The Incredible Edible Schoolyard
by Jane Ciabattari
Alice Waters and some of the student gardeners of Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA. (Photo by Thomas Heinser.)
As a chef, Alice Waters inspired a taste revolution. Her award-winning restaurant, Chez Panisse—with its focus on fresh, organic, locally grown seasonal offerings—changed the way Americans eat and think about food. Now she's creating an education revolution. Waters planted the seeds of this revolution ten years ago when she founded the Edible Schoolyard, a one-acre organic garden of flowers, vegetables, and herbs planted, tended, and harvested by the 950-some students at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, CA. She had noticed the asphalt lot in a neglected school while driving from her Berkeley home to her restaurant. She mentioned the school during an interview, its principal invited her to visit, and voilą, she brought her Montessori-infused thinking full circle, back into the classroom.
Think of the garden and the kitchen at King Middle School as labs, where students plant and water and weed, harvest, gather eggs from the flock of five hens, cook, eat family-style, then clean up, putting scraps into the compost to nourish the garden. "They are learning from experiential education," Waters says. This, she adds, is a special boon to students who have a difficult time learning while sitting in a classroom. "If you go back to John Dewey, this is what he advocated: for all education to be connected to real experiences, in context. It's the way I learned. I'm not a big reader. I always had difficulty sitting in a classroom being quiet and listening."
Her mission: To convince public schools to make the topic of food and how we grow it a formal part of their academic coursework. "Maria Montessori believed everybody needs to have an education of the senses," she says, "and food is a way, on an everyday basis, to open your eyes, your mouth, your nose, your sense of touch. I've used her pedagogy in developing these ideas. She doesn't tell you what to think; she helps you be discerning and develop and refine your senses."
Food as an Academic Subject
How do gardening and cooking fit into the curriculum content that drives the standardized tests required of students? "Students come to the garden with a teacher of another subject," explains Chelsea Chapman, the Edible Schoolyard's program coordinator. "The teacher and our staff create content to link to California standards. The kids might be studying the soil cycle. They'll look at the compost pile, at things in different stages of decomposition, learn about carbon and nitrogen." In the kitchen, the curriculum often is social studies. "They learn about food history," says Chapman. "They might prepare a dish traditionally prepared by the colonists, the Native Americans, African Americans. They study the staple foods around the world."
The Edible Schoolyard also nurtures community. Students who are used to eating fast food and microwaved school lunches in a "snack shack" eat the food they have prepared around small tables, sharing conversation. They take part in a corn ritual that symbolizes hospitality and the cycles of nature. Each spring, the sixth graders plant corn. It is ready to harvest in September, so the first experience for the incoming new class of sixth graders is picking a fresh ear of that corn and grilling it outside. "Through gardening and cooking and eating meals together you can learn empathy and compassion and sharing," says Waters. "It's very powerful to witness. Food is about care. These kids are hungry."
In fact, as many as 15 percent of the students in some of the Berkeley public schools are literally hungry or at risk for hunger according to studies by J. Michael Murphy, Ed.D., associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. "We and others have published studies that show children who experience hunger do worse on a wide variety of academic, health, behavioral, and cognitive measures." In a two-year study, Murphy found positive effects on the social environment of the school as well as on academic performance. He concluded that King's students "are more enthusiastic about attending school, make better grades, eat healthier food due to wiser food choices, and become more knowledgeable about natural processes." Compared to middle schoolers without a garden or kitchen, students at King saw a "significantly greater" increase in grade point average and in math and science grades. He also noted that if students are educated in a respectful environment where they feel safe, violent incidents are reduced.
Better School Lunches
Now Alice Waters is spearheading another ambitious project, the Berkeley School Lunch Initiative. Approved in June 2004 by the Berkeley School Board, the initiative will develop programs based on the Edible Schoolyard throughout the 10,000-student district, with collaboration from her Chez Panisse Foundation, Children's Hospital of Oakland, and the Center for Ecoliteracy. "We are seeing an epidemic of diet-related disease in children-obesity, diabetes, asthma, even coronary heart disease," says Zenobia Barlow, executive director of the Center for Ecoliteracy. "By the time a child is ill, it's too late. We can transform eating habits much earlier. Instead of doing it one child at a time, one family at a time, this is a city-wide public health intervention involving 10,000 students."
Waters acknowledges such a wide-ranging initiative did not come overnight. "It was nine years of proving ourselves and trying to make a model at the Edible Schoolyard—plus probably 34 years of Chez Panisse seeding this idea in Berkeley—that convinced the school board," she says. "It's not surprising the board would be open to this, especially with the obesity epidemic. We have to reach every child when young and bring them into a vital relationship with food."
A Dining Commons scheduled to open in Fall 2006 at King Middle School will serve fresh organic food supplied by a network of local farmers to 950 students. Within ten years, Waters hopes to have a food curriculum and a transformed school lunch program in all 17 schools in Berkeley, kindergarten through high school. Already most of the schools have gardens and cooking classes. Teachers, administrators, and volunteers began meeting last summer to plan how to weave food into the curriculum and how to change the way food is served at lunchtime. "We want to improve the quality of what is purchased and change the suppliers to increase the amount of fresh produce served to children from regional sources, so it is healthy, nourishing, delicious, fresh, and affordable," says Barlow. By September 2006, Barlow notes, all schools accepting school lunch reimbursements from USDA are required to have a Wellness Committee, and this is a chance for parents and reformers in other communities to find a toehold in local schools.
With a view to the future, Waters created the nonprofit Chez Panisse Foundation in 1996 to help fund the Edible Schoolyard. She has been an enthusiastic fundraiser for her own and other projects throughout the country. Volunteers from the University of California at Berkeley, the neighborhood, and the community have helped make the Edible Schoolyard a reality. A couple of the original Edible Schoolyard participants have come back as Americorps teachers; other former students now at Berkeley High School also have returned as volunteers. Through it all Waters has been cheerleader, muse, resource, and guide.
But Alice Waters' ultimate vision is bigger than can be sustained by any individual, group of volunteers, or foundation. She wants versions of her Edible Schoolyard and school lunch initiative available in every school in the country, with funding from cities, states, and the federal government. She wants to make eating an academic subject, with credit, nationwide. And she insists it must have an experiential component. "When you teach nutrition, it has to go along with an interactive pedagogy that engages the kids, so that they are learning a habit for a lifetime."
There is a precedent. Forty years ago, when a presidential panel found poor fitness among youngsters, the country introduced a new physical education curriculum. "We built gyms and tracks and hired teachers," says Waters. "We made it a priority. Now we have to decide that transforming our relationships to food is a priority in every school in the country, teaching the essential information to live on this planet-how to nourish ourselves, how to nourish the land that feeds us, and how to communicate with one another."
Already It's Happening
A thousand visitors a year tour Edible Schoolyard to learn how to start gardens-in-schools projects in their communities and how to make food an academic subject. They are encouraged to use the Berkeley program as a model, to be adapted to climate, resources, and community needs. Take the Agrarian Adventure in Tappan Middle School in Ann Arbor, MI. Todd Wickstrom, a father of four sons aged six through 18, is a former managing partner of Zingerman's Deli in Ann Arbor and cofounder of Heritage Foods U.S.A. He visited the Edible Schoolyard in January 2002. "It felt like walking onto sacred ground, the way the students interacted with one another, the passion the staff had," he says. That fall, he began discussions with the principal at Tappan, his neighborhood middle school. Word leaked out through the press, and Oran Hesterman, who had attended Berkeley's King Middle School and lived in Ann Arbor, read about it. Hesterman, director of the Food and Society program at the Kellogg Foundation, offered a $25,000 planning grant. In November 2004, Alice Waters came to address a public assembly of 300 at Tappan and a fundraising dinner. Not long after, there was a groundbreaking ceremony at which a local farmer plowed the one-acre field—a former soccer field—with two horses. Students stayed after school that fall to plant garlic, parsnips, clover, and some cover crops to get nutrients into the soil. The Agrarian Adventure is on its way.
About the Author
Jane Ciabattari is author of Stealing the Fire (Canio's Editions).
This article first appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Spring 2005.
