You Learn What You Eat

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You Learn What You Eat

COGNITION MEETS NUTRITION IN BERKELEY SCHOOLS

by David Sobel

 

Summer 2001

 

http://www.oriononline.org/pages/oa/01-3oa/01-3oa_learn.html

 

GOT MY FIRST SENSE of the disconnect between children and food when I

was a kindergarten and first grade teacher in a lost-in-the-hills

school in southern New Hampshire, multiple decades ago. Intent on a

healthy curriculum, I had the students prepare their own snack every

day, preferably from scratch. But after weeks of popcorn, apple

sauce, and celery sticks with peanut butter, I was itching to explore

new horizons. What new thing could we make that the kids would really

like to eat, I pondered. French fries? Not terribly healthy, but

certainly a fun food that would allow us to take part in the

transformation from raw vegetable to tasty snack.

 

 

I gathered my group in the kitchen. Their eyes lit up when I

announced our task. " So what do we need to make French fries? " No

response, as a bit of glint left their eyes. Rephrase and

concretize...I tried again: " When you make French fries, what's the

first thing you do? " " Well, " courageous Steve recollected, " you go to

the icebox, open the freezer, and take out the plastic bag with the

crinkly things inside. " Not one of the children knew that French

fries were potatoes. And when we made tomato soup with tomatoes

picked fresh from the garden, I was disheartened when Angela said,

" This soup is OK, but I like real tomato soup better, the kind that

comes in the can. "

 

 

Most of the $4 billion spent on school lunches in the United States

every year reinforces this severing of the conceptual food chain.

When was the last time you walked into a school and enjoyed the

fragrance of fresh-baked bread wafting from the school kitchen? These

days, food appears from somewhere/nowhere out of the back of a truck.

There are no smiling grandmothers with splatters of sauce on their

aprons ladling up love with the freshly mashed potatoes; today's food

service ladies just heat and serve. But in Berkeley, California,

carrots are coming straight from the school's garden, food

preparation is an integral part of the curriculum, local

restaurateurs are selling organic tacos in the schoolyard, and the

whole community is recognizing the links between cognition and

nutrition.

 

 

A killer zucchini from the Edible Schoolyard.

IN THE BEGINNING was the seed. Well, actually, a handful of seeds.

The Berkeley community had a long history of community gardening when

Alice Waters, founder of the acclaimed Chez Panisse restaurant, had

the vision of a school garden. Neil Smith, principal of the Martin

Luther King Middle School, had a parallel vision of empowering

teachers and students to enrich the curriculum and the schoolyard

through real-world learning. A 1995 conversation between Smith and

Waters helped them realize that they both wanted to hoe the same row.

A couple of science teachers, Phoebe Tanner and Beth Sonnenberg, got

intrigued, but were still a bit overwhelmed. Smith recalls, " Alice's

vision was so far-reaching, so 'out there' compared to where we were.

She was talking about students serving other students lunches that

they had grown in the garden, and we were looking at an asphalt,

urban lot. We needed to start with the garden before we could talk

about the cafeteria and redoing the lunch program. "

 

 

Fritjof Capra and Zenobia Barlow at the Center for Ecoliteracy

recognized the asphalt-breaking potential in these seeds. Compelled

by the center's mission to " support educational organizations and

nurture communities in schools that teach and embody ecologically

sustainable ways of life, " they saw an opportunity to recreate a

miniature food system on the school grounds. Philosophical and

financial support from the center helped to weave together many

strands of already existing support for community gardening, and so

it was that the Edible Schoolyard was born.

 

 

First came the garden, then a student-designed and -built toolshed,

followed by a kitchen classroom and specialized food preparation

teaching staff to help students turn fresh produce into healthy

snacks. The garden became an integral part of the math, language

arts, and social studies curricula, and an emotional climate of

warmth, mutual support, and trust flourished in the school. Esther

Cook, manager of the kitchen classroom, reports that students have

enthusiastically made and enjoyed such things as Jerusalem artichoke

fritters, pumpkin and kale soup, cucumber sushi, and sweet potato

biscuits. Cook saw much learning potential in the cooking activities:

" Students have learned the origins of staple ingredients by grinding

their own wheat and corn into flour and making butter from scratch.

They have appreciated the inherent bounty of the garden by counting

the seeds in a cherry tomato. And they were struck by the ability of

one tiny tomato to hold the potential for 100 plants. 'Enough for

everyone on my block!' exclaimed a student. "

 

 

One garden on one schoolyard is a beginning, but not a significant

challenge to Del

 

The new school lunches are popular!

Monte. Yet if a schoolyard garden can foster learning and community

at Martin Luther King Middle School, why not have a garden on every

schoolyard in Berkeley, or every schoolyard in California? And since

you can't realistically feed all the children in any one school with

just one garden, why not create connections between local farmers and

the school district? Instead of freeze-dried burritos

 

Exploring the wonder of chard is part of the curriculum

 

trucked in from the Midwest, how about burritos with organic beans

and cheese grown and produced by area farmers, farmers whose fields

are threatened by suburban sprawl? The educators, systems theorists,

ecologists, and writers at the Center for Ecoliteracy saw the Edible

Schoolyard as the first step in a profound shift toward more

sustainable and equitable communities. They decided to aim

high—convert the Berkeley School District's entire lunch program to

all organic and locally grown.

 

The center staff found conceptual support for their goals in the

USDA's Community Food Security grant program, whose goals include:

meeting the needs of low-income people by increasing their access to

fresher, more nutritious food supplies; increasing the self-reliance

of communities in providing for their own food needs; promoting

comprehensive responses to local food, farm, and nutrition issues;

and developing innovative linkages between the for-profit and

nonprofit food sectors.

 

 

Janet Brown, program officer for the Food Systems Project at the

Center for Ecoliteracy, sees the project as a model for the USDA's

goal of linking farms and schools. " In just five years, the Center's

Food Systems Project has grown from the funding of a school garden at

an individual school site to the complete reinvention of Child

Nutrition Services throughout the 10,000-student Berkeley Unified

School District. By using food as an organizing principle for

systemic change, the program addresses the root causes of poor

academic performance, psychosocial behavior disorders, and escalating

children's health issues such as obesity, asthma and diabetes. At the

same time, the program connects the loss of farmland and farming as a

way of life in our region and the social problems facing school

communities to children's health. "

 

 

There's a direct connection, Janet contends, between agribusiness

that supports the high-fat, fast-food industry and recent research

finding that one quarter of California adolescents are at risk of

being overweight. But by creating dedicated markets for local organic

farmers, school districts can help to nurture healthier students,

minimize the use of toxic herbicides and pesticides, and build

community through supporting local business and cross-generational

food preparation experiences.

 

 

When the Berkeley Unified School District adopted its new Food Policy

in August, 1999, it unpaved the way for breaking down both the

conceptual mindset and infrastructure of the current food programs.

Since the kitchens at most of the schools have devolved to just

providing heat-and-serve meals, the school board proposed and 83

percent of the voters approved a $10 million bond issue to renovate

all of its elementary school kitchens and build a new cafeteria and

kitchen facilities at the largest junior high school. Good facilities

are a start, but kitchens need inspired staff, so additional grant

funding will support a district-wide nutrition training program for

food service workers. To facilitate the shift from USDA surplus food

to fresh, locally prepared food, further grant funding supports

hiring an organic-savvy chef to create whole new menus and new

kitchen designs. Finally, to assure that school meal programs can

serve delicious, nutritiously complete meals with ingredients from

local farms while remaining economically viable, a $300,000 grant

from the California Endowment supports the development of a strategic

business plan.

 

 

And where's all that food going to come from? The project will be

hiring a " forager " who serves as an envoy between the school district

and local sustainable agriculture practitioners. When project

coordinator Jared Lawson did some investigative foraging he found

that Sebastapol orchards consistently lost money on small apples that

had to be thrown away or sold at a loss because they were outside the

standard pack regulations of the California Department of

Agriculture. He saw that these apples were perfect for school snacks

or for making organic cider for kids. Healthy snacks for students

while creating a dedicated market for an unutilizable product for

growers—it's a classic example of feeding two birds with one hand!

 

Most of the $4billion spent on school

lunches in the United States every year reinforces

a severing of the conceptual food chain.

 

Since implementing salad bars in some schools over the last year, the

school district has purchased more than $100,000 of fresh produce

from local farmers. This figure will increase exponentially as the

district uses its buying power to provide locally grown food for the

primary meal program. Further, negotiations are currently underway

with Newman's Own and Amy's to explore whether volume purchasing can

bring down the cost of providing organic, prepackaged snack foods

like dried fruits and healthy cookies. Following Berkeley's lead, San

Francisco, Oakland, West Contra Costa, and Marin unified school

districts have all requested assistance in exploring similar

acquisition programs. Joint purchasing for close to a million

schoolchildren might catch the Green Giant's attention.

 

 

 

THE BIGGEST QUESTION, of course, is will the kids eat the stuff? Can

McDonald's and licorice whips be replaced by kale and kiwis? Not

leaving anything to chance, the Food Systems people have devised

ingenious ways to both assess what students want and educate students

and their parents about what's possible. The new breakfast program at

Oxford Elementary School, consisting primarily of whole-grain

oatmeal, is a test of the willingness of children to try something

new. Extensive local and organic, seasonal condiments such as

berries, yogurt, nuts, seeds, and fresh fruit are provided. Initial

assessments indicate that more children are eating breakfast at

school and that 59 percent are choosing the whole-grain breakfast

over the usual fare of French toast, pancakes, and sugar cereal.

 

 

To assess the impact of this program, Dr. Michael Murphy of the

Harvard School of Medicine is researching the effects of a

nutritionally adequate breakfast on academic achievement,

psychosocial behavior, physical health, and school attendance.

 

 

The other major change has been the salad bars. Four are in place at

the elementary and middle schools and the project aspires to having

eight in full swing by the end of the school year. Though salad bars

present a certain number of logistical challenges, popularity among

students is not one of them. It turns out that if students have grown

cherry tomatoes in the school garden, they're more likely to choose

them when they see them at the salad bar. So school gardens help to

increase the repertoire of students' culinary choices.

 

 

The problems have more to do with time—one salad bar won't process

students quickly enough, and making lunch longer affects the length

of the school day, which impacts the bus schedule, and conflicts with

union contractual arrangements. It's a systems problem; Muir's notion

that everything is hitched to everything else applies to schools as

well. Janet Brown reflects ironically that, " If our goal was to

inexpensively create as many eating disorders as possible, then what

we would do is shrink the amount of time for lunch. " So the solution

is not to shoehorn salad bars into a dysfunctional time frame, but

rather explore how to adjust the whole system so that lunch can

provide both nutrition and the opportunity for productive social

engagement.

 

 

The initiative at the high school has taken a different tack. In

response to the tasteless, unappealing food served at the high school

cafeteria, more and more Berkeley High School students have started

to hit the fast-food places downtown. Merchants then started to

complain about the adolescent influx. Child Nutritional Services

suggested that the solution to the problem was to bring fast food

onto campus, but the Food Systems Project saw it differently. They

went to a variety of local restaurateurs and said, " Here's a captive

audience of 3,300 hungry consumers. Do you want to work with us to

create organic food choices on campus? " The outcome is an on-campus

food court, designed after surveying students about how they like to

be served. In exchange for being willing to make organic

substitutions in their menus, vendors get access to a dedicated

market. Stroll into the food court this week and you can enjoy

hormone-free chicken thighs and legs from Poulet, sandwiches on

organic bread from the E-Z Stop Deli, and pizzas made with organic

herbs and Marin County cheese. The Good Food Cafe, a campus kitchen

for students studying the culinary arts, offers an organic smoothie.

" Any high school in the country would kill for this, " commented

Principal Frank Lynch.

 

 

Student response ranges from thrilled to tolerant. Senior class

president Jamie Lee said, " It's great we have a healthy option to the

greasy stuff they used to serve in the snack shack. But lots of

students just want the food to be affordable and tasty. If it's good

for them, then that's all the better. " When students complained that

the costs were too high the first week, negotiations with vendors led

to lowered prices, which was a good opportunity to demonstrate to

students that feedback loops in ecological systems tend to move the

system toward sustainability.

 

 

 

THE BERKELEY FOOD SYSTEMS PROJECT is problem-solving that explores

connections between seemingly disconnected parts of a system. Wendell

Berry calls this " solving for pattern, " in which " good solutions

promote the well-being of all parts of the system. " The health of the

soil, of plants and animals, of farm and farmer, of schools and

schoolchildren are sustained by connecting the pattern.

 

 

Zenobia Barlow points out that, " schools have become a business

opportunity for fast food vendors and global food producers.... Our

tax dollars are buying a high-fat, high-salt, high-octane caffeine,

fast food diet for school children that in turn produces a

multi-million-dollar public health problem. " This diet also reduces

academic performance and contributes to the demise of family farms

eradicated by urban sprawl. Instead, the Center for Ecoliteracy and

the Berkeley School District are devising a pattern of healthy food,

improved academic performance, and sustainable agriculture.

 

 

The students, teachers, community gardeners, and ecologists in the

Bay Area are on the doorstep of a significant food invention. Think,

for a moment, of that food item that beckons to all of our taste

buds. With enough innovative thinking, Berkeley students will be able

to reinvent that holy grail of American foods—pesticide-free, locally

grown, low-fat, and sea-salted French fries that will taste good and

be good for us too. Maybe the next time I cook with students, I won't

need to feel so guilty.

 

 

David Sobel is director of Teacher Certiification Programs in the

Education Department and co-director of the Center for Environmental

Education at Antioch New England Graduate School in Keene, New

Hampshire.

 

The Center For Ecoliteracy, 2522 San Pablo Avenue, Berkeley, CA

94702, 510/845-4595, info, http://www.ecoliteracy.org

 

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