“Buy Local, Cook Fresh Illinois” is a comprehensive training project helping three rural Central Illinois schools transform their food service programs into scratch-cooking operations that use locally sourced ingredients. The cohort approach allows participants to collaborate and learn together, creating a community of schools to help build and support a local school food system. Participating schools are gaining the skills to incorporate local and fresh food into nourishing meals that students want to eat and staff want to make.
This project is training schools to use fresh, local ingredients in scratch-cooking, thereby generating the demand for larger, consistent orders of local foods. This transformative project is building upon past successes in Illinois and establishing a regional model from which other districts can learn and adopt. The project team is creating the opportunity for large-scale change to local school food systems and meal production, as part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Food and Nutrition Service’s Healthy Meals Incentives (HMI) Initiative, which strengthens connections between farmers and schools to get more healthy, American-grown foods into children’s school meals. As regional cohorts grow in size beyond the lifecycle of this project, there will be more farmers and schools to serve.
Hear why school leaders and food service professionals are energized by “Buy Local, Cook Fresh Illinois,” and learn how they see it transforming their region in this video.