Greener Teachers

The future of farming depends on engaging our youth to be stewards of the land through flagship programs like Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard.

by Amy Roberts

illustrations by Peter Oumanski

One day, Alice Waters was walking to her restaurant Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California, when she passed a vacant lot next to the nearby Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. The prolific chef and author — whose restaurant is widely credited with ushering in the farm-to-table movement — mused to a friend that the lot could be used as a place to grow fresh produce for the students. Their conversation eventually found its way to the middle school’s principal, who agreed to grant Waters access to the lot.

If the availability of fresh, healthy food in public schools is lacking today, in 1995, it was nearly unheard of. But Waters — being ahead of her time — understood this, and so she planted a garden full of crops for children at the school to nourish and grow under the guidance of teachers and volunteers. Soon, the students became stewards of the land, spending dedicated class time and free periods tending to their crops. When it was time to harvest, they brought their bounty into a kitchen classroom, where they learned to make seasonal recipes using the ingredients they had grown. And just like that, The Edible Schoolyard Project was born.

In founding the nonprofit organization, Waters brought much of the same ethos that she used at upscale Chez Panisse to the students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, which remains The Edible Schoolyard Project’s flagship school today. In the 29 years since it was founded, the organization has expanded considerably, establishing a second Edible Schoolyard in Stockton, California, in 2021, and a network of thousands of schools around the U.S. and the world that have embraced teaching students about growing fresh produce through educational programs.

When the program started at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, volunteer-led gardening lessons were conducted in a way that spoke to the students (between sixth to eighth grade) on their level. Cooking classes were made palatable to their budding tastes, as they learned to make seasonal salads, frittatas, and veggie-filled pestos in their kitchen classroom.

“At Chez Panisse, the chefs are creating these beautiful plate experiences for guests, and we think of that as edible education,” Ashley Rouse, The Edible Schoolyard Project’s executive director, tells The Rooted Journal. “What’s on their plate is seasonal, it’s coming directly from a farmer, and it’s being presented in its clearest, purest way. We think of that as the same way we do edible education at the school.”

From the outset, the teachers at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School genuinely believed in The Edible Schoolyard program and helped to seamlessly integrate gardening and cooking lessons into the curriculum — a factor that has no doubt contributed to the organization’s success. “In the beginning, the teachers were highly involved in the support of the classroom integration,” says Rouse. “Their teaching staff worked in collaboration with our teaching staff.”

Over the course of the next three decades, Rouse says that The Edible Schoolyard Project’s curriculum has evolved to continue to serve the students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School and beyond. Today, she says the program incorporates gardening and food sourcing into just about every aspect of education. “We work in collaboration with the school to determine what their scope and sequence is for the year,” she says. “Then, we work backwards from that to create lesson blocks that will intersect that with the topics that we’re trying to cover, which might be climate change, regenerative agriculture, composting, circular economy, or biodiversity.”

Outside the incubator of The Edible Schoolyard Project’s flagship school (and open-minded, health-conscious Berkeley, which has provided a welcoming environment for this type of education), Rouse believes that the landscape for food education in public schools nationwide is moving in a positive direction. “There’s now a national school garden movement,” she says. “I don’t think that’s going away.”

While the students at Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School continue to tend to their flourishing garden and prepare seasonal meals, The Edible Schoolyard Project also empowers educators well outside of Berkeley to start gardening programs. “We’ve inspired over 6,500 schools around the globe, across 57 countries,” Rouse says, adding that Waters often carries a map pinpointing all the schools they’ve reached with their programming. Through free educational resources and their “edible education curricula” (which includes lessons like “Understanding Organic” and “Cooking with Curiosity”), teachers can incorporate The Edible Schoolyard Project’s values into their classrooms regardless of their geographic location.

“We teach kids about nourishment,” Rouse says. “We teach them about what this food does for your body, that it’s better for you because you’re planting it and growing it in organic soil, that it’s been created through regenerative practices.”

She adds that their education doesn’t end there, and extends to how the food is prepared and presented, as they learn about “the witty banter that can happen between tables as they’re prepping, what it takes to set the table with intention, and think about beauty as the language of care.” Ultimately, Rouse says, “It’s really about understanding how we’re all connected, and doing that through food.”

Get involved with these organizations and others:
The Edible Schoolyard Project

For close to 30 years, Alice Waters’ nonprofit organization has been teaching “edible education” to kids through gardening, cooking, and providing fresh produce to cafeterias. Volunteers lead interactive experiences that address issues like climate change, food inequality, and public health.

edibleschoolyard.org

FOODCORPS

FoodCorps works with public schools and communities to improve kids’ health by supplying nutritious food and educational experiences. Educators provide gardening lessons, host taste tests, and advocate for food-justice policy change.

foodcorps.org

SLOW FOOD USA

Slow Food USA runs a series of programs across the U.S. with the aim of “dismantling oppressive food systems to achieve good, clean, and fair food for all.” Through its School Garden Network, the organization works to help kids develop farming and cooking skills in their schools.

slowfoodusa.org

KIDSGARDENING

With free educational resources and grant funding for teachers, KidsGardening supports educators and caregivers by giving them the tools they need to provide gardening lessons to kids.

kidsgardening.org

Newman’s Own Foundation

With a focus on food education and healthy school meals, as well as Indigenous food justice, the Newman’s Own Foundation partners with programs that make nutritious fare available to kids. It also supports organizations working to nourish Indigenous children through food and culture.

newmansown.org

4-H

As America’s largest youth development organization, 4-H hosts a series of programs focused on teaching kids about agriculture, health, science, and civic engagement. Its network consists of approximately 500,000 volunteers and 3,500 mentors who work with close to 6 million children nationwide.

4-h.org

Across the country, Christopher Horne provides organic produce and school gardening programs from his organic farm, Horne Family Farms, in Londonderry, New Hampshire. From his half-acre plot of land, just over a half-hour drive from Lowell, Massachusetts, Horne serves the Lowell Public Schools system (which the farmer once attended himself), and hosts visits for local students so they can learn about agriculture. (The farm also supplies a number of restaurants in the area.)

Horne is passionate about his work, as someone who was born and raised in an urban part of Lowell, about an hour’s drive northwest of Boston, without much access to nature. “We never even had a backyard growing up,” he tells The Rooted Journal of his family home. “I had never even been around a raised garden bed before I was 19 or 20.”

But college lit a fuse in Horne, and, during his time at UMass Lowell, he developed a keen interest in agriculture. He credits it to his youthful idealism and his interests lying at the “intersection of economics, environmentalism, and philosophy,” all of which he was studying at the time. Outside of classes, he began to get involved with Mill City Grows, a local food-justice organization that maintains a network of community and school gardens.

But just as Horne was finding his passion in farming, things at home took a turn. “During that same time, both my parents had a serious heart attack and a serious stroke within a 10-month period,” he says. “All those things came together and culminated in a 20-year-old existential moment of, ‘Okay, what is this all really about?’”

His parents’ health scares only solidified Horne’s belief in fresh, local food as a healing force. After graduating and continuing to volunteer with Mill City Grows for a few years, he began to work for FoodCorps, a national organization that brings healthy food education and gardening lessons to children in public schools.

“Even on this small scale, we were pulling out dozens and dozens of pounds of fresh, beautiful food,” Horne says, speaking of his time working with FoodCorps. “It made me really want to learn how to grow food on a master level.” That’s when Horne immersed himself in a yearlong agriculture program at The Farm School, a nonprofit training organization based on a 100-acre farm in Athol, Massachusetts. Through the program, Horne also learned another important skill: how to write a business plan to start a farm of his own, which he did later in 2018.

Today, Horne Family Farms provides the kind of education around agriculture that the farmer would have appreciated as a kid himself. “I feel this tremendous pull in that direction,” Horne says of educating local children about fresh produce. “Not only because it’s where I came from, but because I know a lot of these kids have no backyard or green space whatsoever. Being able to connect them to the land in any way has always been super important to me.”

In the way Berkeley has provided an encouraging home base for The Edible Schoolyard Project over the years, Horne says that Lowell is also welcoming these types of school agriculture programs. “It’s a small mill town that’s very densely populated and very culturally diverse,” he says of the area. “We have this vibrant community with a huge public school system, and between here and Boston and all these small cities in between, there’s a lot going on in terms of school gardens. There’s a lot of good stuff happening.”

Horne says community donations and grants from the local government help support Mill City Grows, FoodCorps, and other nonprofits. The area also recently incorporated the innovative “Harvest of the Month” initiative, developed by the nonprofit organization Massachusetts Farm to School, which serves locally grown fruits and vegetables to the area’s public schools. Grassroots community support is key when it comes to measuring the success of these types of programs as well.

“In pretty much any school garden I’ve ever planted, any lesson I’ve ever done, kids are naturally really excited,” Horne says. “And I think that’s partly because they hear stories from parents or grandparents, who still want to be a part of gardening or farming in some way. I see these kids start to light up a little bit in terms of understanding and grasping where things are coming from.”

Many wonder if kids are growing disconnected from the natural world during a time when a great deal of value is placed on technology and innovation, not harvesting greens from a garden bed.

To Horne, though, the idea that kids aren’t interested in nature couldn’t be further from reality. “You could easily cast a stereotype of kids not even wanting to get their hands dirty, but in my experience, it’s just the opposite,” he says. “I have photos with a group of students around a raised [garden] bed, and we’re all just smelling the soil, because it was this fresh compost that just dropped, and I was telling them about all the living organisms in the soil and how that makes us happy and releases dopamine. The kids are just cracking up laughing at it, because they all have this big fistful of soil and are shoving it in their faces.” The farmer adds that “the food part” doesn’t have to be center stage for experiences like these for kids to make them meaningful. Rather, he says, “It’s having the experience of putting your hands on something real.”

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Farming the Future
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