A Recipe for Change – Connecting Classrooms, Cafeteria, and Culture Through Local Seafood in Maine Schools

It’s a cold and blustery day in January, but inside South Portland’s Skillin Elementary School, K-4 students are clamoring for Chef Khadija Ahmed’s Acadian redfish with a Congolese coconut lime sauce. While some may question whether students are willing to eat fish at school, South Portland Public Schools and Westbrook Public Schools in southern Maine have demonstrated that kids across all grade levels like eating local fish. A few miles away at Westbrook High School, one student exclaims, “This tastes just like the fish my mom makes at home!” after trying the Iraqi Seven Spice fish made with local hake. 

This student enthusiasm for local fish was built through a 2022 New England Food Vision Prize, representing a collaboration between the Gulf of Maine Research Institute (GMRI), South Portland Public Schools (ME), and Westbrook Public Schools (ME). The project successfully increased K-12 consumption of regional seafood by improving procurement pathways, building staff knowledge and buy-in through training, developing culturally inclusive recipes, and building a local seafood curriculum. 

“Focusing on local seafood is a triple win,” says Sophie Scott, Sustainable Seafood Program Manager at GMRI. “Not only is it arguably the healthiest protein you can put on a cafeteria tray, but it also supports our local fishermen, working waterfronts, and coastal communities. It’s a climate-smart protein with massive health benefits. And fish is an obvious choice for districts with large populations of immigrant, asylee, and refugee students, as they’re coming from places in the world with much higher seafood consumption rates.”

South Portland and Westbrook schools have some of Maine’s most diverse student bodies, and the project prioritized the development of culturally inclusive recipes that highlight local fish reflecting this diversity. Working together, Chef Samantha Cowens-Gasbarro and immigrant chefs Khadija Ahmed, Theavy and Sokhuon Kheam, and Huda Abdulmajed co-created dishes that reflect a wide range of culinary traditions, including Cambodian Sweet and Sour fish stir fry, Seven Spice Iraqi fish, and African haddock sandwiches. These delicious recipes were introduced to students through taste test events, with excellent feedback. 

Chef Ahmed emphasized the importance of culturally relevant meals: “Finding food that you recognize is a way of establishing belonging.” South Portland middle school health teacher, Ruth Solow, noticed how the recipes connect with all students, no matter their background: “The kids are really loving the seafood…today, we had Iraqi redfish and that was really great because the students say, ‘Oh my friend is Iraqi and I know that this is part of their culture.’ And it’s local here in Maine, so it’s also connecting to everyone’s culture.”

Solow was part of a teacher cohort that worked to connect what students were experiencing in the cafeteria to what they were learning in the classroom. Solow and other middle school teachers in South Portland and Westbrook worked with GMRI Education Specialist, Robin Lea, to iterate and develop a local seafood curriculum. “This curriculum covers local seafood from so many aspects. We talk about the nutrients and how sourcing locally is good for the environment. And we talk about everyone who is impacted economically by the local seafood industry,” Solow said. 

Over the course of the project, 650 students in South Portland and Westbrook learned about local seafood from the curriculum. Mary Emerson, Nutrition Director in Westbrook, noted that the coupling between the classroom and the cafeteria helped to build buy-in among students and noticed more seafood meals taken after the curriculum was implemented.

Getting the adults on board with serving local seafood is just as important as building enthusiasm with the students. Many food service staff are not used to working with raw fish filets and unsure whether students will eat fish at all. Staff training helped to overcome these barriers. “Food service staff are overworked, underpaid, and underappreciated, and they literally feed our kids,” Scott says. “We wanted to equip our school lunch heroes with the technical skills of preparing fish and also wanted staff to feel empowered and proud of the incredible work they do.” 

After completing a day-long training that focused on both the practical skills of working with raw fish and education around the community, cultural, and economic benefits that come with serving local fish, more than 50 school food service staff from South Portland and Westbrook reported increased confidence in preparing local fish. Before the training, 30% said they were confident working with fish, and that increased to 75% after the training. 

Shawn Perry, Nutrition Director in South Portland, said the training built excitement and buy-in. Violet Dibra, who works in the South Portland Middle School cafeteria, was pleasantly surprised, “I thought that kids don’t like fish, but I was wrong.  And I’m so happy for that because kids need the nutrients and the food that is good for them.”

On average, and across all ages, nearly 80% of students who sampled the fish recipes voted “I like it” (the top category) in taste tests over the two years of the project. With GMRI’s support in facilitating increased procurement, staff training, and delicious new recipes, the two districts were able to drastically increase the amount of local seafood served: Westbrook doubled the amount of local seafood served and South Portland went from serving 760 pounds of local seafood in the first year of the project to a whopping 3,790 pounds (5x increase) by the end of the second year. 

Building institutional demand for local seafood is critical to ensuring that New England fishermen can continue to thrive and bring their responsibly harvested catch to plates around the region. South Portland and Westbrook are modeling transformative change and showing other institutions around the region that serving local seafood can be enormously successful. By putting seafood on the cafeteria tray, these districts are not just feeding students, they’re nourishing an entire regional food system.

TagsK12, Seafood, Supply Chain