Scratch Happens.. Training the Future of School Food

What does scratch cooking, workforce development, local ketchup, and a mysterious conference hall ice machine have in common? This episode. Recorded live(ish) from the National Farm to Cafeteria Conference, we sit down with Patrick Garmong from the Institute of Child Nutrition to talk about the real work behind getting good food onto kids’ trays—training the people who make it happen. From ditching the “white‑hat chef” mentality to meeting school food professionals exactly where they are, this conversation is equal parts big‑picture vision, practical knife skills, and genuine laughs. Pull up a tray—no chef hat required.

Transcript

Transcript – 

Scratch Happens.. Training the Future of School Food

Patrick Garmong

What does scratch cooking, workforce development, local ketchup, and a mysterious conference hall ice machine have in common? This episode. Recorded live(ish) from the National Farm to Cafeteria Conference, we sit down with Patrick Garmong from the Institute of Child Nutrition to talk about the real work behind getting good food onto kids’ trays—training the people who make it happen. From ditching the “white‑hat chef” mentality to meeting school food professionals exactly where they are, this conversation is equal parts big‑picture vision, practical knife skills, and genuine laughs. Pull up a tray—no chef hat required.

00:00:04 Rick

Welcome everybody 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 across the country.

00:00:17 Michelle

In schools.

00:00:18 Rick

Across the country.

00:00:20 Rick

Did I say that?

00:00:21 Michelle

It's like the first time you've ever said this.

00:00:23 Rick

You guys don't hear the 20 times we record our intro either.

00:00:27 Rick

So just be lucky that this one made the cut.

00:00:31 Michelle

I'm going to tattoo my arm with it so that I don't have to keep pulling it up. We don't have it memorized.

00:00:37 Rick

Sometimes I do. Sometimes I say it like now I'm looking at a screen and I turned into mush mouth, but…

00:00:43 Michelle

It's all good. I'm really excited about this episode.

00:00:46 Rick

I am too. This is another in our continuing series of the Farm to Cafeteria Conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

00:00:53 Michelle

Yeah, that was hosted by the National Farm to School Network.

00:00:56 Rick

Yep. And you and our co-host of Du Jour was Christy Sherding from the Henry Ford at the time.

00:01:03 Michelle

Correct. It was so good.

00:01:04 Rick

So thank you, Christy, for kicking this off. But we talked to Patrick Garmong, and he's from, I think, Mississippi, the Institute of Child Nutrition. And let me pull up another screen here.

00:01:17 Michelle

Yeah, and the Institute for Child Nutrition, if you don't already know them, our premier training for food, child nutrition programs. So the folks who in schools and who buy the food, the sponsors of the programs, National School Entry Breakfast Program, there's a lot to it and there's a lot of things there. 

00:01:39 Rick

And so what really what makes this neat, I think, and Michelle thinks, is like, we talk to you guys all the time about our 10-year vision and our 10-year goals. And one of our goals...

00:01:51 Michelle

For the state of Oregon.

00:01:52 Rick

For the state of Oregon. And one of our goals is local food access for all. And that's kind of the one I'm in charge of leading from time to time. And so every student in early childhood education or K-12 schools who participate in a child nutrition program has access to foods grown, caught, gathered, raised, and or processed locally. So with that in mind, right in, if you go to, if you Google farm to school counts, you'll go to these goals and the local food access for all. What I like to see in here, like right below that goal, it says each community defines what counts as local for food for itself. We aim to have 100% of child nutrition programs provide access to locally sourced foods with 1/3 of all food purchased by child nutrition programs is sourced. within Oregon.

00:02:42 Michelle

Okay, wait, we got to hang out there for a second.

00:02:45 Rick

What?

00:02:45 Michelle

That's amazing.

00:02:46 Rick

That is, yeah.

00:02:48 Michelle

A state said a third of all food purchased in child nutrition programs can come from Oregon.

00:02:56 Rick

Yeah, and so like we said, we try to have these goals in mind when we're doing everything. So our framework, when we're doing our, we have a state grant that reimburses local school districts and CACFP, child and adult care food programs for getting reimbursed for local food. That's the whole thing. So if we want 100% of all kids, children to have access to that, that's we have to figure out how to get all of our programs to not opt out because some people do and stuff like that. So anyway…

00:03:34 Michelle

Well, and it's important to know like, well, if you know where you want to go, you have to know where you are. And so we're so grateful that the USDA has their farm to school census. So based on the 2023 numbers, which is the last census, Oregon had 85% of child nutrition programs are serving local foods. So that's K through 12. And Oregon's a little even more ambitious because we include early ECE, early child care. And then into two, three, if you include fluid milk, it included about 19% of the child nutrition programs budgets were spent on local foods.

00:04:17 Rick

So we're on our way.

00:04:18 Michelle

We are crushing it.

00:04:20 Rick

Yeah.

00:04:21 Michelle

And I always think we've come this far with what we've had. So we need to do something different. Because if we're going to do the next increment of, you know, go from 19 to 30%. We need some new tools and to meet some new people. And that's why I was super excited to interview Patrick.

00:04:42 Rick

Yeah, and if you scroll down, if you go to our websites and look at that goal of food access, local food access for all, there's a bunch of different strategies in our, one that Michelle was just pointing out to me, our strategy #3, provide technical assistance and training to buyers so that every meal producer has the knowledge, skills, motivation, and resources to make their local food purchasing goals of reality. So that ties in really perfectly with this episode.

00:05:10 Michelle

The Institute of Child Nutrition is a gem.

00:05:14 Rick

Yeah, they've been around forever. They used to be called, what were they before the ICN?

00:05:20 Michelle

I don't know, you were the nutrition.

00:05:22 Rick

I was, but we, yeah, it's where our nutrition service people do a lot of their training using this wonderful.

00:05:32 Michelle

All right, we'll enjoy the conversation. There are so many amazing people to meet at the 2025 National Farm to Cafeteria Conference. And we even have fellow podcasters. Patrick, tell us what you're up to.

00:05:52 Patrick Garmong

I'm here at the conference right now. We have a table here exhibiting for the Institute of Child Nutrition, and then also trying to catch a few episodes recording for the Mix-Up, which is the podcast we host through the Culinary Institute of Child Nutrition.

00:06:04 Michelle

So what's up with the Culinary Institute of Nutrition? Tell us about what you do.

00:06:07 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, so I guess to start from the beginning, in 2018, USDA and the Institute of Child Nutrition identified that we're trying to ask operators to get back to more speed and scratch-based cookery, and yet those skill sets had not really been anything that had been focused on an actual training platform offered by either the Institute or by USDA. They had a little bit of training infrastructure built out for it, but it wasn't as intentional as we needed it. So they did a national search to spin up this program, and I threw my name in there into the ring, thinking I won't even get a phone call, and next thing you know, boom, here I am. So, I mean, our goal is to help operators identify where they want to go, meet them, where they're at, and then help them get there. We do not take that white hat approach that others have taken, or they come in. Well, they come in kind of like that savior mentality and tell people how they're doing it wrong, instead of... 

00:07:06 Michelle

I thought you meant chef hat. 

00:07:08 Christy Sherding

This is where my brain went.  Mine too. Yeah, I was thinking ratatouille. It's terrible. I'm so sorry.

00:07:12 Patrick Garmong

No, I mean, it's kind of intentional, right? I mean, the toke is the white hat, right? And there's some that come in with that I'm a chef and I know everything mentality. And we really focus on not being that type of operator and leaning in that direction. We want to help folks grow from where they're at and bring them along rather than just going in and basically destroying them and making them feel terrible while you're trying to coach. Coach and mentor and lead them. That's just not a recipe for success.

00:07:37 Christy Sherding

Not an effective model.

00:07:38 Michelle

That has been a theme, actually, of a lot of people we have been interviewing.

00:07:42 Christy Sherding

Meeting them where they're at.

00:07:43 Michelle

Yeah, we just talked to Erica and Alex from Pilot Light and Erica Curry, and they also work with the education component. So you're talking about the cafeteria, you know, they're in the classroom and community component being like, well, what's your goal? And it just, what I'm realizing is, you know, over the last 15 years plus of this movement, how much capacity we have built up and technical expertise in so many different areas collectively.

00:08:10 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, no, I mean, the massive expansion just in the, I started in the child nutrition space in 2014, right when Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act really went into play with all the new regs. So it's kind of interesting coming in at that moment in time where the program's really shifted to more regulatory. But just seeing the lack of resources in that moment to where we're at now, where it's almost like you got these allied orgs and then different consulting companies almost pouring over each other to try to help and get into the space and keep doing things. So are there gaps out there that we still need to address? Absolutely. But there's so many great orgs out there that want to help and want to do good in this space. And I think for the most part, they're all fairly aligned in what that end goal is. Obviously, some have their different viewpoints on things that might be more indicative of maybe where their funding's coming from. It might be more sustainability or more plant-based or something like that. But I think at the end of the day, the end goal is to just ensure that we're feeding students sound, nutritious, healthy foods that tastes great, and we can start developing those lifelong relationships with food for kids.

00:09:21 Christy Sherding

Yeah, that's the education component right there, really, isn't it?

00:09:24 Michelle

Comes together. Could you break down more? You mentioned speed or scratch.

00:09:28 Patrick Garmong

Yes.

00:09:28 Michelle

And or scratch. Could you break that down more? And then like, what do you actually really do?

00:09:32 Patrick Garmong

Right.

So first of all, I've been trying to move us away from the term speed or scratch cooking, because the word cooking elicits the idea that it's a heat application. So that it also means that maybe we're taking more time and energy and effort to cook something. But there's a lot of things that can be done, scratch or speed scratch, that don't require heat, right? Making salad dressings, doing cut fruit, things like that, are like fresh. And so what we're trying to do is change the narrative from speed scratch and scratch cooking to speed scratch food production, scratch food production. So just kind of like opening it up the conversation a little bit more, because I think the word cooking to so many is just a barrier to entry. They get nervous, like, oh, now we have to, we don't know how to cook, especially when you start looking at some of the smaller, more rural districts that don't have the infrastructure in place with, you know, a dietitian, a chef, the culinary expertise, all those things to like really start ramping up that thing. So if we kind of change the narrative a little bit, make it more approachable, I think we might get a better response rate on people wanting to jump in and start working in the space a little bit more.

00:10:38 Michelle

And then, and then speed or I'm belaboring. 

00:10:41 Patrick Garmong

I'm belaboring just because I'm like, no, it's a good question. So, to me, and the way we look at it at CICN is we're talking about speed scratch that is taking value-added items, so like your USDA direct foods, like maybe the unseasoned unbreaded chicken strip, right? Now, how can we then incorporate that into a dish that we're making, you know, putting together with some more fresh ingredients or marrying it? ingredients. So it's bringing components together that aren't just put on a tray, bake, and serve. So it's mirroring those value-added items. And then like more of the scratch-based is really taking things from a whole state and then elevating it through cookery.

00:11:23 Christy Sherding

So you would like take local tomatoes and make a marinara sauce that's scratch.

00:11:28 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, but I mean, you can also buy canned diced tomatoes and that would still kind of be scratched too, right? I mean, if you're dicing the onions, sweating them down, adding the garlic, adding in the canned tomato product, thing like that. right? Absolutely. That would still be scratched because you're going to find that most Italian restaurants, they're still buying canned tomato, right? So, but like to use that fresh tomato example, if you're making like a fresh pico de gallo, right, with fresh tomatoes, that would totally be a scratch recipe because you're using diced onion, diced tomato, cilantro. Now, could that be also speed scratch if you're buying pre-diced, right? And you're just adding the components together, maybe? right? So it just depends on what lens you want to look through on how far down the rabbit hole you want to go with, like, over scratch or over speed scratch. But I think we all need to be honest, too, in the space that no one will ever have a fully scratched kitchen in the K-12 space, right? Like, if we're making our own ketchup at that point, like, we've probably done something too far down the road.

00:12:21 Michelle

Wow. In Oregon, we actually have Portlandia ketchup.

00:12:24 Patrick Garmong

Oh my gosh, that is the best ketchup.

00:12:26 Michelle

Okay.

00:12:27 Christy Sherding

I want to taste some Portlandia ketchup.

00:12:32 Patrick Garmong

That's awesome. Yeah, it's like more tomato paste based than like your other that are a little runnier. So it like really clings to whatever you're putting. Oh, it's so good.

00:12:39 Christy Sherding

Portlandia, if you're listening, I'm in Michigan and I would like some of your questions.

00:12:43 Michelle

They don't even know. They don't know me.

00:12:44 Christy Sherding

They don't, they will, they will, right?

00:12:47 Michelle

So, okay, I'm going to talk about Oregon a little more.

00:12:49 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, please.

00:12:50 Michelle

Because we have this really ambitious ten-year vision to do 5 things, but two of them really, Patrick, I feel like connect with you and one is food. local food access for all. So that's about getting the food in, which is about nutrition services, procuring, preparing, and serving. And we realized that's not going to happen without a whole other goal area related to leadership and professional development.

00:13:18 Patrick Garmong

Right. Yeah, I mean, that's you. That's what I mean, that's what ICN does, right? I mean, even though our name is Institute of Child Nutrition, our focus is developing the workforce that serves children, right? Whether it's in school, CACFP, summer, whatever, we're a workforce development organization. So I think sometimes people don't look at us through that lens because of just our name, the Institute of Child Nutrition. So I think, oh, you're all about feeding kids. Well, yeah, but it's about developing the people that feed the kids, right? And really trying to professionalize the industry. And again, meet people where they're at, but get them to the level they need to be at to be able to operate these programs efficiently and effectively.

00:13:57 Michelle

So what does that really look like on a day in the life of Patrick?

00:14:02 Patrick Garmong

There's probably no single day in the life of Patrick that's standard. I'll have office days where I'm doing either leadership style work where it's working on budgets, statements of work, going through deliverables, that kind of stuff, or it's developing. We did a lot of development early on when I started because we really, the materials we had were dated and needed just a whole new relaunch. So I mean, we developed for CACFP, there's 8 four-hour face-to-face trainings that we worked on for schools. There's I don't know, 15 or so, 12, 15, something like that, we wrote. And then we also have 51 culinary quick bites, which are short format video trainings that incorporate some activities, a video infographic that all focus on a very specific skill set so folks can be able to train their staff during production. So one example is like in our knife skill set, there's breaking down pineapple. If your staff hasn't broken down pineapple before it's fresh, or maybe they just need a refresher, order in the pineapple, bring the staff in, show them the video, have them start doing the activity. Maybe it takes an hour to break down all the pineapple for them all, but now you're using that pineapple on the service line, right? So that's production hours. So you're not wasting food. You can count that hour of them cutting pineapple for professional standards. So now you're getting a CEU out of production time, right? So that whole concept of there's no time to train, I'm trying to.

00:15:33 Christy Sherding

You're building it into the…

00:15:35 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, That's really neat. Brilliant. So we've got 51 of them and some are on knife skills, some are on basic cooking techniques, like how to ground, how to brown ground meat in a tilt skillet. I just, you know, people might not know that if they've, you know, have not had a professional cooking experience, haven't worked commercially, right? Their biggest meal they ever made was Thanksgiving for 30 at, you know, home, right? And now you have to make lunch for 400 students. We need to develop their skill set to be able for them to move forward.

00:16:01 Christy Sherding

Is this where, and we were fortunate to spend a little bit of time with you yesterday evening, is this where your time as being a chef comes into play?

Like with all of that, because how do you develop those standards, like to cook green beef and the knife skills and all of that? Is that you or is it a team?

00:16:17 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, well, I will say first and foremost, none of this has ever been all me. There's always an amazing team of people that we're working with, whether we have brought in consultants to help us with some of the development, whether it's people from our team, people at the institute that are behind the scenes, like our graphic designers and our editors, and those folks that people don't even ever see. Like, they're so... Yeah, and the people that are writing the contracts for us and the grants management team, like there's so many people that are behind the scenes to allow this work to even happen. And they really are the heroes of it. Sorry, I just want to plug them for a second. But yeah, no, I mean, it takes a it takes a collective, right, to be able to put these things out. And it's interesting too, because like you think about something like cutting a bell pepper, right? You get 5 chefs and five bell peppers. And we'll probably get to cut it a little bit different, right? Some have the technique where they come all the way down from top to bottom and peel it like they're peeling a melon. That's my preferred, because I feel like you get 0 waste. Others like to cut off the tops and bottoms and do the rolling technique. I mean, I've seen so many different ways that people do it. So It's kind of fun because we're able to develop some standards, but then when we have our chefs go out and train, they're like, well, this is, the way the infographic's showing it, but this is also another way you can do it because sometimes it's just that other way that clicks with people too, right? So the unfortunate turn, there's more than one way to skin a cat kind of applies with some of the things we do in cookery, right?

00:17:40 Michelle

Or to chop an onion.

00:17:41 Patrick Garmong

Or to chop an onion.

00:17:42 Christy Sherding

Yeah. No cats in the lunchroom.

00:17:43 Patrick Garmong

Right.

00:17:44 Christy Sherding

Yeah. Sorry.

00:17:45 Patrick Garmong

Unless that's the school's master.

00:17:47 Michelle

I was like, oh, we're the Canby Cougars. Okay, do you do any, speaking of that, training for food educators outside the cafeteria? I'm thinking that cafeteria, community, garden component, like school garden educators.

00:18:04 Patrick Garmong

Right, yeah, so the institute really is focused on just training that next, the operators and the programs, right? So that's an area where, and this is something I've been really focused on in probably the last 12 months, is identifying how the institute should be more foundational, setting the foundation for programs to exceed, excel, and then some of the cool extras the programs do, right? The sustainability, the classroom nutrition, those things. Those are where other great outlet organizations are able to come in and carry that mantle to the next level, right? So like, rather than us trying to be a jack of all trades, should we be that foundation setter and then allow the others in the space to, not allow, that's kind of a weird way to say it, but not co-opt the space, right? Like allow others to, there I go again, create space where others are able to enter and then take things to the next level.

00:18:58 Christy Sherding

Yeah, you're doing things in partnership with other people, like they're aligned.

00:19:02 Michelle

You know, speaking of, I want to go back to actually one of the very first things you said, you had mentioned gaps. I said, there's so many people in this space and that there's gaps. Like I know you're a big picture forward thinker. You are your systems. And so I'm just curious, like, where do you see gaps or potential for other allied partners to pop up?

00:19:24 Patrick Garmong

That's a great question.

So one of the things that I really have been focusing on as well and on top of trying to set the foundation is making some of these connections with different allied organizations to see if there's a way that we can start maybe scaffolding some of our training. So it's not just the ICN or CICN parachuting in, providing a training. It's 4 hours, 8 hours, it's over. But partnering with other orgs that then can take that next level, right? Like how are we going to operationalize that training component? So one of the conversations I've been having is with an organization that does a lot of peer-to-peer learning to try to help build out capacity. So exploring maybe those peer leaders hosting a training, bringing in area child nutrition programs to receive the training. So we would do the training in the morning and the afternoon would be filled with like roundtable sessions and panel discussions about like, okay, this is what we learned today. This is how we've gone and operationalized some of these things. So they have, you know, operators in the field that can bounce ideas and things and strategies off of, right, that are currently operating because operated for five years as a child nutrition director, but I've been seven years now at the Institute. Like there's been a shift in how things, I didn't, I didn't operate during COVID, right? So like there's already that like blind spot I have on that aspect of things.

00:20:37 Michelle

It sounds like there's a giant ice maker.

00:20:39 Christy Sherding

Yeah, I cannot figure out what that noise is.

00:20:41 Michelle

It's right around the corner. And so, you know, is it an ice maker?

00:20:45 Christy Sherding

Poor Patrick. Michelle and I are making faces and I'm like, you're answering this eloquently and I'm distracted by this ice maker. I don't think it's that. It's kind of something else.

00:20:54 Michelle

Two of our listeners doubted for a moment that we were recording live.

00:20:57 Christy Sherding

In a hallway.

00:20:58 Michelle

We were like, so recording live.

00:20:59 Christy Sherding

Conference room.

00:21:00 Patrick Garmong

It cannot be liver.

00:21:02 Christy Sherding

It's actually, yeah.

00:21:03 Michelle

Liver, cookery. You have more language than we've had in any other episode.

00:21:07 Christy Sherding

Oh, scaffolding resonated with me and I was like, nope, I get it though. Building. Parachuting.

00:21:15 Michelle

Braided funding, braided partnerships. That's a term I recently was like, I like that.

00:21:20 Christy Sherding

But that's kind of what you're trying to do, right?

00:21:22 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, I mean, we have to be somewhat careful because of how we're funded and how we're funded.

00:21:27 Michelle

Let's hear about this.

00:21:28 Patrick Garmong

So the institute is funded. Currently, our model is that, so we were written into law to exist under the Richard B. Russell Act. So we have a statutory grant that is $5 million annually.

00:21:40 Michelle

And this is federal.

00:21:41 Patrick Garmong

This is all federal, yes. And then we're also funded through USDA through cooperative agreements. Those are discretionary funds. So if you watch the news at all recently, the statutory required to distribute discretionary discretion, right? So with our grant, we get about 60% of our total funding. It's the cooperative agreements that really are able to allow us to do more of the training and development and those pieces. The grant really is basically just kind of covers our operational pieces, be able to have our learning management system, our LMS, and all the tech and employees and things like that. But to be able to get out and do the trainings and deploy them, we need those cooperative agreements to be able to fund those activities. So, and like the CICN is fully funded through a cooperative agreement. So if the funding doesn't come in, the program dissolves. So yeah.

00:22:35 Christy Sherding

That's sad. Let's not talk about that.

00:22:36 Michelle

I was like, sad face emoji.

00:22:38 Christy Sherding

Yeah.

00:22:39 Michelle

It's always like, is there is there emojis?

00:22:40 Christy Sherding

Do you guys have to fundraise at all?

00:22:42 Patrick Garmong

So because we are written into law as an entity, like it's kind of been a new area for us this year, I'll put it that way, because there was some questions whether or not our funding would be available. Just with the new administration, new priorities, things shift, right? So we're starting to identify if we need to start pivoting and how we operate. And all of our resources are provided to our end users at no cost, which is great for them. It should be that way, right? It's USDA programs that we need to be training them, right? And it shouldn't be charging the program to receive training on how to implement the USDA standards and practices, right?

00:23:16 Michelle

Okay, wait, Makes sense. We could unpack that, but yes.

00:23:23 Patrick Garmong

Yeah. So we've definitely been in an exploration phase a little bit.

00:23:27 Michelle

So I know it's like bake sale. Do you want some Rootopia vegetable character stickers as a fundraiser? I don't know.

00:23:35 Patrick Garmong

Yeah. So I mean, you know, other things we have done though in the past is like sometimes, you know, state agencies will want to do something more robust with us than what we just have as our standard offerings. So they'll do like a outside contract with us.

00:23:49 Christy Sherding

Okay.

00:23:49 Patrick Garmong

So we'll go do like a big training blitz over several months and send consultants and contractors down there to do all that training with them. And that way we're leaving the funds available for the other states in the nation to be able to access these programs, but they're paying for our services.

00:24:05 Christy Sherding

Did you say what state you guys are you're in? Are you nationwide?

00:24:08 Patrick Garmong

So we're nationwide. So the institute is located at the University of Mississippi in Oxford, Mississippi. But we have several remote staff as well. So like I live in Washington State. Woohoo. Yeah. Pacific Northwest or in hotel rooms across the country.

00:24:24 Christy Sherding

Coming to a courtyard near you.

00:24:26 Patrick Garmong

I'll get back to the sad face emoji.

00:24:28 Michelle

And people are always like, that's so great. You travel for your job. You're like, I leave my farm. Although I am happy to see you too.

00:24:38 Patrick Garmong

It's so nice to see the faces, right? And meet new people and intersect and network and all that. But it is challenging to be on the road all the time and away from family.

00:24:47 Christy Sherding

Yeah, juggling family and your own like social life and all of that. It's fun. Good question. Did you hear me stutter? Good, question. I mean, I feel like I probably have more friends in like the K-12 space now than I do in like my personal life just because I'm at these things so often and intersecting and so someone once made an analogy that they start off as your colleagues and then kind of become your peers and your friends and then eventually these people kind of become your family, right? That you're just so deeply connected. Yeah, some of us might really become family.

00:25:22 Michelle

So being here at the conference, tell us about your experience.

00:25:27 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, so this has actually been kind of a refreshing conference for me because I haven't been a presenter, which usually I have several sessions at a conference. So it's been really nice to be able to just work the exhibit table, network, connect with people, record a couple podcasts, and just kind of just be in the space rather than having to be on stage and be on and present the entire time in terms of having to be a presenter. So it's been a little bit more relaxing for me, which has been nice. I've been able to network a lot.

00:25:55 Christy Sherding

Immerse yourself.

00:25:56 Patrick Garmong

Yeah, So unfortunately, I haven't been able to get to any sessions yet just because of timing and

00:26:03 Michelle

There's still time.

00:26:03 Patrick Garmong

There's still time.

00:26:04 Michelle

And there's so much great stuff here, too, which we haven't had a chance to really dig into. Well, Patrick, is there anything else you would like our listening audience to know?

00:26:15 Patrick Garmong

I think the biggest takeaway being in this space right now is that there is a huge movement towards bringing more whole fresh products to the table, to the cafeteria tray, to doing that. But we have to start training our people, investing in that training component in order for them to be able to be successful with it. Because we can't just have these flash in the pan initiatives that feel good in the moment, but we're not building our capacity for them to be long-term and long-lasting. And that only really comes through sound, continuous training.

00:26:45 Christy Sherding

Snapping, snapping.

00:26:47 Michelle

Thank you.

00:26:48 Christy Sherding

Patrick, you're amazing. Thank you.

00:26:49 Patrick Garmong

Thanks.

00:26:52 Michelle

Hey, Patrick, thank you so much for making time to talk with us and listeners for listening. And guess what? We have a treat for you. Go check out ICN Podcast. Patrick is The Mix-Up and there's so much more podcasts that you can listen from him.

00:27:09 Rick

Okay, the content and ideas of the Farm to School podcast do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Oregon State University or the United States Department of Agriculture. The USDA, Oregon State University are equal opportunity providers and employers.

00:27:25 Michelle

And the Farm to School was written, directed, and produced by Rick Sherman and Michelle Markesteyn, with production support from Thanks, LeAnn Locher and Lauren Tobey of Oregon State University. This podcast was made possible in part by a grant from the United States Department of Agriculture. Culture..

00:27:40 Rick

Please bear with us as we learn how to talk again. Do you want to learn more?

00:27:44 Michelle

What did you call it? Was it this episode? Mush Mouth.

00:27:46 Rick

I know. This is the, never again. Moving on, do you want to learn more about Farm to School, Michelle? Sure, Check out other episodes, show notes, contact information, and much more by searching the Farm to School Podcast, OSU.

00:28:00 Michelle

Actually, we really would love to hear from you. It always is so empowering and inspiring to hear.

00:28:07 Michelle

your stories and meet you. Thank you.

00:28:11 Rick

Thanks everybody.

00:28:11 Michelle

See you next time. Bye.