Food Miles

At 6:30 a.m. the dawn sky is just beginning to brighten, but the Cheng Gong Township Farmers’ Association warehouse, located on Provincial Highway 11 in Tai­tung, is already abuzz with activity, assembling the ingredients for the day’s school lunches. Two refrigerated trucks stand outside, ready to depart carrying everything needed to feed the 1,850 students in Cheng­gong and Chang­bin Townships served by the association’s lunch program.

Students at tiny, rural Zhongyong Elementary School are lucky to have the CGTFA providing their lunch services.

Many people don’t realize that the east coast doesn’t enjoy the great variety of ingredients that western Taiwan does. The tubers, greens, fruits and some of the meat that Taitung consumes all have to be transported halfway around the island.

The situation is even more dire in the county’s Cheng­gong and Chang­bin Townships, which are located in the north and accessible only via Provincial Highway 11.

School lunch ingredients must be purchased from Tai­tung City’s fruit and vegetable market, then delivered to 14 different schools along the coast. That means a round trip of more than 200 kilometers.

Transportation costs have risen even higher in recent years as a result of higher gasoline prices, effectively killing any business’s interest in operating the townships’ school-lunch concession. Even a firm willing to make the effort would be compelled to use low-quality ingredients to cover its transportation expenses.

What prompted the Cheng Gong Township Farmers’ Association, which primarily serves farmers, to take on such an unpopular task?

CGTFA president Wu ­Quande happened to be passing by Cheng­gong Township’s He­ping Elementary School one day seven years ago and watched as a contractor in a small truck unloaded boxes of lunch ingredients. The contractor piled them at the gate, whistled, then departed. When Wu walked over for a closer look, he discovered that none of the food had been refrigerated. In fact, some of it was already showing signs of spoilage, the greens wilted and the pork discolored by the long journey.

Wu points out that 70% of the children in these east-coast schools are Aboriginal kids being raised by their grandparents. These tend to be very poor households that serve up whatever they happen to have available for breakfast and dinner. Wu just couldn’t bear the idea of these kids not getting a good lunch either.

“It’s the responsibility of adults to see that kids get their fill of good food,” declares Wu. “No one else was going to do it, so the farmers’ association did!”

By buying locally, CGTFA president Wu Quande (left) is able to provide students with fresh, delicious shrimp for lunch.

The CGTFA began providing lunch services to seven Cheng­gong Township elementary and middle schools in 2006. One year later, it took on seven elementary schools in Chang­bin Township as well.

The townships’ lunch services are run on the public facilities–private operations model, which means that the schools provide the kitchens, and the CGTFA handles everything else, from the delivery of ingredients and planning of menus to the hiring of kitchen staff and management of kitchens.

Wu says that rural schools like these are very small, noting that the largest of the 14 schools the CGTFA serves has fewer than 530 students and Chang­bin’s Zhong­yong Elementary just 40-some.

“Based on Tai­tung’s average school-lunch price of NT$39, Zhong­yong takes in less than NT$1,800 per day from its lunches. That isn’t enough to cover the cost of both food and kitchen staff,” says Wu.

The CGTFA uses volume purchases to minimize food costs, but its high personnel expenses remain a headache.

Qiu Qin­sheng, who heads the association’s distribution department, says that the Tai­tung County Government requires schools to have one kitchen worker for every 200 students. Based on that standard and the roughly 1,850 lunches CGTFA prepares daily, the association should have had to employ only nine kitchen staffers. However, the schools it serves are so spread out that it is impossible to prepare all the meals at a single central kitchen. Instead, it operates a kitchen staffed by one or two workers at each school, giving it 19 employees in total.

High transportation and personnel expenses caused CGTFA to lose more than NT$100,000 in its first year operating the lunch concession. “Our experience over the last few years is that we’re pretty happy if we can just break even,” says Qiu.

Though it hasn’t been easy, CGTFA has remained committed to superior-quality food for the students. The Council of Agriculture and the Council of Indigenous Peoples provided the association with the funds to purchase three refrigerated trucks, enabling it to ensure the freshness of the school lunch program’s produce. Employees take turns driving them, setting out at dawn along different routes to guarantee that all 14 schools have their ingredients in hand by 9 a.m.

The program also does its utmost to support CGTFA farmers, buying its fruit, livestock products, and seasonings from the association’s own market, and contracting to purchase fresh vegetables from farmers belonging to the CGTFA’s production and marketing groups.

Qiu says that the CGTFA’s three extant vegetable marketing groups consist of 36 farmers averaging more than 55 years of age. Prior to joining the groups, these seniors had been barely getting by on the few thousand NT dollars they received in monthly allowances to elderly farmers or subsidies for letting their fields lie fallow. Now they have steady business from the schools, which has revitalized their fallow fields and increased their incomes.

This type of school lunch program, wherein a farmers’ association provides ingredients and oversees operations, is becoming mainstream at small schools in remote parts of Tai­tung County. Even the Tai­tung County Farmers’ Association, located in Tai­tung City, has become involved, providing lunch services to a number of small schools in Tai­mali and Dawu, remote townships south of the city.

Zhao Lian­ying, head of student affairs at Zhong­yong Elementary, says that even local caterers had been unwilling to provide meals to her school. Located in the mountains and having just 50 or so students and faculty, it was simply too small and too remote. “Without the association, the kids probably wouldn’t have any lunches at all!”

Nowadays, lunchtime visitors to these remote schools will find campuses full of smiling children tucking into meals of fragrant stewed chicken thighs, locally produced shrimp and cabbage over rice, and a very popular corn soup.

These full, balanced meals are vitally important to these kids. As an added bonus, the CGTFA’s unstinting efforts and concern for the children’s nutritional needs have helped forge closer ties between local farmers and the younger generation, truly exemplifying the spirit of “our farmers’ association, our community.”