It’s too bad they don’t feed the entire lunch to worms and give the kids normal lunches…
Via EAG News:
HOPKINS, S.C. – Officials at South Carolina’s Lower Richland High School have found an audience that loves Michelle Obama’s healthy lunches: worms.
A new program at the school recycles the district’s lunch leftovers to create compost that’s used to grow produce for the culinary program. Leftover food is hauled to a 2,200-pound food dehydrator where it’s dried to create coffee-like material that’s fed to red worms in vermiculite pods, ColaDaily.com reports.
The worms break down the dehydrated food waste to produce worm castings, a vital ingredient in quality compost. That compost is used for the school’s solar-powered greenhouse to grow vegetables, and flowers for school fundraisers, according to the news site.
The 30-panel solar array that powers the greenhouse was paid for in part with a $25,000 from the local Palmetto Energy. The rest of the $142,361 “LifeCycle Innovation Project” came from “a number of partnership grants.” The school worked with the public-private collaboration firm EngenuitySC to organize the project.
The Free-Times reports the district choose the program because it “was looking to use federal grant money to create a project that would directly link to its STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) program…”