The Luck of the Lunch Tray: Gaelic Greens & Garden Dreams

Born in Ireland, Jennie journeyed to the United States. Her passion for food and health set her on a career path that started as a hospital Clinical Dietitian, evolved into Nutrition Service Manager and Director at a school district, and currently as a state Child Nutrition Program staff. Join Rick & Michelle as they talk with Jennie Kolpak about how she literally defined what best-practice in farm to school procurement and promotions were in the early days of the movement. 

Transcript

Jennie Kolpak

Transcript

00:00:05 Rick

Welcome to the farm to school podcast where you will hear stories of how you thrive and farmers prosper when we learn how to grow, cook, and eat delicious, nutritious local foods in schools across the country.

00:00:16 Michelle

And the world!  Hello, we're your hosts. Michelle Markesteyn

00:00:20 Rick

And hi everybody, I'm Rick Sherman. And today we have an extra special guest in the studio today.  We have Jenny Kolpak, one of my Co-workers at the Oregon Department of Education, A Specialist with the Child Nutrition Program. But why do we have her on the show?  Although Specialists are cool, what they do is they go out and they review school districts, make sure they're in compliance and their National School lunch program and things like that. First of all, hello Jenny,  Hi.

00:00:52 Jennie Kolpak

Hello Rick and Michelle.

00:00:54 Rick

Hey, so Jenny and I, we and Michelle and Jenny and I go way back like what.. almost 20 years now or so?

00:01:02 Michelle

Probably.. at the time of this recording.

00:01:04 Rick

Yeah, and. And Jenny has had a really interesting journey into where she is now. Now we were talking about this offline, but yeah, go ahead and say now you’re from Ireland. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

00:01:20 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So I grew up in Ireland, and I moved to the states when I was 19 to attend college.  And at that time, Ireland was pretty economically depressed.

00:01:38 Rick

I want to stop you right here and say she's shortchanging herself. She came over on her running scholarship.

00:01:44 Michelle

Runner. Amazing.

00:01:44 Rick

She ran cross country and she probably didn't want to say that and bring all this notoriety, but she was a pretty big deal and as a runner, so…  I just wanted to say that so.

00:01:54 Jennie Kolpak

Oh, thank you, Rick.

00:01:56 Rick

OK. OK. Continue, please.

00:01:58 Jennie Kolpak

That's another podcast? So anyway, the country was very economically depressed and there wasn't a lot of employment opportunities.  And there was mass immigration happening among young people. And so I had an opportunity to attend a university in the states Bradford University, on full athletic scholarship.

00:02:27 Rick

OK. And so you we were also talking offline about how you came over and went to school, what was your major field of study in college?

00:02:39 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So right away as a freshman, I declared a major in nutrition and I probably knew I wanted to study nutrition, probably my junior year in high school.

00:02:54 Michelle

Why in nutrition like, what draws you to that?

00:02:57 Jennie Kolpak

Well, I think initially it was as an athlete. I was really interested in the connection between nutrition and performance. So I thought initially I would end up in some kind of sports nutrition practice and that just kind of evolved into different things over time.

00:03:19 Michelle

Like what else?

00:03:22 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So I started my career as a clinical dietitian. And my specialty was in nutrition support, which is actually figuring out how to feed people who can't eat, people who are either acutely or very chronically, ill. And that's when you know if you visited someone in the hospital, you might see like a tube that's in their nasal passage like 2 feet long or nutrition or feeding people intravenously. I had that whole background that's like so different from what I do now.

00:04:02 Michelle

How did you get to feeding kids?

00:04:05 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So I would say when I was a clinical dietician, I had an opportunity when my supervisor went on leave to kind of step in and do some kitchen duties, kitchen supervision and like, a pretty big hospital, and I quickly learned that it was a whole lot of fun to feed a lot of people, and I found that I just really enjoyed that the kitchen dance and the kitchen energy and the creativity of it.

00:04:44 Michelle

I've never been in a big kitchen like that. How does that even work?

00:04:45 Michelle

00:04:48 Jennie Kolpak

Oh gosh, you just, you know, you're sending out, like 400 meals in, like, an hour and a half. You are dealing with, like, special diets that you have to make sure that patients don't get food that they shouldn't have, and it there's definitely a dance to it.

00:05:12 Rick

High energy. I remember from my early days putting a cup of coffee on my desk at 5:00 in the morning, and then coming back later, like 5 in the afternoon, seeing, oh, I never took a drink out of that cup of coffee. So sometimes it can be exhilarating sometimes. You know, it can be.

00:05:29 Jennie Kolpak

Can be exhausting, just really like…

00:05:31 Rick

Can be, can be.

00:05:33 Jennie Kolpak

Trying to figure out how do you keep food hot from going from the kitchen to the patient's room and you figure out are you in good quality and you need to do it.

00:05:42 Rick

In good quality.

00:05:45 Michelle

Really fast. So is that similar to feeding kids in the school setting?

00:05:51 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So I figured out. I really like to feed a lot of people that that gave me a lot of energy. I also figured out that I kind of wanted to move a little bit more upstream in the system.

00:06:08 Michelle

What does that mean?

00:06:09 Jennie Kolpak

Because I was feeding people that, you know, have a diabetes, they have heart disease. These have a lot of comorbidities. You know you're trying to try to change their eating habits at you know, at a pretty late stage in the disease. I wanted to get more in on the prevention level and move upstream and so the avenue to do that I felt was school nutrition.

00:06:44 Rick

So at what point, OK, you're working as a clinical dietician, figuring out people's diets at a place where, yeah.

00:06:51 Jennie Kolpak

They're not prevention.

00:06:54 Rick

Figuring out treatment for people, but then you decided you had an opportunity to move into this school setting and specifically you came to Oregon to do that, right? 

00:07:03 Jennie Kolpak

So I was actually already living in Oregon, and the story goes, I met a boy.

00:07:09 Jennie Kolpak

00:07:11 Rick

It’s always a boy.

00:07:12 Michelle

Now it gets interesting.

00:07:13 Jennie Kolpak

That I saw like…

00:07:15 Rick

You didn't know it was that kind of podcast, OK?

00:07:17 Jennie Kolpak

I met a boy and I ended up relocating to Eugene and therefore was seeking new employment and some of the school districts in that area happen to be hiring leadership positions for their school nutrition program.

And so I was like, here's my opportunity.

And I just kind of took the bull by the horns and like one for.

00:07:46 Jennie Kolpak

And I really didn't have any experience working in school nutrition, and I generally had no experience of school nutrition because remember,  I grew up in a different country. I grew up in Ireland. We do not have a school nutrition program in Ireland, so I came into that, I had no context of what this was.

00:08:11 Rick

Shock to your system.

00:08:12 Jennie Kolpak

Shock to my system. Honestly, I had never been in a school cafeteria because we didn't have them in Ireland, literally.

00:08:19 Michelle

No, there's no cafeteria. No shared meal?

00:08:22 Jennie Kolpak

There are some boarding schools And so they would have dining rooms. But it definitely wasn't, you know, typical.

00:08:27 Michelle

That's very different.

00:08:34 Rick

So what happened next? Tell us, How did you navigate that minefield then, you know?

00:08:41 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah, I was kind of in shock. I didn't go in in like a director. I went in as an operational manager position so I could kind of bluff it a little bit with just my back of the house. Kind of back of the house Institutional Food Service experience, but didn't know anything about meal patterns. I didn't know anything about reimbursement, it was it was kind of hilarious. I was definitely an imposter. And I didn't even know it.

00:09:22 Michelle

That is in stark contrast to when I met you as like one of Oregon's, and really in the country's top farm to school champions and implementers. Where did the inspiration for that come?

00:09:36 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So eventually after getting a little bit more experience, I moved into a director role at a mid size district in Lane County. And I think what happened was I really brought my own food values into that role. And luckily those food values were very much in keeping with values of the community. And it just so happened that there was something called Farm to school that was happening and there were some non profits that were behind it and they were kind of going around to different school districts and gauging interests and like helping us facilitate how to get that started.

00:10:31 Rick

Perfect. OK. And that's where I come into the picture. That's why I think when I met Jennie, I was a fellow food service director across town in, Eugene. And so I was able to always go out and get a coffee with Jennie and pick her brain. What she was doing, and she would invite me, you would have a farm to school promotion. And throughout my life as a as a farm to school coordinator at a state level, I always point to that and say, like, you know, you don't have to do something all year long. Could just do a promotion and I look at it like this and I was, you know, in doing some research for this, I thought… you know what? If you had a kid that went to a school district and it was time for lunch and they went into a cafeteria and they instantly made a connection. And they knew they could see exactly how their food gets to the cafeteria and the kind of people that grow the food that that make the food. They're there in the cafeteria serving it.  Tell us about that.  It was just an amazing promotion and I wish we could like replicate that. So tell us a little bit about it?

00:11:51 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So this is a really nice jog town memory lane for us runners. Yeah. So we had a celebration every year and it was during farm to school month and it was called Oregon Harvest Day and the goal of Oregon Harvest Day was throughout the district to serve all foods that were grown, our process in Oregon and that's a pretty ambitious goal.

00:12:23 Michelle

on everything, the whole plate.

00:12:25 Rick

Entire tray. Yeah, as much as possible.

00:12:26 Jennie Kolpak

Almost everything. As much as possible, for the most part, I would say we are able to do 90% Oregon. I mean I didn't crunch numbers, but that's where I would say it landed. And so we have this… It was at the start of October and you really have to do it at the start of October to hit Farm to school month, but then also to really catch that list last wave of the Oregon harvest bounty.  And what we did was we would serve Oregon Foods and we would invite the farmers, processors and vendors to come to the cafeteria and serve that food to the students.

00:13:15 Rick

Yep, I remember there was little they had name tags or some posters or something, so kids got the connection, but you had the dairy head of the dairy company handing out the milk and there was a muffin from a local grocery with that, right?

00:13:33 Jennie Kolpak

Yes, like the folks from Camas Country Mill would come and they would serve dinner rolls that we had made with a flour and everything was labeled, and we had signage and we would talk about it ahead of time and some of the teachers who were really strong advocates for farm to school. They would talk to their students about… They would write cards for the farmers, thanking them for their food.

00:13:58 Michelle

That's awesome.

00:14:00 Jennie Kolpak

It was really just beautiful.

00:14:03 Rick

We talked about it ahead of time and I think she's again, Jenny selling herself a little bit short here, but she would even invite local legislators, Congressman. And the TV cameras, the local news, the news outfits. And it's one thing if you do a farm to school promotion, but if you don't tell your story, you're doing yourself a disservice. I always say. That was a good example.

00:14:31 Jennie Kolpak

That was a good example. And I really can't take credit for that.  It was really our public relations department.  His name is Pat McGilvery, and so he was really good about promoting that kind of thing and creating that positivity.

00:14:50 Michelle

Well, I think that's also underscores how like primary school is all about interconnections. And so many different, like you said, nonprofits, I heard government, I heard Federal and I heard businesses.

00:15:04 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah.

00:15:05 Michelle

Like how many other things include people from all those different public and private sectors on so many different levels. Yeah, that's true, Michelle. I mean, there's just so many different folks in the farm to school wheel.

00:15:18 Michelle

So I always think of like farm to school as a solution in search of a problem. You know often we address society like here's the problem. It's like actually this is just really good for us.

00:15:30 Jennie Kolpak

It's a lot of solution.

00:15:32 Michelle

And it's really fun.

00:15:33 Jennie Kolpak

And it's fun.

00:15:34 Michelle

It's really delicious, very circular, but as a nutrition service director, what's the other ways? What's the whole portfolio of local look like In the child nutrition setting?

00:15:48 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of School districts out there that think they can't do it.

00:15:57 Rick

Hmm, why is that?

00:15:58 Jennie Kolpak

They think it's.. well, I think what they see are these districts that are absolute pinnacles of farm to school. And it has to be really robust. Extensive. And I think immediately they think I can't do that. We can't do that. And so for districts in that situation, I like to reframe that question. What CAN you do?

00:16:33 Michelle

Yeah.

00:16:34 Jennie Kolpak

You know, can you purchase local apples? A proverbial low hanging fruit. To school right? Those are available everywhere in the US. So what can you do? Can you do something really simple like that? Could. You do a one-time purchase local potatoes. Our local pears, even our state fruit. So yeah, if you do 1 little thing like that, then you're doing farm to school.

00:17:07 Rick

And you know, to put that in context, I think it's just a mindset sometimes because for those of you who don't know, we have a State Farm to school grant here in our state and at one point we started out as a pilot project where it was a competitive thing and we had some school districts get on board and then at one point we went statewide and we had to get everybody on board to getting reimbursed for local food. And I always have my go-to people.  And Jenny was one of those people where I would like, Jenny, can you talk to talk about this with me and a statewide conference or Oregon School Board Association? We would talk with your Superintendent at the time. And we did that a lot.  But sometimes I would get people saying that, you know, farm to school can be difficult. I have to call up people in it and it's hard for me to get started. And Jenny was always the calm voice of reason to say, just do it. It takes me 20 minutes a day to call some people. She had it down. She it didn't seem like you worked that hard at it, but it worked really well for you.

00:18:17 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. And I would say too that maybe the energy that you are using to think about how hard it is. It could be used to just taking that small little step.

00:18:31 Rick

Yeah. That's a good point. A small one.  Buy some local apples and then not only just buy some apples, but tell the kids why you're doing it or show them how and doesn't take. How did you do that? How did you make like, how did the kids know they're coming in? And they had a local thing, or whatever.

00:18:50 Jennie Kolpak

Well, I think as I already mentioned like starting with Apple is a really good thing. And I started with apples and it was pretty easy. But these apples were different and they were delicious.

00:19:06 Michelle

Ah.

00:19:07 Jennie Kolpak

Absolutely.

00:19:08 Jennie Kolpak

And they, you know your standard like, 163 count school Apple they like had different sizes and like different striations in them. And we're just so fresh. And the kids notice.

00:19:23 Rick

Sorry for that, but just so you know, a 163 count means there's 163 in a bushel of apples.

00:19:32 Michelle

So I was like, I don't know what you're talking about.

00:19:34 Rick

It's a food service thing, sorry.

00:19:36 Jennie Kolpak

And for any of you, your school nutrition nerds out there, 163 count Apple credits as a half a cup of fruit.

00:19:43 Rick

There you go.

00:19:44 Michelle

Like because I am between two runners and the one step at a time was full on running mindset. Is that it’s a marathon, not a sprint. You just literally just one step at a time.

00:20:01 Jennie Kolpak

More than that, though, and I think it was just kind of my naivety. On the school nutrition program and really not having contacts and really not knowing what I was doing a whole lot like, I really didn't know about.

00:20:20 Michelle

It's my naivete and getting started, but there's something to that beginner mind that you know when we're younger, we do so many things like I was actually trying to look up this research around. Do we really learn languages easier when we're younger or is that we become “culturized” to not fail or make mistakes? You see what I mean? Like when I'm really new, you're willing to try more things?

00:20:49 Jennie Kolpak

Yeah. And I think the thing for me was I didn't plan. I just implemented. I skipped over that whole step like that whole phase in farm to school where you're assessing and assessing your readiness and planning, and I didn't do any of that. I just  went ahead and implemented.

00:21:08 Rick

Would you,  If you could go back and talk to young Jenny back then.. it wasn’t Kolpak, It was something else.. you had a different last name because you got married. But Hension! Yeah. Thank you.

00:21:20 Jennie Kolpak

Oh yeah, I was Hension. Thanks.

00:21:23 Rick

If you could talk to the young lass and say..  give her any advice, would you do anything different now?

00:21:31 Jennie Kolpak

No, I would 100% Embrace that naivety that I had that pushed me to, you know, do farm to school.  And now can it not be tentative about it or scared of it, or feel like I needed to do a lot of planning.

00:21:51 Rick

That makes sense. Good deal. All right. Well, Jennie, we would want to thank you for being here on the show today.

00:22:00 Michelle

And we'd love to thank all of you so much for listening.

00:22:03 Michelle

Farm School is written, directed and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn with help from LeAnn Locher of Oregon State University was made possible by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture.

00:22:14 Rick

The content and ideas of the farm to school podcast does not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University, Oregon Department of Education, and the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon Department of Education and OSU are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:22:32 Michelle

Do you want to learn more about Farm to school?  Who doesn't? To learn more about Farm to school, come check out our other episode, show notes and find contact information. Just search up Farm to school podcast.

00:22:47 Rick

Where, you'll be able to see our show. And much more information. Much more information, we'd love to hear from you.

00:22:52 Michelle

Thank you.

00:22:52 Rick

Stop by that website and say hello and give us an idea for a future podcast.

00:23:00 Michelle

Thank you, Jennie, for coming on and sharing your story.

00:23:04 Jennie Kolpak

Thank you all. See you soon. Bye.

00:23:04 Michelle

We really appreciate it.