Why teach about food systems?  The list of pedagogical and educational benefits, to both young and old learners, is long and diverse:

How to begin?  There are as many worthwhile ways to educate about food systems as there are delicious foods to eat!  Here are a few diverse examples of programs and curricula that provide children with rich, meaningful and enjoyable encounters with food systems.

Seeds of Change in Southern Florida

(In 1992, after Hurricane Andrew had devastated Florida, Rowena Gerber, an elementary school teacher at Miami Country Day School, sought to involve her children in helping repair the storms destruction.) She and her students decided to grow trees to re-leaf decimated southern Florida communities.  At year’s end, 2000 trees, each gift-wrapped and bedecked with a booklet of student poems, were donated to hurricane victims—garnering her students 1^st place in Scholastic’s KidsCare competition.  This project began the school’s long-standing relationship with ECHO (Educational Concerns for Hunger Organization), which supports small farmers and urban gardeners in the Third World with seeds, farm supplies, and training.  Students began experimenting with growing different seeds that poor Third World farmers need.  Miami Country Day School, blessed with a warm, wet climate and long growing season, will soon be providing ECHO with substantial amounts of seeds for tropical farmers, among them, the native Florida seminole pumpkin and the amazing moringa tree—fast-growing and a rich source of food, vitamins and medicine.

The student’s enthusiasm, with generous support from the Abess family, has enabled the program to grow like a weed.  Beginning with one garden, Miami Country Day now has an Abess Center for Environmental Studies Lab and a garden for each pre-K to 5^th grade class, along with shared arbor and greenhouse projects (designed by the students, of course!)  The cafeteria manager is happy to receive and use the garden’s produce—but students gleefully consume most of the fruits and vegetables during class. The kids grow herbs, and have formed their own non-profit corporation, Project Hope, which sells plants and herb-infused vinegars.

Rowena’s church, meanwhile, was getting involved with solar cooking projects in Haiti.  Haiti is seriously deforested, and for many of its impoverished citizens finding cooking fuel is a daily challenge..  However, the country’s sunny climate provides ideal conditions for the use of solar cookers.  Rowena explains that each grade at Miami Country Day School designs and builds solar cookers, “from primitive crayon melters for the 4 year olds to the sophisticated inventions the fifth graders come up with.” Learning leads naturally to action: students now contribute to two solar-cooking initiatives in Haiti. Their donations fund a revolving loan that allows Haitian villagers in a rural community to be able to afford solar cookers and to share solar-cooking expertise; donated funds also support a solar cooker store and information center in Port-Au-Prince, the capital city.   Miami Country Day kids work to nourish Haitian minds as well as their bodies.  Proceeds from the kids’ plant and vinegar sales benefit a network of 87 schools in Port-Au-Prince; these schools now are working to implement gardening and solar-cooking education into their schools, having visited and seen the success of the Miami Country Day program.  Rowena’s school will work this year with a Haitian teacher; together they will design food-systems activities and curriculum for Haiti.  These personal ties to Haitian communities, enriched through visits, frequent letters, picture exchanges and email, enhance the Miami students’ cultural and multicultural understanding.

Most recently, the program has branched out to include sprouts and juices.  Sprouts, says Rowena, are a botanical bonanza: easy to grow in all seasons, inexpensive, and packed with nutrition. She is working on ways to distribute seeds and sprouters  (inexpensive plastic devices used to sprout seeds) to refugee camps and to needy Haitian communities as a quick and efficient way to enhance health and food security.

Rowena has provided quality instruction in science and social studies to her students through working with them on food systems for an hour a week.  The Florida Solar Energy Center curricula on solar energy and alternative fuels (see resource guide) ensures that solar cooking work is also an in-depth science exploration.  Nutrition, biology, Florida history, Haitian culture—many other subjects come alive as students work with food systems at Miami Country Day School.  “It has been so rewarding to watch the children learn and to listen to their insights and discoveries—their hands-on, nose-on, mouth-on, and both-feet-in approach to this thing we call science,” Rowena notes.   For the last 5 years, Miami Country Day student gardeners/designers/engineers have presented their work at YouthCaN, an international gathering of young environmentalists, at the Museum of Natural History in New York City.   The school is working on a curriculum guide to document how Rowena’s activities with students address the national and state standards.

Community building and leadership also have grown: “I have never seen the children happier than they were the day they carried the wood planks to the garden to build their raised beds.  I saw timid children become leaders, angry children become enthusiastic helpers, and everyone happily pitching in to pull the garden together.”  Perhaps the most valuable aspect of the program is that her students learn the feasibility and value of making a positive difference in the world. “They are genuinely doing something to help other people, and that always makes them feel good.  When they sell their vinegar, it’s something that they’ve done from scratch: they grew the plants, they’ve made the labels, they’ve made the whole thing.  It’s not like selling chocolates for a good cause—they can see how their own efforts and ideas can benefit other people.”

Budding Entrepreneurs in Chicago’s Inner City

The five hulking concrete high-rises of Cabrini Green, a public housing project on Chicago’s West Side, become even more foreboding close up.  The whole site has an eerie resemblance to a massive prison complex, except no police or authorities are in sight.  Behind the building and the drug dealers likes a tiny one-acre rectangular patch of green, a grassy field in front of a two-story elementary school.  There are broken beer bottles, silvery potato chip wrappers and used condoms in the corners, cleared away to make room for 56 long rows of raised beds. 

The 20 children traipsing around the field on a Saturday morning in March are not typical farmers.  For over ten years Dan Underwood, a former public housing resident, has worked with more than 150 children directing this afterschool project, dubbed Cabrini-Greens.  The kids work 5 days a week growing organic “designer” lettuce; they then sell the produce to some of Chicago’s fanciest restaurants and supermarkets, and split the profits.  Kids can earn up to $700 a season.  It’s a rare patch of hope in one of the most hopeless areas of the country.

This youth enterprise, long supported by the Heifer Project, now also cares for 6 goats, soon to be the source of goat cheese.  Borrowed oxen—Ed and John—help plow the lettuce beds and improve the field’s productivity.

The farm serves to educate the entire neighborhood about food systems, and also teaches at-risk kids some valuable life skills.  Underwood says that older teens walk by the garden and call the kids “slaves.”  “Kids need to know that work doesn’t hurt, that it’s beneficial.  After generations of being on public assistance, we try to show kids that getting your hands dirty can be OK.  And animals as a teaching tool is a great way to reach kids—if I can get to them early enough.”  Animals in the city help foster an ethos of caring for children that are too poor to own a pet.

Ramona Garcia was able to pay for a drug rehabilitation program for her mother with her earnings; now she and her mother no longer live in public housing.  Omar Young, another project participant, has worked as a sous-chef at Charlie Trotter’s, a world-class restaurant and purchaser of Cabrini-Greens’ produce.  “I’m planning on keeping straight As in school so I can graduate and go to a good cooking school and, one day, serve top quality food in my own restaurant.”  Helping kids like these grow into responsible adults may become one of Heifer Project’s most enduring legacies.

Kids Growing Food (New York)

New York uses pesticides to make gardens grow.  As part of the settlement of an anti-trust case against a pesticide manufacturer, in 1997 the Attorney General’s office funded Kids Growing Food, a program to support elementary school teachers who wish to create school gardens and use them as instructional sites for their students.  Now administered by New York Agriculture in the Classroom, Kids Growing Food provides a growing network of rural and urban teachers with mini-grants, conferences, curriculum, training, and a community of like-minded educators. 

This support enables teachers to create organic school gardens.  The program ensures that participants learn how to maintain their garden’s health and vitality, and—most importantly—how to use the garden for a wide variety of educational purposes.  Teachers receive training in soil management, horticulture, and standards-based education that use the gardens.  KGF teachers see a clear improvement in both educational and behavioral outcomes with their students, and have found many-faceted ways to use the garden for hands-on learning.  These gardens also have forged connections to families, larger communities, and farmers.

Mary Sciales, a special ed teacher at P. S. 4K in Brooklyn, NY, was able to improve an existing garden—a former abandoned lot—with a Kids Growing Food grant, and has harvested a multicultural bounty.  "Many of our special education students are from different countries. We use our Kids Growing Food garden, which we call Paradise Garden, to teach them various world cultures and history. Underlying these garden themes is our major education goal of literacy for all students." Because of their gardening and educational success, Paradise Garden has been purchased by the New York Parks Department—a protected resource for the school for all time.

Linda Wegandt, at P. S. 33 in Queens, NY, was able to start a school garden with a Kids Growing Food grant.  "We had never had a food garden on our inner-city campus before our Kids Growing Food garden. The kids, teachers, and even our school neighbors really got into it.  We have signs up now that read: 'Sh-h-h. P. S. 33 Garden is Sleeping for the Winter,' and kids say they can't wait until Spring when they can start the garden again."
Linda was able to involve make the garden the center of her school’s afterschool reading program: "Reading lessons were from gardening books, especially The Victory Garden Kids' Book and students developed a strong gardening vocabulary. We built an incentive into the reading project: students really wanted to dig in the dirt and tend the plants and seedlings, but before they could do that, they had to complete their daily reading assignment-about gardens and plants. It worked!"

Berkeley Food Systems Project

Berkeley, California is again earning its reputation as a ground-breaking community, as it is developing a new and comprehensive project to revolutionize the role and the very nature of food systems in schools. In 1995, kids and teachers of Martin Luther King Middle School, with the support of a group of local foundations and donors, began this effort by gleefully breaking up ground to create the Edible Schoolyard, a large and diverse school garden.  Janet Brown, Program Officer for Food and Agriculture at the Center for Eco-Literacy, was thrilled that her organization could be part of this effort, noting that “modern urban children need to know that underneath asphalt lies a garden.”

The insights, community-building and clear benefits of this garden project catalyzed a multi-faceted food systems movement in Berkeley.  Through the Berkeley Food Systems Project, the school district now works to put a garden and food systems-based curriculum in each Berkeley classroom, and, even more ambitiously, to transform the system that daily brings food to its children.  Berkeley is bringing commonly-held notions about healthy and more sustainable food systems to life through purchasing fresh, local, and organic food for its students and through improving the nutritional health of each child.  Its efforts for food equity and access reach beyond the classroom, as the project also works to include food security and health in the Berkeley Community Plan. This tour-de-force of organization and commitment has been recognized as a Pilot Project of the USDA “Farm to School Initiative.”

The Center for Eco-Literacy stands as the center and anchor for this immense initiative.  This Berkeley foundation’s long-standing mission is to foster experience and understanding of the natural world and its complex systems, working primarily in their home region of the San Francisco Bay-Delta.  The foundation funds strategies that focus on food and water, recognizing that these essential systems provide meaningful contexts for achieving ecological literacy. 

The Edible Schoolyard represented a major advance in systematizing and deepening students’ connection to food systems in Berkeley. Before long, the garden began to be used for both science and multi-cultural education.  Berkeley is an ethnically diverse community, and teachers came to explore the students’ diversity through growing and enjoying the food of their cultures.  The garden, and the educational program springing up around it, began to generate interest in food systems education throughout the BUSD.  The Center’s professional development support for teachers, which unites its grantees in educational summer programs, provided further opportunities for teachers and administrators to learn about the possibilities in food systems education.  The Center began to receive requests for grants to implement garden education. 

After the construction of the Edible Schoolyard garden, project supporters focused on reviving the school’s kitchen, long disused and no longer functional since Berkeley used a central kitchen to prepare food to its students.  They tried to obtain funds to repair the school’s kitchen, and had difficulty deciphering the food-procurement system at BUSD.  They began to feel frustrated at its lack of transparency and its lack of accountability to parents, teachers, students, and the community.

The growing conviction that the district’s food decisions needed to be fundamentally restructured, together with the burgeoning interest in school gardens among BUSD schools, began to coalesce around a new, systemic vision.  The Center for Eco-Literacy applied in 1997 for a USDA Community Food Project grant to support the creation of a comprehensive set of new food systems activities and policies.  A 3-year grant of $175,000 arrived in November 1998, making possible the implementation of the many strands of this vision.

The project coordinated the community’s efforts to rework the way the district’s food decisions were made.  Parents, non-profits, and community members began to meet on a monthly basis to decide what to do to improve their school district’s food services.  Organizers included a broad base of community stakeholders in these meetings: “parents who were fed up, kids who were unhappy, teachers who were baffled and frustrated at dealing with children who were unable to sit still because they were just too hungry and restless to pay attention, a superintendent who was tired of parents complaining—the whole thing came together,” reminisces Janet Brown. Out of these discussions, a comprehensive food policy emerged.   “We didn’t set out to write a food policy,” Janet Brown notes.  “We had to write it in order to restore authority to the community for decisions that effected our children’s health.”   The food service became accountable to a 24-member Child Nutrition Advisory Council, composed of a diverse set of stakeholders including school staff and students, and to the Board of Education.

Leadership, skill, and credibility made this sea change possible.  The superintendent attended the initial food policy meetings; Tom Bates, for 20 years an assemblyman from the region, ensured that the policy the group crafted was workable.  The organizers’ early success at inclusive participation made it clear to the Board of Education that the policy represented the wishes and views of a broad, diverse set of community stakeholders.

The policy dictates that local and organic food be purchased wherever feasible.  The Food Systems Project staff works tirelessly to locate these sources of food for the BUSD.  They found a local supply for organic apple-juice, which costs about the same as their previous juice, and have created an all-organic menu for the district’s new after-school program.  Salad bars are appearing in Berkeley schools, and kitchens are getting revamped and staff trained so that fresh food can be prepared on site at each school.  The Center is applying for further grants to support this effort, to fund a business plan and to investigate ways to make the lunch program successful with all schoolchildren.  Waste management, surprisingly enough, is an ally in these efforts. Conventional school lunches tend to generate a good deal of solid waste, often because of extensive packaging or because children don’t eat much of their lunches. BUSD is also applying for a large federal grant from the Department of Health and Human Services to further advance these efforts to improve food systems and food systems education.

School garden education efforts also are proceeding.  The Food Systems Project has a garden coordinator, who works with individual schools to provide administrative and horticultural advice.  This summer, a diverse set of educators will gather to begin to put together a K-12 scope and sequence of food systems learning experiences, involving state and national standards, for a wide variety of subjects.  Professional development for teachers continues, and will expand online through an Ed Gateway forum (www.edgateway.net).  The public is invited to participate.

Berkeley teachers note the great enthusiasm that their garden education awakens in kids; they find their students awake, alert, and listening.  Teachers like the interdisciplinary nature of their garden education, says Janet Brown:  “In the garden, you might think you went out there for a particular science unit, but it also brought in something about weather cycles, and soil chemistry, or migratory birds.  Even music classes have been taught in the garden, and creative writing.  It’s something that’s becoming really, really integrated.”  Teachers also praise the support for more kinesthetic, active learners that gardens provide, and the mutual support that classroom knowledge and garden experience can provide to learning.  Janet Brown frequently hears from teachers that “you can teach a lesson in the classroom, and then go out an anchor it in the garden.”  The project also is studying the relationship between their improved cafeteria offerings and student learning outcomes.  Discoveries and developments—successful business plans, cafeteria designs and menus, assessment data, curricula, institutional arrangements—will all be made available on the Web, for communities that wish to learn from this groundbreaking effort.

Standards-Based Curriculum Units

Looking for more classroom-focused activities, tied strongly to standards and academic skills?  Many useful and exciting materials exist!  A new food-systems focused curriculum unit and after-school activity guide are now available, crafted by The Sustainability Education Center.  The Center, a program of the American Forum for Global Education, develops curriculum and provides professional development aimed at engaging students with the real-life challenge of creating a more sustainable world.  The American School Food Service Association, long-established guardian of school food nutrition, safety and quality, has been the primary funder of these works, through their School Food Service Foundation.  ASFSA will distribute the unit and guide for free throughout American middle schools as part of their new Going Global initiative, which aims to provide students with a comprehensive understanding of global hunger issues.  Both the unit and the guide help students understand global hunger and provide students with opportunities to make contributions to the creation of more just and sustainable food systems. 

The 4-week curriculum unit, From Global Hunger to Sustainable Food Systems, enables students to discover the root causes of hunger, and gives them the knowledge and the skills to envision and begin creating a food system that provides a rich life for all, within the means of nature, for now and for future generations.  Columbia nutrition professor Dr. Joan Dye Gussow, Kathy Lawrence of Just Food, The Sustainability Education Center and The Center for the Study of Expertise in Teaching and Learning were the unit’s principal authors; the design team combines solid knowledge of food systems and sustainability with a profound understanding of the learning needs and opportunities of American middle school students.  The unit provides a rich and diverse set of activities: listening exercises, oral history, calculating a “food footprint” (the amount of space and resources used to feed the student’s family), modeling food systems, a “Socratic Seminar” that engages students with the connection between justice and sustainable food systems, among others.  Through analyzing cartoons, ads, photos, poems, fiction and non-fiction sources, students also answer two document-based questions: What are the causes of hunger?  How are our decisions about food shaped?  Crucial understandings about the use, relevance and reliability of various kinds of documents are developed along the way.  The unit strongly connects students with the real food systems that exist in the world today, and provides them with opportunities to develop informed opinions and to create a more healthy and plentiful world.

The Going Global Activity Guide, compiled by the Sustainability Education Center to complement the curriculum unit, is designed to work in afterschool Global Hunger Clubs, which ASFSA is organizing in schools around the country.   These clubs, with the help and support of in-school ASFSA food service workers, will provide kids with fun and enjoyable ways to learn about and participate in food systems, to work to end hunger, and to share their knowledge and projects with a wider community.

Kids Can Make a Difference, a middle and high school program that focuses on the root causes of hunger and on stimulating students to take action, also offer a wonderful curriculum that connects kids to hunger and its solutions.  Finding Solutions to Hunger: Kids Can Make a Difference, a 5-week curriculum unit, contains a rich, diverse and effective collection of activities, useful for a wide variety of ages, that provide kids with a profound and multidimensional understanding of national and global hunger and with opportunities to act on their new knowledge.  The appendices contain a rich and varied list of sources and organizations to help teachers and students explore hunger in their classrooms in many contexts.

Tips for success

Involve your school.  If the teachers and maintenance staff of your school don’t support your garden, or understand its role in your kid’s lives and education, the garden’s long-term health and security are in danger.  You risk returning from vacation one day to find your compost heap replaced by a fence, or your pumpkin vines torn down because they encroached on a window.  Likewise, school food service personnel are an immense resource; meaningfully involving them in your plans can help your food-systems education program immensely.  Administrative support can ensure that a successful program can become a core component of a school’s mission and strategy, instead of the special interest of particular impermanent faculty members. 

You can start small.  You don’t have to wait for total buy-in, say many successful food systems educators.  If you have a commited core, you can begin and demonstrate the merits of your program to the rest of your staff.  Some schools have a smaller, more flexible cafeteria that feeds teachers, which can more easily be involved in your food systems education program—eating your garden produce, or purchasing local or organic food, for example.

Involve your community.  You will find a good deal of support and expertise among your school families, neighbors, stores, agricultural professionals, local businesses, and non-profits. 

Be safe.  Get guidance from horticulture professionals about suitable plants for a school garden, and follow food safety procedures when preparing and cooking food.

Reach out for garden space.  Rooftops, sunny windowsills, neighborhood parks, nearby farms, community gardens, family backyards can all be sites for school gardening activities. 

Make arrangements for summer care.  Your custodial staff or a network of volunteers may have to care for your garden over summer.  If you install a living machine (see additional resources), it too will need to be maintained over the summer.  Living systems don’t shut down because students aren’t around!

Think systemically.  Explore the many aspects of food systems with your kids: farms, farming practices, nutrition, distribution of food, food systems in literature, the food systems of other cultures, the biological and physical bases of life, waste and compost, the connection between hunger, poverty and justice, etc.  Encourage your students to explore the complex interaction of ecological, economic and social systems that occur in food systems.

Make sure your program helps your teachers.  Make clear connections to the mission of your school and the responsibilities of your teachers.  Document the knowledge and skills that students acquire through participating in your program.

Resources and Further Ideas

The featured programs:

Additional resources:

§         Agriculture in the Classroom.  www.agclassroom.org, adickerson@ree.usda.gov, (202) 720-7925.  This is the national clearinghouse for all the state Agriculture in the Classroom programs, sponsored by the US Department of Agriculture.
 

§         Cooperative Extension Service.  Each state has a Cooperative Extension Service, affiliated with the US Department of Agriculture.  They are extremely diverse and helpful resources for all school food systems education.  Find contact info for your state’s service at: http://www.reeusda.gov/hrd/statedir.htm, sdorsey@ars.usda.gov, (202) 720-6296.

§         Community Food Project.  Research the USDA’s grant at http://www.reeusda.gov/crgam/cfp/community.htm.

Further ideas:

§         Pisciculture. Why not try raising food fish at your school?  Tilapia can be both a fund-raiser for your school and an exciting living system to manage with your students. You can consult with Mr. Perry or Mr. Shapiro at John Bowne High School in Queens NY (718-263-5555), or at God’s Gang in Chicago (TK) for tips on raising fish.