People seem to have an insatiable appetite for food matters right now. Case in point: the public tickets for Edible Education 101 at UC Berkeley were snapped up in 12 minutes on Monday, according to a tweet from Alice Waters, who played a key role in bringing the curriculum to the university.

The 13-week course, co-taught by J-school professor and The Omnivore’s Dilemma author Michael Pollan, and Nikki Henderson, the executive director of People’s Grocery, a food justice organization in West Oakland, will examine the rise and future of the food movement. Student enrollment for the one-semester course also filled within minutes after it was listed online, as Berkeleyside reported earlier this month.

Why such interest? The class offers undergrads, grad students, and regular folk a chance to critique current food systems and dissect food politics with Pollan, Henderson, and Waters, as well as a slew of other big names in the food movement, including Marion Nestle and Eric Schlosser. The course kicks off with a lecture by Slow Food founder Carlo Petrini on August 30th. The class also coincides with the 40th anniversary celebration of Chez Panisse restaurant.

“UC Berkeley is my alma mater so I feel a real connection to the institution,” Waters explained to Berkeleyside earlier this week. “The opportunity arose to develop this course and we pulled this program together quickly. We also wanted to show our support for the university and public education.” Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (soon to be renamed The Edible Schoolyard Project) is footing the bill for the fall semester course to the tune of $30,000.

“I hope that students will have a stronger grasp of the concept that what we eat has consequences for our health, culture, and the environment,” Waters said, adding that she hopes that the course will continue beyond the fall.

If Waters is the iconic idealist and Pollan the affable academic, Henderson is the unapologetic activist. She’s also young (26), African-American, and spends her work days at a non-profit devoted to dealing with food security issues for low-income people of color.

Prior to coming to People’s Grocery 18 months ago, she worked for Slow Food USA and Green for All, the environmental organization co-founded by Van Jones. Not surprisingly, Henderson, who grew up with seven older foster brothers and two blood brothers in L.A., brings a different perspective and sensibility to the Berkeley bourgeois food scene.

Berkeleyside recently met Henderson for lunch — in Oakland — to learn more about why she decided to come to the table with Waters and Pollan.

Members of the People's Grocery team meet with Coalition of Immokalee Workers

How did your involvement with this course come about?

Well, the Chez Panisse Foundation came to me and asked me if I’d be interested in doing it. This class was important to me because it’s an opportunity to have a real exploration of the issues of race, power, class, and privilege in relation to food, which is something we do every day at People’s Grocery. When Chez Panisse approached me I told them I was only interested in teaching the course if we hit those bases and a good third of the curriculum does that.

It was also important for me that people speak for themselves. The whole class could have been taught by people who have written books about other people’s experiences. But we’ll have practitioners like the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (immigrant farm workers who have brought about historic changes for tomato farmers in Florida), for instance, who will come and tell their stories themselves. It’s important for the students to experience that, because one of the dynamics of not having privilege is that you don’t get to tell your own story. Those with means and access get to spend their time telling your story.

I wanted to ground the syllabus in the struggle for food justice and food security. There wouldn’t need to be a movement if there weren’t deep injustices happening and divisions within the movement. This college course explores the complexity of these issues within the context of the food movement.

How involved have Waters and Pollan been in shaping the curriculum?

Alice Waters really laid the groundwork for this to happen and her message is so consistent that you know what she’s going to say, so she just sort of gave me her marching orders and made a lot of suggestions, but then she just leaves it in your hands.

Michael wanted to make sure that the course was academically rigorous and that it involved deep, critical thought. He wanted the mix of practitioners and academics. He didn’t want it to be just a good conversation about the food movement but that there was a component that explored the complex question: what is there to do now?

They both made it clear since the beginning that they wanted me to feel it was very much my course too. And they’ve been generous with their time and expertise. Michael has been coaching me through putting the lecture series together. One piece of advice he gave me: don’t have the same format every week or people will fall asleep.

Can you tell us a little about your personal connection to food?

We grew up eating very healthy food. We ate home-cooked meals that consistently included a grain, a protein, and a vegetable, usually something like brown rice, baked chicken, and steamed broccoli. My mom was a kind of ’70s hippie, though I don’t think she’d classify herself as such. She is vegetarian and has a deep interest in health and nutrition, and she passed on those good habits to her children.

My great aunt and uncle were diabetic amputees. My aunt has the disease and my grandfather, who is no longer alive, almost lost his feet to the condition. With this exposure to diet-related diseases it hit me early on: what you eat is not something to play with.

What can young people interested in the food movement learn from those who have worked on this cause for decades?

There’s a lot of context that younger people need, of what’s actually happened so far in the food movement, like the current middle-class mainstream food movement is very much centered in an older struggle for food security and it’s important to have that context. You need to be grounded in the history. I’ve only been in the food movement the past three or four years and I’m well aware of how much there is to learn about what’s happened historically, so we in this younger generation can be truly effective in bringing about change. I want to soak up every bit of that in this course.

Is this the right time for this class?

It should have happened two years ago because the window of opportunity is closing. The mass media switches from one thing to the next pretty quickly and food has been hot for the last two years and it’s probably only going to be hot for another year or two and then it’s going to fade into the background. I’m going to do everything I can to move some things along while I can.

Photo: Rick Gilbert

Originally published on Berkeleyside

When Chez Panisse board members met to talk about expanding its Edible Schoolyard organic garden and kitchen program, board member John Lyons immediately volunteered: “I know just the place!” Lyons began volunteering at Brooklyn’s Arturo Toscanini Elementary School (PS 216) five years ago as a Pencil Principal For A Day, where he became acquainted with the principal, students, and the school’s quarter acre-sized parking lot–perfect for a school garden.

On a blustery but sunny Friday morning last week, Lyons joined PS 216 Principal Celia Kaplinsky, Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, City Council Member Domenic Recchia Jr., Brooklyn Borough President Marty Markowitz, and several PS 216 4th-graders in inaugurating Edible Schoolyard NYC’s first model garden and kitchen program. The pilot site will include an organic farm plus a moveable greenhouse, and a kitchen classroom in a self-sustaining building, all designed by WORK Architecture Company. On Friday the farm’s soil was ready for its first day of planting.

Clad in colorful rain boots, students planted a few tidy rows of kale and other hearty winter greens, and the garden’s first tree–a Macoun. They will soon add more apple trees, Asian pear, garlic, and cover crops. The program will run year-round, with an expected two lessons each month, per grade, for all kindergarten through fifth grade students. In addition to gardening, students will learn about the origins of food and will learn to cook seasonal dishes using their own produce. Principal Kaplinsky enthused, “When we give anything to children I see magic… From the time they enter PS 216 every child learns to appreciate healthy living, healthy food.”

Edible Schoolyard NYC is partnering with Columbia Teachers College, which will help develop the New York State standards-based curriculum and also measure the program’s effect on students’ health. “Nearly half of all New York City public school children from kindergarten to eight grade are either overweight or obese, which is often associated with poorer levels of academic achievement,” says Executive Director Christiane Baker. “Thanks to the support and commitment of the NYC Department of Education, the Edible Schoolyard NYC program aims to offer a solution to improving the way our children eat, by learning where food comes from and how healthy food can be delicious as well as nutritious.”

The program will not directly measure academic achievement. However, Baker points out that Edible Schoolyard is intended to enhance the classroom experience, not replace it, by providing another way for teachers to help struggling students make connections through hands-on experiences. Baker adds, “It’s a lot to ask a teacher to support a garden and to teach.” So Edible Schoolyard further supports teachers by providing two garden managers/teachers, Vera Fabien and Mirem Villamil, to maintain the gardens and related instruction.

PS 261 is just the first of 25 elementary schools in Brooklyn that will eventually grow edible schoolyards with the help of a mobile kitchen bus that will travel between schools. There are also plans for an Edible Academy operating throughout the five boroughs, which will offer training and technical assistance for yet more public school teachers and principals who want to bring an “edible education” to their students.

Edible Schoolyard NYC will receive $1 million in funding from the city–a nice sum considering the city’s current financial crisis. As it happens, the City Council Member with jurisdiction over PS 216, Domenic M. Recchia, Jr., was recently appointed Chairman of the New York City Council Finance Committee, and was therefore in a prime position to advocate for funding for Edible Schoolyard at PS 261. An additional $1 million was donated by Brooklyn Borough President Markowitz, who crowed that this was “one of the few things that I’m involved in that no one’s against!” Another surprise benefactor was actor Jake Gyllenhaal, who with Lyons (president of production at Focus Features), co-hosted a fundraiser earlier this month and who quietly attended the opening ceremony Friday.

“We all know a tree grows in Brooklyn, but increasingly, kale grows in Brooklyn, too,” Borough President Markowitz said. Brooklyn may seem like the white-hot epicenter of the East Coast food revolution, but it’s worth noting that the pilot is not centered in one of the borough’s trendier neighborhoods, but rather in Gravesend, a neighborhood with a mixture of Russian, Pakistani, Chinese, and Mexican immigrants, and where 82 percent of students are eligible for free lunch.

The Edible Schoolyard, a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, began at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California in 1995. There are also plans to expand the program in Los Angeles.

The new Dining Commons at the Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California – feeding students since August – opened its doors to the community on Saturday to show off the latest phase of a revolutionary approach to school lunch. For the first time, several hundred parents, teachers, local food activists and assorted politicians – including Mayor Tom Bates, Assemblywoman Loni Hancock, Assemblyman Mark DeSaulnier and Congresswoman Barbara Lee – could sit together in this extraordinary new building and share an ordinary school lunch: lentil soup, grilled chicken with roasted root vegetables, green salad and bread, fresh fruit. They paid $100 apiece for the privilege (the proceeds going to support the program). Students pay anywhere from 40 cents to $3.50 for a comparable meal (depending on family income).

Alice Waters first proposed the dining commons, sited between the gym and the baseball diamond, almost 10 years ago. It was originally slated to open in 2005 – which was probably unrealistic all along. Then 2006 rolled by, then 2007….I had started documenting construction with time-lapse ambitions, but I could go months at a time without clicking the shutter and not miss anything. The project reflected all the contradictions and hopes of school lunch as an emblem of our food culture: the absurdity of the official “nutritional” rules; the dire funding and related staff shortages; the increasingly scary links between diet and health, especially for children – and the weird knowledge that what had to change quickly wasn’t going to. Not even at the King school, which is home to The Edible Schoolyard, a hands-on organic gardening and cooking program that’s supported by Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation (of which I’m a board member). It had come to seem almost normal that sixth, seventh and eighth graders who were learning about biodiversity, the science of composting, and the central role of agriculture in ancient civilizations, not to mention planting, harvesting and cooking food from the school’s one-acre garden – were getting a school-district-wide menu of microwaved chicken nuggets.

No more, thanks to the incredible efforts of Ann Cooper – aka Chef Ann, aka the Renegade Lunch Lady, and officially Director of Food Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. In addition to offering breakfast and lunch to King’s roughly 1,000 students, the Dining Commons is also the new central kitchen for the entire BUSD, comprising about 10,000 students. “We’re serving 8,300 meals a day from this kitchen,” Cooper told the Saturday gathering. “No trans fats, no high fructose corn syrup, whole grains, fresh fruits and vegetables.” So far, about 70 percent of what she purchases comes from the West Coast corridor, and about 30 percent from within 150 miles. Almost everything is cooked from scratch. (For more info, go to http://www.schoollunchinitiative.org)

On Saturday, the mood seemed one of euphoric disbelief (sound familiar?) as Cooper and her staff, plus devoted volunteers, began bringing out lunch and Waters and Congresswoman Lee took the microphone by turns to tell the story of how the funding and the vision for the project came together. We were sitting in front of an open kitchen, in a dining room saturated with natural light (and windows that open!); under a vaulted, wood-beamed ceiling; on reclaimed-wood benches and stools at reclaimed-wood tables (nothing nailed to the floor!); with a china plate, a glass and silverware in front of each of us. We were at the children’s table. It felt remarkable. In fact, said a woman sitting next to me, it felt “like a miracle.” Of patience and determination, surely.