Alice Waters, The Edible Schoolyard

“I’ve seen it myself: when kids grow food them­selves and cook it, they all want to eat it,” Alice told Organic Connections. “And it could be any­thing from kale and gar­lic to lit­tle sal­ads or chick­peas. They feel empow­ered by the cir­cum­stances of it. They like the taste and they like serv­ing their friends. That’s a truth I have dis­cov­ered. If you engage chil­dren in a pos­i­tive way and if you make them some­thing deli­cious and it comes with care, they want that.”

The Edible Schoolyard pro­gram has become Alice’s top pri­or­ity in a life filled with many amaz­ing accom­plish­ments. Her Berkeley, California, restau­rant, Chez Panisse, is leg­endary for hav­ing intro­duced California Cuisine. President Bill Clinton, when he was in office, once dropped by for din­ner with a large con­tin­gent of Secret Service agents. Through her restau­rant, tele­vi­sion appear­ances, arti­cles and books, and also through her func­tion as an inter­na­tional gov­er­nor of Slow Food, Alice Waters has been at the fore­front of bring­ing the world to a table at which locally grown organic ingre­di­ents are lov­ingly served.

The Edible Schoolyard Program

The Edible Schoolyard began 13 years ago when Alice, dri­ving daily between her restau­rant and Berkeley home, noticed Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, which she described as “a run-down col­lec­tion of sad old con­crete build­ings with peel­ing paint and a hard black­top play­ground. Countless win­dows lay bro­ken with no money to fix them, and a few lawns grew long and wild in the rainy sea­son and then died and dried yel­low in the summer.”

She con­ducted an inter­view at the time with a jour­nal­ist vis­it­ing her restau­rant, and in that inter­view she brought up the idea of using vacant lots and other unused land as places for grow­ing crops. She pointed out the local school as an exam­ple of how not to use land. A few days after the arti­cle appeared, she received a hand­writ­ten note from the school’s prin­ci­pal. He agreed with much of what she had said and invited her over to the school to per­haps find a way to help.

Alice went for the visit, and dur­ing her tour she ver­bally envi­sioned a gar­den where stu­dents could grow and har­vest whole­some food. She also had the idea that the school could open up a new kitchen to teach stu­dents how to cook the food they were grow­ing, and even a cafe­te­ria for shar­ing it with their class­mates. Leftovers could be recy­cled right back into the soil as com­post.
The first reac­tion of the prin­ci­pal was to laugh out loud. But when he real­ized that Alice was quite seri­ous, and when she vol­un­teered her per­sonal help for the project, he had to try and get the con­cept through a resis­tant school board and parent-teacher association.

The prin­ci­pal suc­ceeded, and one by one the bar­ri­ers to the project were knocked down. The project grew and grew. Local farm­ers, includ­ing sup­pli­ers to Chez Panisse, donated trees and crops. Landscape archi­tects and gar­den­ers pitched in as well.

The account of how the gar­den was even­tu­ally created—and how at first the school and then the entire com­mu­nity pulled together to bring it all about—is an amaz­ing story detailed in Alice Waters’ book Edible Schoolyard. To this day that gar­den con­tin­ues, staffed year after year by stu­dents com­ing up through the sixth, sev­enth and eighth grades. Alice’s vision came true in its entirety: food from the gar­den is pre­pared in a spe­cial kitchen and served to the stu­dent body, who seem to never get enough of it.

Beyond Berkeley

While the gar­den at MLK Middle School con­tin­ues to thrive, new ones have begun sprout­ing up all over the coun­try. If Alice has her way (or, as those who know her might say, when she has her way), it will hap­pen at every school in the US.

“I think of the Edible Schoolyard as the way to bring chil­dren into a new rela­tion­ship with food and a set of val­ues that we are all going to need in order to live on this planet together,” Alice explained. “So we are very involved with mak­ing mod­els that peo­ple can walk into. We made the one in Berkeley, but that’s in Berkeley and it’s for an older group of kids. I think it’s very impor­tant that we reach kids when they’re lit­tle, so I’m also talk­ing about preschool and kinder­garten. We should feed all of our chil­dren in school and do it for free. I sort of see this as a stim­u­lus pack­age that deals with pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine, sus­tain­able farm­ing and bring­ing the chil­dren into a sense of their cul­ture, back to their senses. We’re work­ing on an affil­i­ate project in New Orleans that’s been going for a cou­ple of years, and there’s one in North Carolina, one in Los Angeles, and one going to be built in Brooklyn.”

It’s not only a sense of food to Alice, but a sense of com­mu­nity. “I think that this is a uni­ver­sal idea. I’m not talk­ing about any­thing new—people have been liv­ing and eat­ing together since the begin­ning of time. But I mean eat­ing what’s local and sea­sonal, and feed­ing chil­dren things that are deli­cious, and cook­ing these with fam­ily and friends. Being close to nature and cel­e­brat­ing tra­di­tions of the table—these are mean­ing­ful things in everybody’s life. And I just think we have lost our way and we need to come back there, because that’s where we learn how to take care of the land. We learn to be good stew­ards and we learn to cook for our­selves, nour­ish our­selves, and sit there at the table and com­mu­ni­cate with one another.”

Free School Lunches

In addi­tion to the Edible Schoolyard pro­gram, Alice has been cham­pi­oning a school stim­u­lus pack­age that would pro­vide a free healthy break­fast, lunch and snack for every stu­dent in US pub­lic schools. “It has not yet been adopted, but it should be,” Alice said. “We’re pay­ing with the health of the nation, and instead we need to pay up front. I think that putting more money into school lunches is a step in the right direc­tion, which we hope to accom­plish this fall. There are issues of dia­betes in chil­dren and obe­sity as well, and these med­ical emer­gen­cies are not being addressed.”

Click on any image above to see a larger version.

The med­ical indus­try, which even­tu­ally has to treat the casu­al­ties of non-nutrition, is start­ing to take notice. One of the spon­sors of the Edible Schoolyard pro­gram is, believe it or not, Kaiser Permanente. “It’s great when health­care orga­ni­za­tions like Kaiser start to pro­mote pre­ven­ta­tive med­i­cine and talk a lot about the qual­ity of one’s life, because they don’t see how they can take care of every­body who’s going to be sick,” Alice stated. “That’s where we have to go.”

Alice sees the problem—and its poten­tial solution—in the light of a pro­gram that occurred some 46 years ago. “It has been done before, when President Kennedy put phys­i­cal edu­ca­tion in the schools because we weren’t phys­i­cally fit. We spent lots of money then. We built tracks and gym­na­si­ums and hired teach­ers and made it part of the cur­ricu­lum of every school in this coun­try. We now have a huge need to teach gas­tron­omy and ecol­ogy, and we need to feed all chil­dren because we don’t want child­hood hunger to be an issue for why chil­dren aren’t learn­ing. We need school reform and this brings it along with feed­ing the children.”

The Larger Issue

With all the world’s prob­lems at the moment, such as cli­mate change and the econ­omy, how does Alice see the prob­lem of proper nutri­tion for children—and every­one, for that matter—stacking up?

“We need food for our sur­vival,” said Alice. “And we need to pro­tect the planet because that is the source of our food. It is unimag­in­able to me that peo­ple could think about global warm­ing with­out talk­ing about food, because 40 per­cent of the emissions—the bad kind—come from the wrong sort of farm­ing, ranch­ing and dis­tri­b­u­tion of food around this planet. So if we were all to be asked to sup­port the peo­ple who take care of the land, to buy our food care­fully with inten­tion, I think we could make a dra­matic dif­fer­ence. Because once you get into that place of farm­ers’ mar­kets and com­mu­ni­ties that care about nour­ish­ment, you begin to make dif­fer­ent deci­sions about every­thing you do. It teaches you a dif­fer­ent set of val­ues. And so I may end up walk­ing to the farm­ers’ mar­ket instead of dri­ving my car to the super­mar­ket. I bring all my bags to pick up the gro­ceries; I don’t use any of the wrap­pings in the farm­ers’ markets—I just put the veg­eta­bles right in my bas­ket. All of these are con­trib­u­tors to the big pic­ture. And I think it’s the easy and deli­cious way to help peo­ple under­stand deeply the fright­en­ing pos­si­bil­i­ties of global warm­ing and to feel empow­ered to do some­thing about it.”

Alice sees a great deal of pos­i­tive change occur­ring today, begin­ning right at the top of our own gov­ern­ment. In March of this year, assisted by Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and a group of local fifth graders, Michelle Obama broke ground on the south lawn of the White House to plant that esteemed institution’s very first organic veg­etable gar­den. “I think that Michelle Obama putting her shovel in the gar­den with a lot of chil­dren is prob­a­bly the first time that we’ve taken the ie out of foodie,” Alice said. “We’ve all of a sud­den started to look to the land and con­nect where our food comes from. I really believe that the pres­i­dent and his fam­ily care about how we eat as a nation, and maybe we’re mov­ing slowly toward that ulti­mate deci­sion to feed all chil­dren at schools.”

Reaching John Q. Public

While all this is going on, there are still numer­ous aver­age cit­i­zens who yet seem obliv­i­ous of the need for nat­ural food and good nutri­tion, who carry on sup­port­ing indus­tri­al­ized fast food and cheap super­mar­ket pro­duce trans­ported from far-distant locales. To try and wake them up, some of us loudly preach, some stage protests, oth­ers write books and arti­cles, and yet oth­ers attempt to get the mes­sage across through tele­vi­sion, radio and even music.

In her very unique and inge­nious way, Alice sees the prob­lem being solved with a sim­ple, very direct yet very effec­tive approach. “I’ve thought about this a lot,” she said. “I believe the most effec­tive way of wak­ing peo­ple up is just to cook for them. I think that we need to cook very sim­ply and sea­son­ally and really gather those peo­ple at the table. I did a project in Washington a few years ago, and we invited sen­a­tors and con­gress­men to the table and we cooked from the gar­den and from the farm­ers’ mar­ket. They stayed at the table and they had a con­ver­sa­tion. That’s the eas­i­est way to do this.”

See you at the table, Alice.

Photos by Katie Standke—www.katiestandke.com