Why is it so difficult for farms to place and serve local, organic, fresh produce in nearby schools for breakfast and lunch? Can chef Ari Stern of Dinnerfix be the bridge?
Core Problem: Government agents are still incentivized to choose the cheapest option, both at the federal level, but especially in low-income, low tax bracket districts. Taxpayers often choose the cheapest option or pressure local politicians to do so. This is still the case for school lunch.
Funding problem: 1: Private citizens, i.e., those with means, float programs (in this case, locally sourced, nutritious school meals) for underserved communities with little expectation for ROI. Eventually, investments cease without clear models for perpetual sustainability. 2: Government grants, often pushed through new programs or non-profits, though helpful and valuable, are often one-time only injections of capital. Grant-writing requires awareness, time, skill, and labor.
By Kurt McVey
Columbia, Maryland, a “planned community” and “census-designated place” within Howard County, was designed and developed by the actor Edward Norton’s Grandfather, James Rouse, the businessman and real estate developer responsible for coining the term “Urban Renewal.”
After WW2, Rouse became involved in President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s National Housing Task Force, where he coined the enduring, aforementioned, now perhaps slightly stale term, which he then felt properly described the task force’s recommendations, including redevelopment of the neighboring but still very much beleaguered city of Baltimore, Maryland.
Aryeh (Ari) Stern was born and raised in Uptown New York City proper and culturally close to Jewish orthodoxy. He now lives with his wife Erica and two young boys in one of Columbia’s suburban hamlets in a perfectly humble, surprisingly spacious sun-lit ranch. Ari has another son, Zev, a high-functioning autistic teenager and Taekwondo red belt from a previous marriage living just north of Manhattan. Ari visits and talks with Zev frequently, where they discuss Zev’s nascent but growing YouTube channel, sometimes in Tom Hardy’s (or Bartley Gorman’s) “Bane voice” from the final Chris Nolan Batman film. Ari is a big-hearted, fast-talking, at times brash, tattooed chef with an even bigger personality. He can boast resume bullet points from past high-level kitchen positions at New York’s Jean George affiliates, the Lever House Restaurant, and the China Grill Group. He also co-founded and operated one of the more ground-breaking “art bars” in New York City, Culturefix, once voted by Complex magazine, the publication that produces the wildly popular Hot Ones YouTube talk show, as the best of its kind in America. It was an uncompromising original, like Ari himself. A large plastic novelty chair in the shape of a human hand, which lived in a small outdoor recess a few steps down from the NYC streets by Culturefix’s entrance, still spray painted a gritty, peeling, tooth-grill faux gold, sits in his suburban backyard. It’s speckled and glimmering with sweaty morning dew. Invisible walnuts are falling from trees, crashing down on deck railings and shed roofs in the background. A half inch of rain water collected in the palm, this old artifact retired with honors but perhaps too soon in 2015.
Ari the independent entrepreneur operates now as a food consultant, private chef, and “Farm-to-School” activist. He recently offered up, on the printed itinerary for a community “Buy Local” cookout organized earlier this year by Maryland’s optimistic new Governor, Wes Moore, that he draws his inspiration from “the bounty of the seasons and the flavors of his youth.” There’s some humor in this, as Stern still wears New York City’s attitude and concrete curtness on his sleeve with the aforementioned heart and tattoos, whether he’s picking his kids up from soccer practice or meeting with the Howard County Chief of Staff to make sure our kids eat well.
Ari now runs Dinnerfix, a callback to Culturefix and its legendary 5-year run from 2010-2015 on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Skills were developed on Manhattan’s developing Clinton Street well beyond small plates and tapas, microbrews and accessibly priced contemporary art. It was a community hub and incubator for everyday neighbors and global creatives from all industries.
Acclaimed chef Wylie Dufresne’s WD-50 was right down the street serving once as an inspiration for experimentation, imagination, high-standards, and rigorous community engagement. Ari too exerted his fisher king mayorness on the block. He and the team at Culturefix understood that gallery outposts, or even small-plate, beer and wine food operations situated off the fairer beaten path are often precursors for gentrification. Great strides were made therefore to provide access to local and under-represented artists, including those working in the culinary arts. Though New York misses Ari Stern, Maryland needs him more.
Columbia, Maryland is officially part of the Baltimore metropolitan area and is an idyllic middle (hanging in there) to upper-middle class suburb consisting of ten self-contained villages. It’s populated mostly by the liberal-minded (Virginia draws most of the conservatives apparently, Ari’s wife Erica offered), and is situated between Washington D.C. and Baltimore, the latter being a city currently known less in the wider national and international consciousness for its historic Camden Yards ballpark and fresh crab cakes than for its relentless poverty, crime, gang violence, drug-use, low literacy rates, political corruption, hunger, and general urban decay.
In 2022, Wes Moore, now 44-years-old, won the Maryland gubernatorial election against Republican nominee Dan Cox to become Maryland's first Black governor. Moore is the third Black person elected as governor of any U.S. state, and as of 2023, he’s the only African-American incumbent governor of any U.S. state. Moore ran on the slogan “leave no one behind.” He took the oath of office on a Bible owned by abolitionist Frederick Douglass, as well as his grandfather's Bible. His commitment to his Farm to School initiative carries momentum from former First Lady Michelle Obama’s mission to fight obesity. The CDC currently claims obesity in the United States affects 100.1 million (41.9%) adults and 14.7 million (19.7%) children and accounts for approximately $147 billion in annual health care costs. Four in ten American adults have obesity, and obesity rates continue to climb nationwide and within population groups, according to a report State of Obesity 2022: Better Policies for a Healthier America released by Trust for America’s Health (TFAH). Black adults, as cited in this report, have the highest level of adult obesity at 49.9 percent. Earlier this year, the CDC announced the availability of fiscal year 2023 funds to implement CDC-RFA-DP-23-0013: The High Obesity Program (HOP 2023), which would address how poor diet and low levels of physical activity affect overall health and are significant risk factors for obesity and chronic disease.
Last summer, on June 30, 2022, the Biden Administration announced that the United States. Department of Agriculture (USDA) would be providing nearly $1 billion in additional funding to schools to support the purchase of American-grown foods for their meal programs.
“The Biden Administration knows that ongoing impacts of supply chain issues and rising food costs continue to be a challenge for many schools and child nutrition operators, and we are thankful for Congress stepping up to ease some of their burdens,” said Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. “On our end, this funding boost is yet another step the Administration is taking to ensure every child who needs a meal, gets one. No matter the circumstances, USDA and all our partners must continue collaborating to provide our young ones with the healthy meals they count on.”
The Department of Agriculture’s website explains that the $943 million boost from the department is provided through USDA’s Commodity Credit Corporation. Funds must be distributed by state agencies to schools across the country so they can purchase domestically-grown foods for their meal programs. This assistance builds on the $1 billion in Supply Chain Assistance funds USDA previously allocated in December 2021, which states can use this school year as well as next to provide schools with funding for commodity purchases.
This is where things get murky, however. “State agencies'' is a wide and perhaps deliberately broad term. What Ari Stern and Dinnerfix have addressed or diagnosed rather, is that these funds are still largely being used to serve kids the cheapest, lowest common denominator food items, despite the sentiments from Maryland’s Governor and our sitting President, especially in hyper-low income cities like Baltimore. This is due to a lot of the same bad actors: entrenched, inefficient supply chains and delivery conduits, a lack of fresh and uncompromised procurement channels to allocate funds to local farms and participating schools and independent contractors like Stern, whose Dinnerfix acts and hopes to continue to act, with sufficient support to scale, as the worthy, concerned, and capable bridge between the farm and school. Ari is the broker and producer, as well as the manufacturer (washing, cutting, cleaning, portioning, packaging) of local farm products to individual schools and for wholesale distribution, and he’s ready to scale.
Ari and Dinnerfix have a small commissary, roughly 1,500 square feet in Northwest Baltimore, very much not in the Columbia suburbs. This nondescript building is where Ari’s “chef-mind” and “chef-hands,” are put into hard utilitarian action. All the food network zoom-in skills are on display here. On a recent Tuesday afternoon, one finds Ari receiving and cataloging inventory for the week. On Tuesdays, food for Wednesday through Friday is sent to partner schools. On Fridays, they deliver food for Monday and Tuesday and so on. It’s important for Dinnerfix and participating farms to harvest, manufacture and deliver food the very same week. This requires communicating openly with schools about how planned, on-menu sweet potatoes might switch in real time to prune plums depending on the yield. While Ari chops up fresh apples, adding to an already impressive knife blister hardened over by several sedimentary decades of ferociously fast dicing, Dinnerfix’s Director of Culinary Operations, Greg Harden finishes the product. This means getting it portioned out for schools or turned into another phase of apple, like super-fresh apple sauce for instance. Chopped carrots and kale radiate with calcium nearby.
Dinnerfix is a for-profit company at the moment, but remains open to shifting to non-profit status, as much of the “out of kitchen” actions involve liaising with the government or other non-profits, like Waverly Main Street, a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization dedicated to the commercial revitalization of the Greenmount Avenue commercial corridor in Baltimore. They support the Greenmount Collective, a membership program for sustainable DIY food operations and other small business initiatives. It was started by William Burgess, the current owner of Dinnerfix’s little commissary building-that-could, an unremarkable structure housing Ari’s remarkable, independently owned project. “Whatever is best to solve the central problem,” says Stern.
Though Dinnerfix has its hands in a lot of local pies, literally at times, its primary focus is on one client, Cradlerock Children’s Center in Columbia, a licensed and accredited, non-profit preschool and daycare serving nearly 100 families (the school has roughly 87 kids currently) with children ranging from 6-weeks-young to 5 years of age. The school’s passionate and steady Director, Amanda Morton, agreed to partner with Dinnerfix to launch a pilot program for farm-to-school food service and education. The program was funded entirely by Cradlerock Children’s Center. USDA offers $1.25 per student reimbursement based on the compliance with current standards. The program is successful, but it needs to scale in order to be sustainable. The money runs out at the end of 2023. While on location for this writing and reporting, Dinnerfix and Cradlerock were making urgent and polite appeals for grants and assistance directly to Howard County representatives.
Dinnerfix complies with all USDA regulations, and though Cradlerock is the ideal incubator considering its size, general tax bracket spectrum within a “Goldie Locks'' zone (not too rich, not too poor) and geographic location, it’s capable of serving any school at any size, no matter how they’re funded. Cradlerock is by no-means the inner-city, but the school and the families, guardians, and parents who send their kids there, are still conscious of where their money is going. Dinnerfix’s pilot program is not only successful and popular among kids, staff, and parents, it's literally life-changing in terms of overall health and educational awareness. This covers nutrition, human and animal biology, agriculture, meteorology, commerce, exercise, cooking, food safety, and much that can’t easily be quantified. However, without new funding for the next calendar year, or a good faith monthly stipend or credit line, the program will go into remission or disappear entirely, as working-class parents will likely be reluctant to shoulder the full financial burden and they shouldn't have to.
The third party in Cradlerock and Dinnerfix’s ongoing healthy partnership is Moon Valley Farm (MVF), their local farm and fresh produce provider. Before solidifying the partnership with Cradlerock, Ari reached out to MVF about purchasing CSA shares. CSA refers to Community Supported Agriculture, a production and marketing model whereby consumers buy shares of a farm's harvest in advance. These are not to be confused with Mutual Aid Shares, a program and process by which customers can help donate the fruits or surplus from the harvest to organizations in the region that give food to people in need. In nearby Westmoreland County, Virginia, Chris Newman, a Black and Indigenous farmer, runs Sylvanaqua farms, where he’s pushing a return to Indigenous modes of bartering goods and services to help close the space between the haves and have-nots. Dinnerfix does not work directly with Sylvanaqua farms, but Stern respects Newman’s practice and has looked at mutual aid shares as a potential funding model.
For Cradlerock’s Dinnerfix program, Ari receives weekly harvest reports from his primary local vendor, Moon Valley Farm-what’s available; what’s going to waste; what does it cost; what’s the most fresh, and so on. Since its inception, Ari has witnessed first-hand that children not only become accustomed to good, locally sourced fresh food, they demand it, and enjoy pontificating, critiquing, and exploring what's in season, swapping out 20th century wood block toys for red bell peppers. Children in turn develop standards and expectations regarding what’s palatable and truly healthy. They can spot a fake. A bad apple. This of course becomes a new foundation, not only for one’s own personal health-mental, physical and spiritual (see: Chris Newman’s Indigenous approach to lifestyle and the notion of food sovereignty), but a new prism through which to view the world and others. Nutrition is mental health.
The importance of celebrating, reinforcing, and firmly instituting this pilot program, as well as this broader underlying ideological and lifestyle foundation, is equally and monumentally vital to the micro (an individual child) and the macro (a healthy citizenry). Dinnerfix works, but the way it’s funded and fueled can be improved upon.
“I just want to take what grows here in the Delaware, Pennsylvania, Maryland, Virginia region and support those farmers by selling and producing what’s available,” says Stern, wiping his hands in a no-nonsense “that’s it” gesture. In January earlier this year, MVF produced a surplus of turnips. “Everyone told me kids wouldn’t eat turnips. So I made the kids small Japanese Hakurei turnips with fresh greens glazed in a Chinese-style sauce. That’s ginger, honey, soy sauce, garlic, and cooked very slowly. They devoured it! So simple to make. These are not your mom’s soviet-era boiled brussel sprouts that terrorized you as a child. We don’t do that here.”
Ari likes to use small “immersion circulators,” heating devices that are light and cheap and can heat up (steam) packaged fresh foods quickly, without smoke or using too much energy. When prepared by a guy who worked in incredible New York restaurants, veggies rock. The machines can fit nicely in the corner of a school’s kitchen. And if the school doesn’t have a kitchen, the immersion circulators can be utilized in a more mobile capacity. “A lot of these schools have different capabilities,” Stern notes. “A school with an oven can receive a semi-finished product, but a school with no oven can use these small heaters. They’re like a hundred dollars each.”
The pilot program by Dinnerfix at Cradlerock, one pre-school nestled within the Owen Brown Interfaith Center in Columbia, Maryland, costs $209,000 for the 2023 year. That’s two cups of different fruits or veggies, a half cup each, every day as minimum. The state, that is the USDA, still mandates kids drink milk. That’s whole milk if you’re under two-years-old and 2% milk if you’re over two. Ari says he’s not interested in taking on the milk lobby right now. Dinnerfix gets their milk from Harrisburg Dairies in Pennsylvania. They’re the only producers Ari could find that make five-gallon bags of milk. “Five gallons of milk has the same shelf-life as one gallon,” he gruffs. “It’s a huge expense. 300-400 dollars a week, just in milk.”
Ari previously worked for Aramark, a massive company on the Fortune 500 with thousands of employees worldwide. Aramark supplied food vendors at M&T Bank Stadium, where the Baltimore Ravens, the American NFL football team play. While there Ari saw tremendous, nay “astronomical” food waste. It wasn’t necessarily Aramark’s fault. It’s insane trying to plan for and actually feed 70,000 Ravens fans in one day over the course of three and half hours.
Ari later worked for Reef Technologies, a company in charge of 400 multi-brand kitchens around Baltimore and D.C. They like to speak to “the Power of Proximity” as they attempt to bridge the gap between digital demand and physical access by “simply getting closer to more consumers.”
The company (REEF) became interested in Ari running “ghost kitchens” in trailers in unused parking lots around the city. He put his chef mind and hands to the task, but the logistics, especially coming out of COVID, were ultimately untenable. This model gained a lot of prominence during Corona’s run, but recently ran into a quality of product snag, as seen in the recent MrBeast lawsuit, filed by Beast Investments against ghost kitchen company Virtual Dining Concepts back in August earlier this year. The two partnered in 2020 to create MrBeast Burger. The suit alleged quality control issues that VDC ignored, causing “inedible” food that has hurt the MrBeast (YouTube star Jimmy Donaldson’s) reputation. Virtual Dining Concepts, which handled the fulfillment and delivery of MrBeast Burgers, is seeking $100 million in damages in its own lawsuit. This is relevant in terms of balancing quality and scale when considering various food distribution models. It also brings into question the cultural sustainability of “fast food.”
Where does mass media junk align with junk food for the masses? What do our kids value?
“Our school has always been a great business and a great center, but food was an issue,” admits Amanda Morton, the brain and heart of Cradlerock. “As applications were coming into the center with a waiting list, I saw a trend in children’s health. It was deteriorating. We found that allergies increased by 30% and obesity was growing at an alarming rate.” Morton had been working with a company called Smart Lunches, which has since gone out of business. The partnership ended December 2022. “There was a lot of canned fruit and processed food. Our children on average would have a stomach bug of food contamination origin, circulate roughly every 8 weeks. It felt like monthly. Food was waiting around from 4am on delivery to be served at 12 noon. Not good. We put ads out and that’s when we met Ari. We took the next steps and now we couldn’t be happier and healthier.” Amanda herself emphasized in the meeting with the Howard County Chief of Staff that Dinnerfix is simply too important to just go away. “Our school invested $130,000,” she adds. “The return on investment is the health of the children. If a center like ours can do this without much help, imagine what I could do with real help.”
Dinnerfix hopes to float another calendar year at Cradlerock while expanding to five more schools. The trouble is private elementary centers don't want to spend more than $1.25 per day on a kid, when Ari’s program costs as much as $6 and that’s with current government grants.
In the meeting with the Howard County Chief of Staff, potential solutions, grants, and collaborations were mentioned or alluded to, involving funding “releasing” sometime in October, but actually awarded sometime in the Spring of 2024. The United Way of Central Maryland’s “The Changemaker Challenge” was referenced, and it sounds promising, as Ari Stern and Amanda Morton are indeed changemakers, but to reiterate, the money runs out at midnight when the ball drops. This of course doesn’t negate the mission, past, present and ongoing efforts of these organizations; they could certainly bear future fruit, but there’s thinking outside the box, and there’s solving the puzzle-box placed right in front of you before time runs out.
“The Changemaker Challenge isn’t a competition among applicants or ideas, instead it’s the challenge of addressing inequity,” said Franklyn Baker, president and CEO, United Way of Central Maryland in 2021. “This platform gives more people a seat at the table and provides a way for changemakers to share fresh ideas that will help close service and resource gaps, so that united we can help even more people and drive positive, meaningful change in our region.”
It’s not a bad idea to still apply to these sorts of grants or to point to their existence, which itself is a barrier of entry for many. Not everyone can get in the room with a local Chief of Staff whose knowledge of state agencies, their funding windows, various grants, real and aetherial, might be notable. One sympathizes for these local human avatars of a wider political apparatus. They’re the ones meeting farm sales executives, former chef’s, teachers, parents, non-profiteers, organizers, and administrators in pre-school lobbies filled with paper plates crusted over with unbridled Crayola wax stick figures bleeding through with free-wheeling magic marker and Elmer’s glue; sometimes in a similar space to where they picked up their kid after great days, so-so days, and not so good days. Days surely before school lunch was as good as it is now.
The constructive criticism of local political avatars everywhere is this: to literally and metaphorically take and offer the hand completely, with firm confidence and trust, both in and out of the room, and to lean into not only the on-site conversation, but the mission. It’s about doing one’s best to avoid the unfortunately limp and too-frequent feeling that arises when recommending a series of slow-moving state agencies feels far too much like passing the buck; agencies like The Horizon Foundation for New Jersey, or Howard County Public School’s The Bright Minds Foundation, these well-meaning, but oft-nebulous, sometimes extremely polite and harder-to-reach gatekeeper complexes controlling even more distant and abstract government funds, somewhere over the rainbow, way up high. Talking to the PTA was also mentioned briefly.
It’s a lot to manage for Amanda Morton, who still has a school to run, including a “Parent’s Corner” program, which provides parents with recipes and other health and nutrition-related information. That’s been incredibly successful as well. Also, and he would admit it, Ari Stern isn’t exactly the grant-writing type, despite his decades of expert food and hospitality knowledge, not to mention his menuing and plating expertise, which is bar none. Ari Stern gets things done.
During the meeting with the Chief of Staff, a representative from a local farm who asked not to be named in this piece, perhaps not to betray the parents looking to stop betraying the health of their children, told an anecdote about receiving calls from these same parents, begging their farm for fresh vegetables for their kids. She discovered through these channels that local children, which she would often meet at the farm or at markets with their parents, at 6 or 7, were already obese. “We have to introduce kids to this immediately,” she said. Where public school kids might be afforded an apple at lunch, Cradlerock developed a spontaneous garden program focusing specifically on radishes and all their local varieties because its kids liked her farm’s radishes so much. ”Some kids have never seen a garden before,” she added. “For them, it’s a thrill to pick a cherry tomato off the stem and pop it in their mouth. This can be life-changing.”
“And you can’t serve a whole radish to a two-year-old,” Ari Stern reminds everyone in the room, inciting chuckles, breaking further ice with the calm, gravely, rip-roaring urgency of a lawn mower starting cord in highly capable hands. “They need to be prepped and processed.”
Kurt McVey for Radiical Systems.