Students learn about nutrition and agriculture as they prepare locally grown apples with help from a volunteer chef

“I didn’t start out to create a farm-to-school project,” says educator Emily Jackson from Asheville, NC. It began, she says, with a school garden. “I saw how much our garden entranced my third graders. And when they grew the food, they always wanted to eat it.” What’s more, she adds, they really paid attention to related lessons in the classroom. Knowing she was on to something, Emily got other teachers involved. But, she says, something was missing. “We were growing good food, but we weren’t connecting it to the cafeteria.”

Emily’s goal was modest: to grow a new generation of people who care where their food comes from! To that end, she worked with the Appalachian Sustainable Agriculture Project and secured a grant for a project dubbed Growing Minds. Soon the gardens became just part of a broader nutrition and farm to school program that includes farm visits, classroom cooking, chef demos, and cafeteria connections.

“Too often, nutrition education is uninteresting, lots of facts are delivered, and the focus is on what kids shouldn’t be doing,” says Emily. Her philosophy? Find out what engages students. What do they know about foods and what would they like to know? Help teachers think about their current instructional goals and plans and ask, “How do garden, food, farm, and cooking connections fit?”

Here we share highlights of this emerging multi-school initiative.

Cooking Classes Flourish
A concerned parent group called Eat Better, Learn Better launched a creative culinary project. In participating schools, a volunteer cook comes in once a week or so. He or she (usually a parent, chef, or nutritionist) brings in a recipe and related seasonal foods and local products. Teachers can sign up to send ten students to a class. Student cooks work in pairs, tackling everything from chopping to simmering. If one class puts something in the oven to bake, the next group prepares its own batch, and then takes the treat from the oven to the first group’s classroom.

“One chef heard that the kids liked tasting kohlrabi,” says Emily, “and proposed a carrot/kohlrabi stew.” Word has it, the meal was even a hit with the young skeptics – as was the guacamole and the winter squash-apple dish. Another chef pushed the envelope by suggesting chicken mafe, an African chicken, peanut butter, cabbage, and carrot dish. It, too, got thumbs up.

Once a month, a chef does a cooking demonstration for cafeteria staff and students; he or she discusses the ingredients and cooking process, and fields questions. Comments from the crowd reveal growing food wisdom: “Things taste better when you add the right stuff to them,” said a boy in Patti Evans’ kindergarten class.

“The students have become much more willing to try different things and do the work involved in growing ingredients,” says fifth grade teacher Janet Miller. She adds that they’ve also been delighted by the generosity of the chefs, one of whom donated a set of aprons for students to don as they cook. These types of firsthand experiences with people who are passionate about cooking and sharing good meals can help pave the way for healthy lifelong relationships with food.

From Farm to Restaurant
Parents weren’t the only escorts when a K-2 class visited a local farm. A local chef joined the group to help students focus on the foods they were seeing. The plan: Invite the class back to the restaurant the following day. “The chef had noticed how excited the kids were when they saw and tasted beautiful okra at the farm,” says Emily. “So she talked about things they might do with it back at the restaurant.” The next day, she prepared some okra in different ways (such as pickled, and fried with cornmeal) for the class to taste and describe. A stunned and grateful parent sent this note to the chef: “When we went to the grocery store, my child begged me to buy okra and insisted that we try cooking it three different ways. Thank you!”

Emily explains that one of the adults captured youngsters’ comments and “incredible conversations” on tape during the farm visits and restaurant sessions. After being edited and narrated by a volunteer, the tape ran on a local radio station, garnering great PR for the project. It will surely be valuable for soliciting donations from potential funders, too.

Farmers’ Market Scavenger Hunt
“I designed a scavenger hunt sheet for a farmers’ market visit,” says Emily. Her goal was to pique students’ interest and focus them on some science concepts. Something more personal happened, too. With scavenger hunt sheets in hand, the young sleuths talked with the men and women who grow their food. Student questions often broke the ice: “Some students, challenged to find something that grows underground, ran up to a farmer to ask if his lettuce would fit the bill!” says Emily.

(Kindergarten teacher, Patti Evans, used a farmers’ market trip as part of a new twist on an old tale. Read about her students’ experiences in Stone Soup at the Market.)

Young Authors Tell the Story
Fresh from a year of new flavors and farm connections, a group of K-2 students worked with Emily and another teacher to create a book about their experiences. Language arts lessons bloomed as students determined what type of book it would be (“nonfiction, because this is real”) and what audience they would target (“other kids like us”). The storyline: Who grows our food and the experiences we had cooking it. The group incorporated photos, students’ drawings, and quotes they’d pulled from field trip audiotapes. Money from the project’s grant will cover printing costs. “A local bookstore plans to have an author’s night,” says Emily. Talk about PR!

Getting Parents to Buy In
Emily wants to inspire parents to support schoolwide food and nutrition education. To that end, she worked with the parent group Eat Better, Learn Better. “The group’s first inclination was to go into classrooms and talk about what kids shouldn’t be doing (e.g., eating sugar),” says Emily. I suggested that it would be more effective to offer things they can do.” Inspired by the new strategy, parent volunteers set up the cooking classes and made sure that recipes went home in Spanish and English. Often, it’s the youngsters who inspire the adults. One young student wrote to Emily, “I’m making better choices when I shop with my parents.”

Growing Ties with Cafeteria
Wanting to better understand how the food service operated, Emily spent a day shadowing the child nutrition director, who is in charge of all food for the school system. “I hadn’t realized that the school food budget was totally separate from the rest of the school,” says Emily. “Or that they have to raise all their own money.”

Next Steps Emily and participating teachers are rife with plans for enriching the program. Here’s one idea we hadn’t heard before: Develop a field trip curriculum to help farmers engage students and keep them coming.“Many are scared to death about what to do with a group of kids,” says Emily. “We model things for the farmers, but this would add another level of support.” After all, field trips can directly and indirectly (through raised awareness), enhance a farmer’s income. The Growing Minds Web site will feature this and other new resources...stay tuned.

So she spread the word, first to the Eat Better, Learn Better group. The upshot? The group asked the food service for a cafeteria “wish list.” Then they sent the list home with students; families who could do so bought list items from a restaurant supplier. The parent group also bought a share in a community supported agriculture farm (CSA) so they could have fresh produce for cooking classes and cafeteria demos without taxing the food service budget.

Meanwhile, Emily worked on a broader scale by starting a districtwide farm to school committee comprised of child nutrition directors, farmers, Cooperative Extension staff, the health department, and a local food processing facility. Suspecting that some food workers might be hesitant to support the project, committee members invited them to join farm field trips to meet the growers and see what they had to offer. Then they hosted a locally grown lunch prepared by a chef.

“We make sure the food service staff knows they are an important part of these efforts,” says Emily. And, it appears, they’re rising to the challenge. Now, posters featuring photos of one of the suppliers’ farms loom large in the lunchroom. As students enter, they can read the companion stories of the family and farm behind the fresh wholesome fare.

Advice for Teachers
Emily offers these suggestions to educators wanting to work food and farm education into classrooms and curricula:

And finally, says Emily, “What ever you do, move beyond growing bean seeds in a cup on the windowsill!”