I
GOT MY FIRST SENSE of the disconnect between
children and food when I was a kindergarten and
first grade teacher in a lost-in-the-hills school
in southern New Hampshire, multiple decades ago.
Intent on a healthy curriculum, I had the students
prepare their own snack every day, preferably from
scratch. But after weeks of popcorn, apple sauce,
and celery sticks with peanut butter, I was
itching to explore new horizons. What new thing
could we make that the kids would really like to
eat, I pondered. French fries? Not terribly
healthy, but certainly a fun food that would allow
us to take part in the transformation from raw
vegetable to tasty snack.
I
gathered my group in the kitchen. Their eyes lit
up when I announced our task. "So what do we
need to make French fries?" No response, as a
bit of glint left their eyes. Rephrase and
concretize...I tried again: "When you make
French fries, what's the first thing you do?"
"Well," courageous Steve recollected,
"you go to the icebox, open the freezer, and
take out the plastic bag with the crinkly things
inside." Not one of the children knew that
French fries were potatoes. And when we made
tomato soup with tomatoes picked fresh from the
garden, I was disheartened when Angela said,
"This soup is OK, but I like real tomato soup
better, the kind that comes in the can."
Most
of the $4 billion spent on school lunches in the
United States every year reinforces this severing
of the conceptual food chain. When was the last
time you walked into a school and enjoyed the
fragrance of fresh-baked bread wafting from the
school kitchen? These days, food appears from
somewhere/nowhere out of the back of a truck.
There are no smiling grandmothers with splatters
of sauce on their aprons ladling up love with the
freshly mashed potatoes; today's food service
ladies just heat and serve. But in Berkeley,
California, carrots are coming straight from the
school's garden, food preparation is an integral
part of the curriculum, local restaurateurs are
selling organic tacos in the schoolyard, and the
whole community is recognizing the links between
cognition and nutrition.
IN
THE BEGINNING was the seed. Well, actually, a
handful of seeds. The Berkeley community had a
long history of community gardening when Alice
Waters, founder of the acclaimed Chez Panisse
restaurant, had the vision of a school garden.
Neil Smith, principal of the Martin Luther King
Middle School, had a parallel vision of empowering
teachers and students to enrich the curriculum and
the schoolyard through real-world learning.
A 1995
conversation between Smith and Waters helped them
realize that they both wanted to hoe the same row.
A couple of science teachers, Phoebe Tanner and
Beth Sonnenberg, got intrigued, but were still a
bit overwhelmed. Smith recalls, "Alice's
vision was so far-reaching, so 'out there'
compared to where we were. She was talking about
students serving other students lunches that they
had grown in the garden, and we were looking at an
asphalt, urban lot. We needed to start with the
garden before we could talk about the cafeteria
and redoing the lunch program."
Fritjof
Capra and Zenobia Barlow at the Center for
Ecoliteracy recognized the asphalt-breaking
potential in these seeds. Compelled by the
center's mission to "support educational
organizations and nurture communities in schools
that teach and embody ecologically sustainable
ways of life," they saw an opportunity to
recreate a miniature food system on the school
grounds. Philosophical and financial support from
the center helped to weave together many strands
of already existing support for community
gardening, and so it was that the Edible
Schoolyard was born.
First
came the garden, then a student-designed and
-built toolshed, followed by a kitchen classroom
and specialized food preparation teaching staff to
help students turn fresh produce into healthy
snacks. The garden became an integral part of the
math, language arts, and social studies curricula,
and an emotional climate of warmth, mutual
support, and trust flourished in the school.
Esther Cook, manager of the kitchen classroom,
reports that students have enthusiastically made
and enjoyed such things as Jerusalem artichoke
fritters, pumpkin and kale soup, cucumber sushi,
and sweet potato biscuits. Cook saw much learning
potential in the cooking activities:
"Students have learned the origins of staple
ingredients by grinding their own wheat and corn
into flour and making butter from scratch. They
have appreciated the inherent bounty of the garden
by counting the seeds in a cherry tomato. And they
were struck by the ability of one tiny tomato to
hold the potential for 100 plants. 'Enough for
everyone on my block!' exclaimed a student."
One
garden on one schoolyard is a beginning, but not a
significant challenge to Del
Monte.
Yet if a schoolyard garden can foster learning and
community at Martin Luther King Middle School, why
not have a garden on every schoolyard in Berkeley,
or every schoolyard in California? And since you
can't realistically feed all the children in any
one school with just one garden, why not create
connections between local farmers and the school
district?
Instead of freeze-dried burritos
trucked
in from the Midwest, how about burritos with
organic beans and cheese grown and produced by
area farmers, farmers whose fields are threatened
by suburban sprawl? The educators, systems
theorists, ecologists, and writers at the Center
for Ecoliteracy saw the Edible Schoolyard as the
first step in a profound shift toward more
sustainable and equitable communities. They
decided to aim high—convert the Berkeley School
District's entire lunch program to all organic and
locally grown.
The
center staff found conceptual support for their
goals in the USDA's Community Food Security grant
program, whose goals include: meeting the needs of
low-income people by increasing their access to
fresher, more nutritious food supplies; increasing
the self-reliance of communities in providing for
their own food needs; promoting comprehensive
responses to local food, farm, and nutrition
issues; and developing innovative linkages between
the for-profit and nonprofit food sectors.
Janet
Brown, program officer for the Food Systems
Project at the Center for Ecoliteracy, sees the
project as a model for the USDA's goal of linking
farms and schools. "In just five years, the
Center's Food Systems Project has grown from the
funding of a school garden at an individual school
site to the complete reinvention of Child
Nutrition Services throughout the 10,000-student
Berkeley Unified School District. By using food as
an organizing principle for systemic change, the
program addresses the root causes of poor academic
performance, psychosocial behavior disorders, and
escalating children's health issues such as
obesity, asthma and diabetes. At the same time,
the program connects the loss of farmland and
farming as a way of life in our region and the
social problems facing school communities to
children's health."
There's
a direct connection, Janet contends, between
agribusiness that supports the high-fat, fast-food
industry and recent research finding that one
quarter of California adolescents are at risk of
being overweight. But by creating dedicated
markets for local organic farmers, school
districts can help to nurture healthier students,
minimize the use of toxic herbicides and
pesticides, and build community through supporting
local business and cross-generational food
preparation experiences.
When
the Berkeley Unified School District adopted its
new Food Policy in August, 1999, it unpaved the
way for breaking down both the conceptual mindset
and infrastructure of the current food programs.
Since the kitchens at most of the schools have
devolved to just providing heat-and-serve meals,
the school board proposed and 83 percent of the
voters approved a $10 million bond issue to
renovate all of its elementary school kitchens and
build a new cafeteria and kitchen facilities at
the largest junior high school.
Good facilities
are a start, but kitchens need inspired staff, so
additional grant funding will support a
district-wide nutrition training program for food
service workers. To facilitate the shift from USDA
surplus food to fresh, locally prepared food,
further grant funding supports hiring an
organic-savvy chef to create whole new menus and
new kitchen designs. Finally, to assure that
school meal programs can serve delicious,
nutritiously complete meals with ingredients from
local farms while remaining economically viable, a
$300,000 grant from the California Endowment
supports the development of a strategic business
plan.
And
where's all that food going to come from? The
project will be hiring a "forager" who
serves as an envoy between the school district and
local sustainable agriculture practitioners. When
project coordinator Jared Lawson did some
investigative foraging he found that Sebastapol
orchards consistently lost money on small apples
that had to be thrown away or sold at a loss
because they were outside the standard pack
regulations of the California Department of
Agriculture. He saw that these apples were perfect
for school snacks or for making organic cider for
kids. Healthy snacks for students while creating a
dedicated market for an unutilizable product for
growers—it's a classic example of feeding two
birds with one hand!
Since
implementing salad bars in some schools over the
last year, the school district has purchased more
than $100,000 of fresh produce from local farmers.
This figure will increase exponentially as the
district uses its buying power to provide locally
grown food for the primary meal program. Further,
negotiations are currently underway with Newman's
Own and Amy's to explore whether volume purchasing
can bring down the cost of providing organic,
prepackaged snack foods like dried fruits and
healthy cookies. Following Berkeley's lead, San
Francisco, Oakland, West Contra Costa, and Marin
unified school districts have all requested
assistance in exploring similar acquisition
programs. Joint purchasing for close to a million
schoolchildren might catch the Green Giant's
attention.
THE
BIGGEST QUESTION, of course, is will the kids eat
the stuff? Can McDonald's and licorice whips be
replaced by kale and kiwis? Not leaving anything
to chance, the Food Systems people have devised
ingenious ways to both assess what students want
and educate students and their parents about
what's possible. The new breakfast program at
Oxford Elementary School, consisting primarily of
whole-grain oatmeal, is a test of the willingness
of children to try something new. Extensive local
and organic, seasonal condiments such as berries,
yogurt, nuts, seeds, and fresh fruit are provided.
Initial assessments indicate that more children
are eating breakfast at school and that 59 percent
are choosing the whole-grain breakfast over the
usual fare of French toast, pancakes, and sugar
cereal.
To
assess the impact of this program, Dr. Michael
Murphy of the Harvard School of Medicine is
researching the effects of a nutritionally
adequate breakfast on academic achievement,
psychosocial behavior, physical health, and school
attendance.
The
other major change has been the salad bars. Four
are in place at the elementary and middle schools
and the project aspires to having eight in full
swing by the end of the school year. Though salad
bars present a certain number of logistical
challenges, popularity among students is not one
of them. It turns out that if students have grown
cherry tomatoes in the school garden, they're more
likely to choose them when they see them at the
salad bar. So school gardens help to increase the
repertoire of students' culinary choices.
The
problems have more to do with time—one salad bar
won't process students quickly enough, and making
lunch longer affects the length of the school day,
which impacts the bus schedule, and conflicts with
union contractual arrangements. It's a systems
problem; Muir's notion that everything is hitched
to everything else applies to schools as well.
Janet Brown reflects ironically that, "If our
goal was to inexpensively create as many eating
disorders as possible, then what we would do is
shrink the amount of time for lunch." So the
solution is not to shoehorn salad bars into a
dysfunctional time frame, but rather explore how
to adjust the whole system so that lunch can
provide both nutrition and the opportunity for
productive social engagement.
The
initiative at the high school has taken a
different tack. In response to the tasteless,
unappealing food served at the high school
cafeteria, more and more Berkeley High School
students have started to hit the fast-food places
downtown. Merchants then started to complain about
the adolescent influx. Child Nutritional Services
suggested that the solution to the problem was to
bring fast food onto campus, but the Food Systems
Project saw it differently. They went to a variety
of local restaurateurs and said, "Here's a
captive audience of 3,300 hungry consumers. Do you
want to work with us to create organic food
choices on campus?"
The outcome is an
on-campus food court, designed after surveying
students about how they like to be served. In
exchange for being willing to make organic
substitutions in their menus, vendors get access
to a dedicated market. Stroll into the food court
this week and you can enjoy hormone-free chicken
thighs and legs from Poulet, sandwiches on organic
bread from the E-Z Stop Deli, and pizzas made with
organic herbs and Marin County cheese. The Good
Food Cafe, a campus kitchen for students studying
the culinary arts, offers an organic smoothie.
"Any high school in the country would kill
for this," commented Principal Frank Lynch.
Student
response ranges from thrilled to tolerant. Senior
class president Jamie Lee said, "It's great
we have a healthy option to the greasy stuff they
used to serve in the snack shack. But lots of
students just want the food to be affordable and
tasty. If it's good for them, then that's all the
better." When students complained that the
costs were too high the first week, negotiations
with vendors led to lowered prices, which was a
good opportunity to demonstrate to students that
feedback loops in ecological systems tend to move
the system toward sustainability.
The
Berkeley Food Systems Project is problem-solving
that explores connections between seemingly
disconnected parts of a system. Wendell Berry
calls this "solving for pattern," in
which "good solutions promote the well-being
of all parts of the system." The health of
the soil, of plants and animals, of farm and
farmer, of schools and schoolchildren are
sustained by connecting the pattern.
Zenobia
Barlow points out that, "schools have become
a business opportunity for fast food vendors and
global food producers.... Our tax dollars are
buying a high-fat, high-salt, high-octane
caffeine, fast food diet for school children that
in turn produces a multi-million-dollar public
health problem." This diet also reduces
academic performance and contributes to the demise
of family farms eradicated by urban sprawl.
Instead, the Center for Ecoliteracy and the
Berkeley School District are devising a pattern of
healthy food, improved academic performance, and
sustainable agriculture.
The
students, teachers, community gardeners, and
ecologists in the Bay Area are on the doorstep of
a significant food invention. Think, for a moment,
of that food item that beckons to all of our taste
buds. With enough innovative thinking, Berkeley
students will be able to reinvent that holy grail
of American foods—pesticide-free, locally grown,
low-fat, and sea-salted French fries that will
taste good and be good for us too. Maybe the next
time I cook with students, I won't need to feel so
guilty.
