Julie Bjorkstrand is a self-described “worrier,” a trait that comes in handy when you’re in charge of feeding nearly 2,000 kids every day.
“I worry where there’s often no need to worry just because I like to think ahead,” she says, taking a seat at the small conference table in her office. The spring sun streams through the windows. Outside, a lawnmower whines in the adjacent Mike Whalen Field. It’s a decidedly non-stressful office, belying the myriad concerns Bjorkstrand encounters daily as Del Norte Unified School District’s Nutrition Services Director. Has she found the best vendors for the mix of prepackaged and fresh fare students get? What if the funding goes away? What if Last Chance Grade slides into the sea?
“I’d rather be unsurprised by bad news,” Bjorkstrand says, “and have had a moment to think about if this happens, what next? What do we do after that?”
Bjorkstrand has been Nutrition Services Director since 2020. Before that, she served as the admin to her predecessor, Deb Kravitz. For seven years, she worked alongside Kravitz, learning the role of director, helping develop relationships with local food producers, making sure the district was able to provide quality nutrition to its students. “I learned a lot from her,” Bjorkstrand says of Kravitz, “oh, absolutely!”
Today, Bjorkstrand’s department feeds between 1,700-1,800 students each day. “We feed them two meals, breakfast and lunch, at every school site.”
And every student is able to eat for free, thanks to the district’s participation in the USDA’s Community Eligibility Program, which guarantees free meals to all students in districts where more than 25 percent of the enrollment receives government assistance of some kind. Proposed funding changes in Washington D.C. threaten to raise that threshold to 60 percent, a move which would eliminate free meals for 2.4 million California school kids.
But the proposed change in the CEP won’t affect school meals in Del Norte, where the number of “disadvantaged” students has historically stayed above the 60 percent threshold. A bigger impediment to getting students to the breakfast (and lunch) table, as Bjorkstrand sees it, is simply a reputational one: school food is nasty.
“People in the community, they talk about school food,” Bjorkstrand says. “School food’s gross. Green hot dogs and yucky food. I don’t think that people understand the impact of what they say out loud. They don’t make their kids get school lunch because it’s green hot dogs and gross food. OK, so you have the ability to cook food, make food for your kids to bring to school. Then the other kids say it to kids who don’t have the ability to bring food, and then it’s like, ‘Oh,, if everybody thinks it’s gross, I don’t want to eat it.’ But for about 70 percent of our students, the food they get at school is all they have access to. If they’re not wanting to participate because somebody says it looks gross, that’s doing a disservice to those kids.”
For Bjorkstrand, this spurious reputation no longer applies to school food. It’s a qualitative change she witnessed over the course of working with Kravitz as the district, and the culture at large, shifted to fresher, more nutritious fare. For perspective, Bjorkstrand looks back at her days as a student. “When I was at Del Norte High, we had soft serve milkshakes and French fries and fried burritos and vending machines where you could get soda pop and chips and stuff like that. And that’s not the case [now]. We can’t fry anything anymore. We have a fresh salad bar at every school site every day.”
These days, there’s a computer program called Titan that analyzes each day’s menu against a nutritional rubric supplied by the USDA and the California Department of Education. “We input the menu — we’ve already input those items — and it calculates everything, fat and sodium, calories, to make sure we’re doing everything properly. It’ll make the square green. You want the square to be green,” Bjorkstrand laughs. “There’s nothing that I decide in terms of calories…or anything like that, it’s all from the USDA and CDE.”
Sourcing the food fed to Del Norte’s students is where Bjorkstrand has to get creative. A major challenge is location. “Being so rural,” Bjorkstrand says, “it’s really hard to get new vendors to come up here to deliver things we can order. So that’s a challenge, trying to find the best deals for stuff but also meet all of the requirements of our program which are extensive.”
The district purchases prepackaged food items and commodities from various vendors who specialize in school nutrition as well as the USDA, but Bjorkstrand likes to get as much fresh food as she can locally.
“Two days a week we do bulk cooking, where we make beef stroganoff or spaghetti or chili. All of the beef this school year we have bought [has been] locally raised, locally grown. All of it. Close to $50,000 now, spent just on hamburger.”
Using “micro-purchases”— expenses under $50,000 — allows Bjorkstrand to acquire foodstuffs without having to put the purchase out to bid, a process that would be onerous for small local producers. This means she’s able to spread the largess among local ranchers and farmers as equitably as possible. For the beef, this year the district purchased from Lopez Farms in Del Norte. In the past, the beef has been sourced from other suppliers, like the Foggy Bottom Boys out of Ferndale.
It’s not just the beef that’s purchased locally. Berries and “farm apples” — a designation the students came up with for the locally grown apples that don’t have the classic red delicious appearance — come from Smith River Organics, blueberries from Blueberry Hill, carrots from Ocean Air Farms.
“This year we started buying all of our cheese directly from Rumiano’s,” Bjorkstrand says. “We literally just go over to the store!”
More fresh fruits and veggies come from the North Coast Grower’s Association’s Harvest Hub in Arcata. “Right now, when we order for them, we meet them in Orick because they don’t deliver up here. We drive down and meet them and transfer the produce into our trucks.”
Juggling these local sources of fresh food sounds like a lot of work. “It’s a lot, yeah!” Bjorkstrand says. “But for me, I feel like having access to all of these resources and having the responsibility to buy responsibly — why wouldn’t I do what I could to support my local community? It makes sense in a lot of ways. Obviously, getting things locally is easier. We don’t have to worry about what happens if Last Chance goes down because we [have] access to things here. That’s one of the driving factors. But also, we have all these local growers and ranchers and people who work hard here, so why wouldn’t we put that in our school food as well?”
Developing this network of locally produced food began under Kravitz, but it’s an initiative Bjorkstrand hopes to expand with the district’s purchasing power. “I purchase what’s available,” she says. “Kind of my hope is by continuing to purchase in this way I’m facilitating either more people wanting to be growers and sell produce as well as maybe helping the existing folks expand, because I’m a pretty solid customer for 10 months of the year during school. So, I’m kind of hoping that’s the shift we see over the next five, 10 years, that it continues to grow and that I’m able to get more locally every year.”
Another resource Bjorkstrand would like to see come to fruition is a new kitchen facility, which would enable to district to prepare more fresh and from-scratch food. The current kitchen at Crescent Elk Middle School is at capacity in nearly every possible way.
“We would benefit from having one more stack of ovens,” Bjorkstrand explains. “We don’t have the electrical capacity to do it, we don’t have the space to do it. We don’t have a single dishwasher. Anywhere. Everything that gets washed in our program is washed in three compartment sinks by hand. We looked into adding a dishwasher a few years ago, and again, we do not have the electrical capacity to add another anything, anywhere.”
Bjorkstrand is using kitchen infrastructure and training funds to plant the seed, having the district architect draw up an initial concept. She wants to have a concrete plan before going after more funding. “In my estimation, I need to know what I’m asking for before asking for it.”
And Bjorkstrand is hopeful about funding, possibly even funding coming from the USDA or FEMA. An updated kitchen facility would have very real benefits for the community at large, not just the school district. “When the Smith River Complex fires happened, my department jumped in and we fed the Red Cross evacuees at the fairgrounds. That’s something we have the ability and capacity to do, and the potential need. If we lose 101, if we lose 199, we’re here. There’s not going to be anything coming in, there’s not going to be anything going out. So, who has the resources already here to feed people? Who has the facilities and the skills at feeding large quantities of people? That’s us. We have that skill set. It’s what we do. But getting a better facility where we’re better equipped to do those things is going to be helpful.”
Bjorkstrand was able to network with other school nutritionists during a recent trip to the legislature in Sacramento. “I was able to talk with other directors who have done that,” she explains, “who’ve designed their own kitchen and [ask them] how do you do that..?”
The trip was organized by the California School Nutrition Association and billed as their Legislative Action Convention, an opportunity for school nutritionists to meet with legislators. “I don’t think I’ve been to the Capitol since my eighth grade trip there,” Bjorkstrand laughs. “I learned a lot about how we advocate for nutrition services’ things at that level.”
One conversation the SNA and its affiliated school nutritionists are having with legislators centers around the question of what exactly constitutes an ultra-processed food? A proposed assembly bill seeks to limit such foods in school meals, but there is no legal definition of what the term “ultra-processed” means. Without that, school nutritionists could be left to enforce guidelines that don’t make sense. Their input is key to the issue. As Bjorkstrand puts it, “In order to legislate things around school meals, you need to have the school meals professionals working with you.”
Bjorkstrand and her staff are currently finalizing the summer meals program, which will distribute free meals from a number of locations throughout the community during the summer. In addition to feeding Del Norte’s youth, Nutrition Services will also hire a number of high school-aged youth through the E3 Summer Youth Program. It’s going to be a busy summer, but Bjorkstrand says her staff of 37, from admins to drivers, are up to the task no matter the time of year.
“There are just some absolutely phenomenal people who work for me,” Bjorkstrand says. “They care about feeding the kids and it shows. We’re not in this job for glory and mansions. None of us is getting rich doing this. But what we are doing is making a difference in our community everyday to every one of these kids who comes in and gets something delicious for lunch or breakfast. Good luck trying to teach a kid who’s hungry. Do you want a bunch of hangry second graders in front of you? I don’t think so!”
