Part 2 of 3 of Cooking up a Story’s interview with Marion Kalb, director of the Farm to School program of the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) out of Portland, Oregon. In this segment she addresses the financial challenges posed by bringing in local foods. However in many cases, she notes, local food can actually be less costly than food shipped in from elsewhere.
Scale, Kalb argues, could be the way of getting around price. If local producers are offered a market of a number of different schools, the likelihood is that they can offer their product or products at lower prices. The larger market would offer security, allowing local producers the ability to charge less thanks to volume. Since the school also offers a better rate of return than that offered by third party distibutors (which in many cases would end up in the school lunch program, anyway). In fact, she says, apples offered to a certain Arizona school district ended up at $22 per box, where apples shipped from out of state ended up at over $30 per box thanks to market value and transport costs. These are factors that the local market can actually avoid.
