Have you seen a typical school-lunch menu lately? If not, get yourself to the Internet and prepare for a shock: At most American schools, children live on diets made almost entirely of corn dogs, tater-tots, chicken nuggets and pizza. I’ve even seen one middle-school menu that offers pizza — from Papa John’s to Domino’s — five days a week.
Few 12-year-olds really know where their food comes from, which is particularly ironic considering that the traditional school calendar was created with summers off to allow children to help on the family farm. Instead, many kids today are simply harvesting bad food habits and a future of obesity-related maladies, from diabetes to heart disease.
That’s part of the reason why the current generation of children is the first in our history to have a lower life expectancy than their parents. What’s a thinking person who cares about children to do?
First, she could think about ways to teach children how to garden and cook. Then, she could encourage educators to bring gardens into the science-and-humanities curriculum, and to create school-lunch menus with much more wholesome and appealing options than pizza and corn dogs. It could be the start of a food revolution (or something close to one, anyway)!
This near revolution, called the Edible Schoolyard, has been taking place in Berkeley, Calif., since 1995, and it’s led by that doyenne of the organic movement, chef and author Alice Waters. Waters’s new book, Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea (Chronicle Books, 2008), details the journey she has been making with her young charges. It’s simply fascinating.
It all started when Waters made an offhand remark to a journalist that the local Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s unused, condemned cafeteria and adjoining unused paved lot were symbols of all that was wrong with our culture. It sent a clear message to local children: No one cared about them. The new principal of the school challenged Waters to do something about it, and the two worked together to replace the abandoned lot with gardens.
Today, 300 middle-school students visit this 1-acre garden every week as part of their science curriculum. They study plant structure, decomposition and other aspects of botany. There’s also a kitchen class — a sort of new-fangled home-ec — where students work in groups of 10 to harvest garden vegetables and cook them
None of this is new, strictly speaking. Gardening was a core part of American school curriculums before World War II, when growing food to eat was seen as a necessary part of life. But factory-made food has become so common that Waters and her compatriots in the Berkeley school system were forced to create “an edible education.” They argued that a garden really does fit into the test-taking academic mission of a school: Journaling in the garden can be part of English classes, while studying (and eating!) vegetables fits into the health and nutrition curriculum.
Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard has inspired school administrators across the country, leading to affiliated gardens in New Orleans, San Francisco and Greensboro, N.C. If you are likewise inspired, you can take that first step toward starting a food revolution by picking up a copy of Edible Schoolyard or checking out the Web site (www.edibleschoolyard.org). Or, you could plant a pot of kale or herbs to harvest, or set about making one of Waters’s delicious recipes, like the simple frittata at right.
Just because we find ourselves in a corn-dog-saturated moment in history doesn’t mean we have to lead corn-dog-saturated lives. Instead, we can lead a movement toward healthy, local eating that teaches our children not only where their food comes from, but how to grow it, cook it and even love it.
It’s a win-win for the many kids whose brains, hearts and muscles are currently supported five days a week by nutritional building blocks that are anything but stellar.
Dara Moskowitz Grumdahl is a celebrated food and wine critic. Nominated seven times for James Beard Foundation Awards — the Oscars of the food world — she has received four awards for her restaurant and wine columns. Since 2001, her work has been regularly featured in the Best Food Writing anthologies. Her new book, Drink This: Wine Made Simple (Ballantine, 2009), is being released in November.