While visiting our Berkeley home in January, I took a tour of the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School’s edible garden, founded by Alice Waters in the early 1990s. After about fifteen years of development, the garden and kitchen classes run flawlessly with new projects always in the works. The day of my tour, a mound of mulch had just been delivered to the edge of the garden; steam was puffing out of it, as if from volcanic fissures, and the aroma was heady, like a fermented brew.
Since 2003, the Chez Panisse Foundation has been running the school program of eleven classes a week for grades 6-8. The 90-minute classes handle 30 students in groups of three. Thus the large, immaculate kitchen has three work stations equipped with cooking implements and stoves. No appliances are used; the students learn to cook from scratch, by hand. For many in this diverse student body, both cooking and communal dining are new experiences. Besides integrating the school curriculum into the kitchen program (e.g., ancient civilizations and how they ate), the kids learn how to prepare a meal together from set-up to clean-up. At the table they learn how to converse, and if long silences occur, prompting cards are available. The program has found that students with academic problems flourish in the kitchen. Sociable eighth graders are harder to engage, so the teachers have found a way to keep their attention: making pizza, and not just from dough to topping to oven, but from threshing and grinding the grain first. One King School graduate returned to build a stone pizza oven in the garden. The feeling of openness to ideas and special projects permeates the garden, turning it into a thriving laboratory that respects and pays homage to nature. Almost everything in view, from plants to the central “ramada” gathering place, is tended to and made by hand. It is the garden and kitchen’s sense of community, combined with its loving and serious purpose, that creates its enchanted spirit.
Classroom teachers attend the kitchen program and recipes serve only as guidelines, allowing students to exercise their creativity. Naturally, the ingredients come from the garden. Outdoor classes integrate the science curriculum. Besides being an enchanted vegetable, fruit tree, and herb garden, the one-acre space includes science experiments, such as growing oyster mushrooms or installing a water harvesting system. On rain days that keep the kids indoors, they learn about ecology, life cycles, energy flow, or genetically altered foods. Outdoors they learn to mulch, cultivate, prune, weed, and brew herb teas. They learn about composting and harvesting. They care for the tools and maintain the shed’s order. They observe nature and how the garden has changed since their last visit. Teachers point out all kinds of phenomena, such as the weeping mulberry that houses silkworms and what silkworms do. The kids taste the difference between their freshly grown corn and farmers’ market corn.
Posted on the kitchen door is a hand-painted sign sharing Alice Waters’ philosophy, which not only enriches the education of King School kids, but also spreads slowly to other schools and communities throughout the world:
Eat seasonally
Eat locally and sustainably
Shop at farmers’ markets
Plant a garden
Conserve, compost, recycle
Cook simply, engaging all your senses
Set the table with care and respect
Eat together
Food is precious
Cook together
http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/homepage.html
Photo courtesy Edible Schoolyard
Gail Spilsbury, Mangiare Bene