An hour ago, this room at City Neighbors Charter School in Northeast Baltimore was filled with sweaty, sneakered sixth-graders running laps in gym class. Now it's noon, and children sit at folding tables contemplating their next meal. On today's menu: cheeseburgers, tater tots, and peas, each in its own plastic-covered Styrofoam container. I, the intrepid journalist, am here to join in the school lunch experience.

The meal is, frankly, awful. The containers are hard to break into: The plastic tops don't peel off easily and have to be stabbed with the only utensil available, the ubiquitous "spork." The whole-wheat bun looks OK, but the burger is rubbery. When I fold the patty in half, it doesn't break, and it tastes like it smells: salty, a little musty. The tater tots are the most appetizing feature of the meal, probably because they are little more than fried, salty starch.

Did I really spork my way through such fare when I was in school, or have my standards just risen with age? My lunch-mates, eighth graders Ryan Becker and Latravious "Tra" Holley, assure me that I'm not alone. About a year ago, they earned some notoriety—and a story in the Sun—when they took their case against the food to the school board. Exhibit A: that day's lunch.

"It was fish nuggets," Becker says.

Holley groans. "Oh, God. Fish nuggets."

"We gave it to the board, and one of them started to eat it and he spit it out," Becker says. "He said, ‘I don't know how you guys have been doing this all year.'"

Khadijah Wilson, a seventh-grader sitting nearby, offers this description of the mashed potatoes: "You could drink 'em."

But there is hope. There, on the corner of my tray, sits a glowing ball of pure food: a peach. I bite into it, and the cool, sweet juice trickles down my chin.

During the first month of school, tens of thousands of Baltimore school kids ate Maryland peaches, grown at Baugher's Farm in Carroll County. (See "The Ripe Stuff," June '08 Urbanite.) The peaches represented a promise: In a school system flooded with pre-plated meals of questionable nutritional value, kids might soon be eating real food again. The promise came courtesy the Baltimore City Public Schools' new director of food and nutrition, Tony Geraci.




The product of a Sicilian father and a mother who came from a family of "dirt-poor sharecroppers, Creoles from the Delta country," Geraci spent his early years up in the Crescent City's notorious Desire Street Projects. He learned cooking from his grandmothers. His father's mother is celebrating her 100th birthday this year. "She still cooks," Geraci says.

In and out of trouble as a kid, Geraci left home at 15, found work cooking on cargo ships, then spent about a year and a half in the U.S. Army before an injury got him discharged. He received formal culinary and business training at Victor Valley Hospitality College in California and returned to New Orleans to manage nightclubs. In 1980, Geraci moved to Santa Cruz, California, and opened a series of six restaurants, including Antoine's Inn New Orleans, his most successful. "I had the first Creole restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is much like having the only Chinese restaurant in a five-hundred-mile radius," he says. "You're guaranteed a certain amount of success."

It was in Santa Cruz that Geraci began using local food. Unlike his Bay Area contemporary Alice Waters—she of the pioneering locavore shrine Chez Panisse—he didn't do it out of a moral obligation to save farmers or the planet. "It was about keeping my business going," he says. "Local food is fresher food. Fresher food creates a better product. A better product keeps my customers coming back."

In 1988, Geraci sold his restaurants and followed his first wife back to her native New Hampshire to raise their three children. There, he got into food brokerage, turning his chef's mind to the business side of food, until the death of a childhood friend from alcohol and drug abuse led him to reevaluate his priorities. "I had to go identify the body," he says. Geraci holds up his thumb and forefinger, as if measuring something small. "I realized this is how long we're here, and this is what we get to do while we're here. I thought, ‘From this moment on, my life is different.'

"Some people talk about going quietly through life," he says. "F that. I want to carve my initials on the place and say ‘I was here, and I made a difference.'"

He started small, with the 2,800-student Contoocook Valley School District. In 2003, he put New Hampshire apples and cider on lunch trays in district schools; by the end of 2005, more than 108,000 school kids from forty-four districts were eating apples grown in their state. Then came local lettuce and bagels. Elisabeth Farrell, program coordinator for the University of New Hampshire's Office of Sustainability, worked closely with Geraci on the Contoocook project. "He went beyond the basics and integrated a lot of new things into the district there," she says. "Going into the food service with his chef's background perspective gave him a different approach."

Geraci went on to do consulting for school districts nationwide, and he also started a program called First Course, a culinary training school in Keene, New Hampshire, for adults who are low income, developmentally disabled, or recovering from substance abuse or mental illness. Eventually, word spread south. In 2006, Jill Wrigley, a Baltimore advocate for school meal reform, called Geraci while doing an Abell-Foundation-funded study for BEEF: the Baltimore Efficiency and Economy Foundation. Wrigley brought Geraci to Baltimore and introduced him to then-schools CEO Eric Letsinger, who offered Geraci the job as school food chief. 

Geraci declined. He says the schools were in upheaval, and he didn't feel that he would have the support he needed to create change.

After a changing of the administrative guard, developer Ted Rouse, founder of the Chesapeake Sustainable Business Alliance, got Geraci an audience with new Baltimore Schools CEO Andrés Alonso, who convinced him to apply for the job of director of food and nutrition. This time, Geraci accepted the gig, sailing south in July aboard his Pearson 365 ketch. (He came alone: His youngest child is now in college; his second wife is in law school in New Hampshire.) His mission, he says, is to make the food in the Baltimore schools "the best in the nation. I am hopeful this will become a model, a catalyst for change for every school district in the country."

It's a significant undertaking. There are 82,000 students in the Baltimore City public schools—and not many are accustomed to fresh vegetables or whole grains. According to a 2007 report released by the Johns Hopkins Children's Hospital, obesity among children ages 6 to 11 has more than tripled since 1980. Type 2 diabetes is now one of the most common child health problems in Baltimore.





Among Geraci's first challenges: teach school cooks how to cook again. In 159 of 215 Baltimore public school kitchens, there is no real cooking going on at all; food is "pre-plated," shipped frozen from a manufacturer in New Jersey, and re-heated by cafeteria workers. Many kitchens are no longer even equipped for cooking.

The city is bound for another year by a contract with the New Jersey supplier, but down the road, Geraci envisions providing kids with fresh, locally produced food every day. Imagine, he says: chicken nuggets made from whole chickens rather than processed meat, breaded on-site and baked with Cajun spices; oven-roasted sweet potato fries; whole-grain sourdough pizza with fresh veggies.

Geraci also wants kids to have a say in what's on their trays—and a hand in cooking it. Beginning next spring, every school in the system will take part in a citywide contest. Kids will develop breakfast and lunch menus based on federal nutrition guidelines, earning extra points if they include a family recipe, source the ingredients locally, or make use of U.S. Department of Agriculture commodities—cheap staples provided by the government specifically to be used in school lunches.

"The outcome I'm hoping to achieve is a cultural and culinary tapestry of our city," he says. "All these neighborhoods are unique and diverse and have their own style and their own flavor."

Geraci is also creating an educational horticultural center at the old Bragg Nature Center, 33 acres of nearly abandoned backwoods off Route 40 next to Patapsco State Park. Ultimately, he hopes to turn the Bragg farm into the national center for the Farms to Schools organization, where kids can learn about farming and food services directors from around the country can train, using Baltimore as their model of a food education system that works.



All this represents the whirlwind arrival of a movement that got its start in 1995, when Alice Waters teamed up with the staff at Berkeley's graffiti-laden Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School to turn a vacant lot into a garden. The project spawned the Edible Schoolyard program, a nonprofit that encourages students to grow their own food and participate in cooking it.

Despite the Baltimore school system's lack of resources—especially relative to affluent Berkeley—Geraci insists that adopting locally sourced food doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive. Throughout September, cafeteria facilities supervisor Jeff Wilson brought in six hundred cases of Baugher's Farm peaches each week. Fruit from a wholesaler would have cost $5 more per case, Wilson says. Geraci claims that buying bulk ingredients will be cheaper than purchasing the pre-prepared meals that kids are eating now. "The only people who benefit from the ‘pre-plate' system are the companies themselves," he says.

But there's another hurdle, says Dr. Antonia Demas, president of the Food Studies Institute, a nonprofit based in Trumansburg, New York: getting kids to eat what he serves. "Kids eat what they're used to," Demas says. And what they're used to is Styrofoam-packaged nuggets and burgers.

Arugula can be scary—and there's where Demas comes in. She created a food education program called "Food Is Elementary" that takes kids through two semesters of nutritional education, beginning with an introduction to the food pyramid and ending with a culinary tour of world cultures. Demas has brought the program to eight schools in Baltimore, mainly charter schools, and she and Geraci are working to spread the curriculum citywide.

Demas conducted a study on Baltimore, which she'll present at the conference "Nutrition: The Missing Link in Education" at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health on November 6. According to the study, the Food Is Elementary curriculum costs $229 per student per year. The average cost of a year's treatment for diabetes is $6,650.

Geraci has his own ideas about getting kids to eat better. "You have to out-McDonald's McDonald's," he says. "Kids understand Happy Meals—they get Happy Meals because they want the crap inside." He's created boxed "Breakfast Breaks" to encourage more kids to take advantage of the public schools' free breakfast program. The boxes feature nutritional word searches and neighborhood maps on the outside, and, on the inside, the chance to win baseball cards and music downloads. Oh, and a balanced meal.

But if Ryan Becker and Tra Holley are any indication, healthy food may not be too tough a sell. At the end of our meal at City Neighbors, I ask my new friends what they think about the changes afoot in the lunchroom. "I'm happy with Dr. Alonso," Becker says of the schools CEO. "I think he did a great job getting Tony [Geraci] in here. He listened to us."

"The thing that sucked me into this town is that whole ‘Believe' thing," Geraci says. "And I know it sounds hokey, but on my car I've got, ‘B'lieve, Hon.' And I believe, hon, that you can do this stuff. You just need to stop having meetings about meetings about meetings to form action plans to make subcommittees. You need to get off your ass and do it."

—Rebecca Messner wrote about the Open Society Institute's community fellows program in the August issue.




On November 6, Tony Geraci will be a participating speaker at "Nutrients: The Missing Link in Education," a conference on food literacy in public schools at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, co-sponsored by the Food Studies Institute and the Johns Hopkins Center for a Livable Future. For more information, go to www.foodstudies.org/Conference/index.htm.



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