This story is published in collaboration with the Local Catch Network. With the 2014 school year in full swing, Jenn Lovewell, the then-acting director of the Monterey Peninsula Unified School District, noticed something was conspicuously missing from her schools’ lunchrooms. “We were doing a lot of work in the district around farms, so we had a lot of beautiful salad bars full of fresh local produce and free range chicken, grass fed beef, all that stuff,” recalls Lovewell.
“We were doing a lot of work in the district around farms, so we had a lot of beautiful salad bars full of fresh local produce and free range chicken, grass fed beef, all that stuff,” recalls Lovewell. “But I really wanted a source of seafood — local seafood — because [what] we served otherwise was frozen fish sticks.