This summer, as a counselor at CitySprouts, the Cambridge-founded urban gardening initiative, I taught middle schoolers about healthy food and food production. I saw how much my campers enjoyed cooking and eating the lettuce, basil and raspberries from our garden. The King Open School rooftop garden is not nearly large enough to produce breakfast and lunch for 20 kids, though. We relied on the Cambridge Summer Food Program, and at the end of lunch, I was always frustrated by the full trash of unopened milk cartons that U.S. Department of Agriculture policy requires students to take at every meal regardless of whether they plan to drink it.

Now, as the president Donald Trump administration labels funding for school meals as a whole “wasteful,” I have looked into that waste more fully – whe

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