2 (9:51) it Speaker 1 (9:51) makes me feel really. But 80 % of the farm to school grantees are Title I schools and our public school system is not Title I. And so we weren't prioritized. But also, all it requires is a passionate individual in the school or school district to make this a priority and then to connect the dots and to start. the process because we have created an entire, this is like an ecosystem change in the food system. That's what we've created. So what we did was we basically pulled in outside advocates in education, food, farming. healthcare to basically help us create a roadmap in partnership with an interagency working group that I convened with the Secretary of Ag, the Secretary of Health and Human Services, the Superintendent of Education, Natural Resources, EPA, Labor, et cetera, et cetera, to basically design a pathway forward to create real systems change. And so then once we had this roadmap, we created a pilot grant program that was successful. farm to school, connecting local farmers to school districts. And then we invested in kitchen infrastructure and training so that we were not just building scratch kitchens, but also creating district-wide beautiful kitchens that could supply all the schools in the district. Remember, California has 1,095 school districts. We have a lot of schools. And then we created these apprenticeship programs with the Chef Anne Foundation with funding to basically train chefs and food service workers. So it's a whole systems approach that has been very successful. And because of the success, the governor this past July basically institutionalized this so that farm to school will live on beyond us, which is very exciting. Speaker 2 (11:54) Jennifer, two things. One, you said some people get. Some kids get three meals and the other, since everybody's going to want to know this, is how does this get paid for? Speaker 1 (12:04) It's been a priority of the administration because if you think about it, we are reducing health care costs by giving kids healthy whole foods. We are we're going to start to see and you'll probably be interviewing these folks who've done the research benefits to children's cognition and behavior from eating healthy whole food. We are obviously mitigating impacts on climate. So with locally sourced food from small, medium-scale farmers that are practicing regenerative ag, 100 % of our grantees are transitioning if they're not already practicing climate-smart agriculture. So we're seeing reduction, obviously, in transport with locally sourced foods, less plastic and processing and waste. And then we're also growing local economies because we're training food service workers and upskilling them and just creating a robust ecosystem where the local community is really thriving and benefiting economically from this school, farm to school infrastructure. So the meal, the third meal is often a snack or and we saw more of this start during the pandemic where local farmers would send food home with a recipe in little bags that kids would take home to their families. But they're they're often smaller meals, but they're nutritious, delicious and, again, seasonal. Speaker 2 (13:41) So just... Speaker 2 (13:43) To go back to the money thing for a second, you convinced your representatives of all of those things you were talking. You don't have to convince me just Speaker 1 (13:52) to be Speaker 2 (13:52) clear. But you convinced your representatives that it was worth spending the money on this. Speaker 1 (13:57) Yeah. You know, look, that part is not always easy because Speaker 2 (14:01) oftentimes Speaker 1 (14:01) they would. The legislature knew how passionate I was about this. And so they would play games because the governor sets his budget. in January, a proposed budget. And then he redoes the budget in May based on the state's income. And then the legislature toys with that budget and presents their budget. And it's often a negotiation tactic. So there were times where we would actually not put our stuff in until the very end as our own. protection of the program and ecosystem. But it's a no brainer. It is a win win for everyone. And so it really took, you know, relationships and partnerships with the Women's Caucus