SACRAMENTO, Calif. – The Sacramento City Unified School District has been circumventing the “buy American” provisions of the National School Lunch Program to serve students cheap Chinese peaches.

And California peach growers and Congressman John Garamendi aren’t too happy about it.

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“My district is the center of the peach country. When I found out about it, I was angry,” Garamendi told The Sacramento Bee. “I jumped all over it. I said, ‘How can this be? How can the Sacramento school district do such a thing?’”

“Sacramento has had this strong farm-to-fork program, and one of our biggest purchasers of produce is off buying Chinese peaches,” he said.

Actually, it’s not just peaches. Someone in the district’s purchasing department – nobody’s naming names – ordered 3,900 cases of diced peaches, 2,700 cases of apple sauce, and 500 cases of pears, as well as a small vegetable order, from Gold Star Foods with a specific request for Chinese products, Gold Star CEO Sean Leer told the news site.

The district’s request to contractors asked for domestic products, and Gold Star provided its costs for both domestic and imported foods, and district officials awarded the company the $300,000 contract with a request to go with the cheaper, Chinese produce, he said.

“We would have hoped that they bought the domestic product,” Leer said, but “the lowest price usually wins the award.”

The Bee reports a “Buy American” provision in the National School Lunch Act requires participating schools to purchase foods grown and processed domestically, unless a product is not available or absurdly expensive.

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In Sacramento, the district would have saved about $42,000 on the peaches, almost $10,000 on the applesauce, and about $6,000 on the pears. The district halted its order after 728 cases of peaches, 952 cases of pears, and 896 cases of applesauce, alleging the purchase was a “mistake” and vowing to sign a new fruit contract.

The deal with Gold Star Foods was approved by the school board as a consent item, with no discussion, on Aug. 6, according to the Bee.

A school food worker noticed the fruit was from China in early November and alerted school officials, who plan to use up the remainder of the Chinese fruit stocked in a school warehouse, district spokesman Gabe Ross said.

He said the purchase is “inconsistent with our priorities and our goal to buy local products in the Sacramento region and California.

“We’ve got a great track record in the region with locally sourced foods,” Ross insisted.

The flap also caught the attention of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which plans to work with Sacramento officials “to ensure that taxpayer dollars are being used to purchase American products,” department officials told the Bee.

It’s unclear whether the district had already taken action before Garamendi sent a two-page letter about the contract to the district’s nutrition services director last week. In the letter, Garamendi highlighted the fact that there’s “four canned peach processing facilities within a two-hour drive of Sacramento.”

California Canning Peach Association CEO Rich Hudgins told the Bee he suspects many schools are violating the “Buy American” law, or at least the spirit of the law, because the USDA doesn’t enforce it.

“It’s becoming the 55 mph speed limit,” he said. “It’s on the books. But there’s no active enforcement.”