Home Base: A practice-based program to build capacity to prepare fresh, local produce in school cafeterias and encourage healthy eating amongst Child Nutrition Service Staff

Introduction:  Home Base, designed by a school chef, is a program designed to increase the capacity of Child Nutrition Services (CNS) to serve local foods during school meals, and to encourage healthy cooking and nutrition habits among staff.

Approach: We partnered with a school food company to update the Home Base curriculum and deliver training to CNS in 3 Southern counties.  Two schools in each county were selected as intervention schools; each received two trainings including nutrition education, recipe preparation, and discussion of barriers and opportunities for incorporating more local produce into school meals.  Cafeteria audits were conducted to assess scratch cooking infrastructure.  Pre and post training surveys were administered to assess knowledge, attitudes, and skills.  We also conducted taste-test surveys with students. 

Results:  A total of 40 CNS participated across the 3 school districts. Cafeteria audits revealed that one district did not have knives or cutting boards, tools essential for preparing fresh produce. Those items, as well as other small cook wares were purchased for the schools using funds from a USDA Farm-to-school implementation grant. Schools began to offer fresh, local items demoed during the training such as sweet potato wedges. All participants reported that they would recommend the program to a colleague.  Many suggested that there should be more time allotted to hands-on recipe preparation.

Discussion:  Home Base is a practice-based program providing hands-on cooking skills training and is acceptable to CNS.  Further effectiveness testing should be conducted with a larger sample of participants.