Sometimes the best questions come from the most unexpected places.
Take the case of Doug Davis, a food expert who had been on his new job - planning menus at a Vermont public school - for only a few weeks when the woman who owned the orchard next door approached him.
"My apple trees are so close to the school, the apples fall right onto your playground," she said. "Why are the students being served apples from Oregon?"
Davis, a Culinary Institute of America graduate and industry veteran, stopped short. "I really don't know," he said.
The answer to her question - an elaborate explanation involving the Department of Defense and economies of scale - was less important than the fact it had to be asked.
Clearly, the system bringing food to school cafeterias was deeply flawed.
Davis, an award-winning food service director, spent the next 18 years helping to nurture a trend now bearing fruit across the country, including in Maryland: the "farm to school" movement, a loosely organized if fast-growing campaign whose goal is to get locally grown food onto schoolchildren's trays.
"Farm to school is a complex mission with many working parts," Stew Eidel, a Maryland State Department of Education official, told nearly 200 farmers, educators, food-service directors and parents at an Anne Arundel County workshop last week. "But it has one simple goal: to produce healthy kids."
Davis and Eidel were speakers at the Jane Lawton Farm to School Conference in Crownsville, a joint production of the state's agriculture and education departments. Last year, the Maryland General Assembly charged the divisions with promoting fresh and local school food by passing Senate Bill 158, a measure that created the Jane Lawton Farm to School Program.
Gov. Martin O'Malley signed it into law in May 2008.
Lawton, a former House delegate from Montgomery County, spent years campaigning to bring healthier food to Maryland school cafeterias.
"She was always emphatic about getting junk food out of the schools," said state Sen. Jamie Raskin, a Montgomery County Democrat who co-sponsored the legislation with Lawton before she died of a heart attack in 2007.
In a year of budget cuts, the measure has attracted little in the way of funding, but it has created a framework in which ideas have taken root in the state, and many are flowering.
Here in Maryland and nationwide, the movement has one principal enemy: Getting food into schools is a lot more complicated than it looks.
