Three years ago, the name Tony Geraci was known to only a few in the school food industry. Now school systems across the country are begging to see him; top food service companies are courting him; he’s on a first-name basis with food activist legends such as Michael Pollan; and there’s even been a major documentary film, Cafeteria Man, made about him.
But back in 2008 when he first arrived in the Baltimore City Schools to take the job of food service director, not many knew of his appointment. He had been a successful chef, food broker, food manufacturer and food service director before he was hired by Dr. Andrés Alonso, CEO of Baltimore City Schools, for the express purpose of transforming an extremely distressed food program into something nutritious and good for the students.
Upon his arrival, Tony Geraci found he had his work cut out for him. “There was nothing when I first came on board,” Geraci told Organic Connections. “They didn’t purchase anything fresh, anything local; it was all canned USDA commodities and prepackaged food. It was pretty dismal, horrible stuff, and that’s really why I was brought on board: to dismantle that, and then create a program that focused on healthier options.”
From Behind the Camera
In an interesting twist of fate, Cafeteria Man director Richard Chisolm and his producer-partner Sheila Kinkade happened to hear about Tony right when he arrived. “We were really lucky,” Chisolm told Organic Connections. “Tony wasn’t known when he came to Baltimore. The school lunch issue wasn’t being talked about nationally. During the period of the production it just blossomed, and Tony became a nationally controversial and positive kind of figure—on ABC News, in big magazines and on radio shows. At the same time, school food was being embraced by Michelle Obama, Jamie Oliver and Michael Pollan, as well as by other movies. So we got incredibly lucky about the emergence of an issue from obscurity to being in the forefront of American thought.”
Concurrent with his taking on a food system in peril, Tony made the decision to allow himself to be followed around by cameras. But there was method to his madness. “When Richard and Sheila came to me, I saw they were brilliant filmmakers in that they wanted it to be real,” Geraci said. “They didn’t want it scripted. They wanted to show the good, the bad and the ugly. But they also got a genuine sense that this is a moment that people should know about, and it’s a tool that my colleagues can use to do their own reform; and that’s why I did it. I thought that if my colleagues around the country could get an opportunity to see the land mines that I was stepping on so that they could avoid them, then it was all well worth the shoot.”
And it was about as real as filmmaking could get. Richard Chisolm began shooting pretty much at the beginning of the story, not having any idea what was to happen. “We chose a kind of filmmaking that I’ve grown incredibly respectful of, but it’s seldom actually applied anymore,” Chisolm said. “We decided to be religiously true to the real chronology of events. The goal was to return to a pure form of filmmaking where the visuals are the main part of the story.”
Multilevel Approach
Tony’s approach to changing the system had several prongs. First, the majority of kids in economically depressed Baltimore didn’t know what fresh food tasted like. It was up to Tony to introduce them. “Unfortunately in big urban school districts, there’s no access to real fresh food,” Geraci said. “So their reference point is based on fast-food offerings because that’s all they get, that’s all that is offered to them. To them, that is food.
“So we started doing things like little Solo cup offerings to the kids, containing just a bite or a bite and a half of fresh fruit or vegetable, or an entrée that we were trying. We called them ‘thank-you bites,’ because it was our way of saying thank you to them for trying it. To the students that tried it we gave these little stick-on stars next to their names at the cash register, and then at the end of the month we had a constellation party for all the stars.
“As a next step, we created this non-threatening forum where kids could talk about what was in the cup. What did you like about it? What did you not like about it? How would you make it different? For me it was all about finding out what my clients wanted so that I could go back to my chef-dietician and say, ‘Okay, we need to move the menu in this direction because that seems to be the place where they like it.’”
Simultaneously, Tony began slowly but surely introducing to the school administrators the idea of sourcing local fresh food. One example he used in talking to them was regarding peaches. They normally obtained canned peaches packed in corn syrup for 14 cents a serving. He pointed out they could get fresh peaches for around 8 cents each, and not only were they cheaper, but the local children had never had a real peach. On the first day of school, he made sure the students tasted them—and the kids were in a state of electrified wonder at the taste and feel of the peaches.
The Budget
As anyone who has worked within a school food system will tell you, budgetary constraints have always been given as a major barrier to serving higher-quality, fresh food to school students. It is still a reason that many accept. Tony, however, did not—and it was because he brought considerable food management experience with him and knew how the program should be run.
“I’m a businessman and I’m an entrepreneur; that’s kind of my claim to fame,” Tony explained. “That’s why I was brought there. So I took a very entrepreneurial approach to the management of this business. At the end of the day this is a $40-million-a-year food business, and I think communities often set lunch ladies up—putting somebody in a position to run a multimillion-dollar concern with zero business experience, and they expect miracles. It’s unfair to them; it’s unfair to the community. I think that the right pathway is to use a professional business person, a contract management company—somebody that does this for a living, somebody for whom it’s not their first ride at the rodeo.
“And then I looked at the purchasing model differently. I know the economics are hard in Maryland, so I thought I’d buy by putting together local purchasing and keep the local dollars within the community. Rather than building these expressways to send money out of the state, you build off-ramps to keep the money there. That makes it a more solid economic environment.
“Then it became stop buying crap that the kids don’t eat—that the kids all agree is crap—and buy something they want to eat. That way you get increased participation. The school lunch program lives, breathes and dies by a thing called ADP, which means ‘average daily participation.’ In a city like Baltimore where you have 88 percent free and reduced-cost meal rates, if the kid doesn’t take the meal, we don’t get paid by the government and we can’t buy product. You can just purchase french fries and hamburgers and pizza because you know they’ll like it, but then the reality is you’re killing your clients. So why not try to introduce something that is also better for them, so that they are better students, so that they’re learning?
“Next I cut a lot of waste and fraud out of the system. In the beginning, I was paying around $600,000 a year to move product that I already owned from one side of a warehouse to another side of a warehouse. How do you explain that? You have to look at the thing holistically. To be fair, it was beyond the scope of my predecessor’s understanding.”
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Getting Their Hands Dirty
As Tony was working to source fresh local food, he also wanted the students to fully understand what they would be getting. To that end he, with the help of a local farmer, created a school farm where the students could participate in growing food. “I think that is one of the single most important tools we can offer our children—the opportunity to plant a pea, to watch it grow, to turn it into something that you can harvest and share with your friends,” Geraci said. “It changes the way you think about food. It’s no longer consumption—it’s quite different; it has a different approach.”
In watching the film, seeing the children come alive as they put their hands in the earth and touch and taste fresh food in its original form is a wonder to behold. As it turns out, this was done very much on purpose. “To have the emotions in the faces and voices of children, to me that was the most important part,” Chisolm told OC. “I think, really, the story is about focusing a lens on young people in a new way: thinking of them as being end-users of a system instead of just feeding them anything while parents don’t care and nobody is watching. When something like this comes along, it’s a very powerful force to embrace.”
The Status Quo
As one might imagine, walking into a very fixed bureaucracy would take its toll. There’s a point in the film where Tony is asked by one of the students what the hardest part of his job is. He firmly purses his lips and replies, “The adults.”
“The bureaucracy was really the hardest thing,” said Geraci. “There were moments when I thought, ‘I’m done; I’m out of here.’ There was bruising and permanent scarring, trust me. This was the most difficult project that I’ve ever undertaken in my career, and I’ve been a pretty successful businessman. But a lot of people in the community kept rallying around me and saying, ‘Look, we need to fight through this; we need to get to the other side. So we need to do the right thing for our kids.’”
“In making this film, I learned about optimism in the face of severe resistance and seeing that it’s not black and white,” Chisolm continued. “It’s not a person who comes to town and has the magic recipe and everybody falls in line. When Obama came to Washington, he was this new messiah president who was going to fix our country from all its horrible situations. A year later, the same people who voted for him were saying, ‘Why isn’t it fixed? Why is it still a problem?’ The same thing happened to Tony after about a year. In human nature there is sometimes this ridiculous impatience and this oversimplified outlook, especially in the United States, where we want something to be fixed quickly. To watch a man who just is tenacious and energetic get clobbered over and over again by that kind of reality was kind of scary at times. But to also see him win a lot of those battles was really fun.”
Improvements Made
At the end of three years, Tony decided to pull back to part time and to answer the now fervent demands for his help that were coming from school districts all over the country. He left Baltimore City Schools far, far better than he had found them. In a radio interview at the end of the film, he proudly announces that Baltimore Schools now purchase all produce from Maryland farms, that pre-plated meals have been eliminated completely, and that items grown on the school farm are being utilized in educational programs. A central kitchen, which would greatly facilitate locally grown and cooked food, is well underway.
Today, Tony still has a voice in the creation of that central kitchen, but he is also lending his talents to the creation of local farm-to-school food programs in numerous other cities. One of the largest school food service companies in the nation—an establishment that one would think would never want Tony Geraci anywhere near it—after learning what he did in Baltimore, wants him to pilot similar programs for ultimate broad national export.
Tony summed it up with the motivation that carried him through his Baltimore adventure and beyond.
“I think that people are starting to really wake up and recognize that they can make the change, that it doesn’t have to be the same old stories about ‘Oh, it’s too hard; it costs too much; I can’t afford it.’ We can spend a lot of time saying, ‘You can’t.’
“I grew up in the sixties, when there was this young president who said that in this decade we will put man on the moon. Our rockets blew up on the launch pads; we didn’t have guidance devices; we didn’t have systems that could get us from here to the moon. But in the summer of 1969 in the living room of my grandfather—a man who saw air travel happen in his lifetime—we sat and watched a man walk on the moon. We did that because we as a nation willed that to happen. We decided we were going to do this thing; we were going to do the impossible. I sort of liken it to this child nutrition reform thing—but this is not rocket science; this is not as profound as putting a man on the moon. And it certainly should not take a decade to accomplish. I think we need to embrace that willingness to fix the things that are broken and stop blaming everybody else for it. We are amazing people. Why don’t we embrace our amazingness?”
To find out about the release and screenings of Cafeteria Man, visit the film’s website at www.cafeteriaman.com.
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