You may have been listening to us back in April, when Mark and his partner, Kathleen Finlay, who is president of the Glynwood Center for Regional Food and Farming, talked to us from Nagasaki about what we Americans can learn from school lunch in Japan. They visited one of Japan’s school lunch centers, a place that serves 1,750 students and serves as an excellent model for what a progressive lunch program looks like. Today’s episode is from that same epic trip, but this time, they recorded from Meghalaya, India, in the east Khasi Hills.
In India, the government provides just 5 rupees per child per day for lunch—that’s about six cents—plus rice. Not great. But an organization called Nesfas—North East Society for Agroecology Support—which is run by the good people who hosted Mark and Kathleen, is trying to change school lunch. They got funding to do a three month training and trial program doing great school lunches for 10 or so schools, and they’re working on figuring out how to keep going after the funding is used up. When Mark and Kathleen were there, they attended—and Mark was a judge at—a competition, a way to showcase the program, with five or six of the schools competing. I loved hearing about their experience. Enjoy.
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