An ex-Washington Post reporter, who now blogs about school food, recently spent a week embedded in the central kitchen of the Berkeley Unified School District (BUSD) in Northern California.

Ed Bruske’s mission: To find out how one school community manages to cook food from scratch for its students.

What’s going on in Berkeley isn’t news to those of us, myself included, who live in the town and whose child attends a BUSD school.

But, of course, lots of school-food fixers around the country want the inside scoop on how to get real meals into school cafeteria. “I’m so glad Ed did this,” says Ann Cooper, the “renegade lunch lady,” who was brought in to overhaul Berkeley’s school food five years ago. “It’s great when an outsider comes in and reports back, as opposed to singing your own praises.”

Bruske’s the man for the job. Earlier this year, he embarked on a similar reporting project. He wanted to know just what gets dished up for lunch at his daughter’s elementary school in Washington, D.C. So Bruske, a personal chef, detailed his culinary misadventures with school cafeteria food in the nation’s capital in a seven-part series called Tales from a D.C. Kitchen. Not surprisingly, he discovered that the kids ate pre-cooked, processed foods, not unlike the fare the Berkeley school district rejected several years ago.

Many schools–as you probably know unless you’ve been hidden under a pile of commodity chicken nugget boxes lately–typically dish up frozen, industrially manufactured foods. “The joke in school food circles these days is that the most important tool in modern school kitchens has become the box cutter,” writes Bruske in his blog The Slow Cook. All the better to quickly slice through the boxes and plastic wrap to get to the “food-like” products, such as the ubiquitous chicken nuggets and tater tots. Then they’re ready for the microwave and served up on plastic trays in time for lunch.

Bruske’s series ran for a week. His first post focuses on prepping chicken, which in Berkeley means frozen pieces marinated in teriyaki sauce, not those pulverized patties pushed in cafeterias across the country that Jamie Oliver deconstructed for kids on his recent Food Revolution reality TV show, set in Huntington, West Virginia–dubbed the unhealthiest town in the U.S. (The Huntington kids, um, ate them up unlike kids in England, who refused to touch the patties when The Naked Chef conducted the same experiment there.)

The takeaway from Bruske’s initial installment? Making real food requires real labor. Labor takes time and time is money. And even in Berkeley’s much-touted model school food program, which has benefited from the culinary chops of Alice Waters and Ann Cooper — the grand dames of the school food improvement movement — you will still see pizza on the menu at least once and sometimes twice a week. Nachos too. That’s true for all 16 Berkeley schools, even at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, home to the Edible Schoolyard and the state-of-the-art Dining Commons. (In fairness, that’s pizza with a whole-wheat crust, scratch sauce, veggie toppings, and turkey sausage. And the nachos are made with whole foods as well.)

Still, as Bruske notes: “Alice Waters might cringe at the way her food rules have been bent to accommodate juvenile tastes.”

In his second BUSD blog Bruske, who also tends his own urban farm and teaches food appreciation in an after-school program at his daughter’s school, recounts how the activism of Berkeley parents was key to the food revolution that has taken place in a town well-known for political activism. Up until five years ago, Berkeley schools served up corn dogs, canned commodity vegetables, and fruits laden with high fructose corn syrup. This kind of food in a place dubbed the Gourmet Ghetto, home to Alice Waters and her “delicious revolution,” with its focus on fresh, local, seasonal ingredients. Waters toured the cafeterias and reported that they looked like prisons, notes Bruske.

Until the parents protested. It took, of course, much lobbying of school administrators and local politicians, teaming up with advocacy groups like the Center for Ecoliteracy, and educating voters to bring about change and find the money to make it happen. It didn’t hurt, of course, that Waters’ Chez Panisse Foundation granted around “$100,000ish” to bring Cooper in as a consultant to get the job done. As former school superintendent Michelle Lawrence says in this installment, you have to invest in food in the same way you invest in books.

Cooper worked hard to get rid of processed foods and flavored milk, and introduced salad bars, whole grains, and loads of raw vegetables, which find their way into cooked meals.  During Cooper’s tenure — she left a year ago to tackle a similar problem at a school district three times the size of Berkeley in Boulder, Colorado — the Dining Commons was built at Martin Luther King, Jr, Middle School.

It now serves as the central kitchen for the entire district of 16 schools. The Dining Commons looks lovely, and happens to be housed at the same school as the Edible Schoolyard, the kitchen-garden program also started by Waters. (Full disclosure: I’ve been a volunteer in the kitchen there for the past five years.)

In part three, Bruske reveals why it’s so important to have real chefs in school kitchens — and just how rare that is. For BUSD executive chef Bonnie Christensen, who has done stints in some of the best NYC restaurants, and sous chef Joan Gallagher, plating aesthetically-pleasing food for students is an essential part of their culinary craft, writes Bruske. They must also comply with food rules and regulations, work within a tight budget, and meet all the federal nutritional requirements — including all that nonsense about two starches that drove Jamie Oliver crazy in his recent TV series.

In the fourth installment, we learn how Cooper combed the school district budget and was savvy enough to find funds slated for “Meals for Needy,” which should have been going to school food but weren’t. That turned out to be manna from heaven for the Berkeley cooking crew — an extra $879,000 in cash this year, which represents around 24 percent of the entire school food budget, Bruske notes.  Cooper also started providing free school breakfast for all of the 9,100 Berkeley students.  Serving breakfast, Cooper learned, is essentially a cash cow for the school food program; extra revenue from breakfast helps pay for better food at lunch.

There are school breakfast naysayers: Some teachers aren’t too keen about the time it takes away from teaching and the increased mess in the classroom, which can attract unwanted creatures. Some parents grumble that their child now eats two breakfasts. But, as Bruske points out, breakfast in Berkeley is typically a small, fruit muffin or box of whole grain cereal with a low sugar content, plain, organic milk, and fresh fruit.

In his final post on the subject, Bruske works the lunch line and reveals just how hard it is to get middle schoolers to eat their greens and beans. Progress, it seems, happens in small steps, even in a green education paradise like Berkeley. The BUSD kitchen staff work hard to incorporate produce in ways that are attractive to students — they roast veggies rather than steam, (which enhances flavor and appearance), vegetables also show up in pasta sauces, meat loaf, shepherd’s pie, and soup.

An epilogue for the series is here. You can read all the installments in their entirety by visiting The Slow Cook.

So, just how well is the BUSD program doing? The numbers of kids signed up for school lunch hasn’t grown much since the changes were put in place, and participation is essential for keeping costs on track. About a quarter of Berkeley school kids eat the federally-subsidized school meal; nearly 70 percent of the lunches served go to students who are eligible for free or reduced-priced meals based on family income.

Most high school students still leave school to forage for food, typically at fast food joints close to campus. But the program isn’t losing money. “It essentially breaks even and we no longer take money from the general fund,” Bonnie Christensen told me. “There isn’t any profit, per se, any money left over after paying for food, labor, and supplies is reinvested in the program. But we are paying our bills and staying in the black. We keep a watchful eye over our expenses on a daily basis. We work within a very tight budget. There is no wiggle room.”

Christensen also told me that training and educating kitchen staff on how to cook from scratch is a constant, time-consuming job. Some really care and feel empowered because they’re learning new skills, she notes. But it can be difficult to get everyone on board and she is largely working with relatively unskilled workers. “Until we as a society value the food service employees and pay them a living wage, then doing this job will continue to be a challenge.”

Still she’s committed to the task. “I do this job with pride — I come in at 4:45 a.m. and leave around 2 p.m. and I’m wiped out by the end of the day. But I do this because I’m a mother as well as a chef, and what could be more important than feeding all our children well?” asks Christensen, whose two children will attend BUSD schools next year.

Of course, Berkeley is a small school system, not beholden to huge food service corporations such as Chartwells, Sodexo, and Aramarck, which have contracts with more than 500 school districts around the country, writes Bruske in his final post from the field.

Is it possible, then, for a large school district, say in Chicago, New York City, or Washington, D.C., to achieve what Berkeley has achieved?

Absolutely, says Cooper. “But it takes systemic change, it doesn’t happen overnight, and it requires a lot of money — that’s the reality,” she adds. “And you need to get as many students participating in the program — so your labor costs are a lower percentage of your overall costs — and you need your staff to buy in to the program and receive training on cooking with raw ingredients. But we did it in Berkeley, I’m doing it Boulder. It is absolutely possible.”

Could you see this kind of program working in your child’s school? What obstacles do you think you’d face? Do you have questions or comments about Berkeley’s school food program?

Feel free to chime in below.

Photo: Berkeley Unified School District 2007 Nutrition Staff, courtesy BUSD; Alice Waters and students, courtesy Edible Schoolyard; Chef Ann Cooper, courtesy Ann Cooper.

A version of this post originally published on Lettuce Eat Kale

When Jamie Oliver set out to change the eating habits of people in Huntington, West Virginia, he cut up a whole raw chicken in front of a group of school children. He started by removing the breasts, legs, and wings and separating them from the leftover carcass. Then he asked the children which pile contained the best parts of the chicken, and they pointed to the good pile. Then he put the other pile, the skin and carcass, in a blender and pulverized it. When he told the kids those were the parts used to make chicken nuggets, they all said, “Ewww!” But when he formed the blended bone and cartilage into patties, fried them, and asked who would like one, a bunch of hands shot up.

We who live in the land of the Edible Schoolyard like to think this would only happen in Huntington, West Virginia, but that is far from the case. Santa Cruz High School student Nick Morris recently filmed students in the lunchroom at one of Santa Cruz’s public elementary schools as they approached the new salad bar. The kindergarteners, along with a few first graders, moved right in and filled their plates with fresh organic lettuce and raw vegetables. But the older students’ eyes never even met the salad bar.

“Kids in our schools are conditioned,” says Santa Cruz City Schools’ Food Director Jamie Smith, “to eat food that is either brown or white. I can put anything out there,” he says, “but that doesn’t mean they’re going to eat it.”

Like the kindergarteners who were Santa Cruz City Schools’ first dual immersion class and are now the program’s first sixth graders, our students’ palettes are going to take time to develop. That is why education is such an important component of the national movement toward healthy school meals. And that is why Doron Comerchero’s “Food, What?!” program is so powerful. Doron is not waiting, any more than Jamie Smith is, for those first salad bar tasters to grow up; he’s educating teens now in what he calls “ a youth empowerment program using food through sustainable agriculture and health.” And students enrolled in “Food, What?!” recently hosted their annual Strawberry Blast at the UCSC Farm, inviting two to three hundred middle and high schoolers from the area to an event featuring organic strawberries grown on the farm.

On the day of the Strawberry Blast, Jorge, a Costanoa senior and one of Food What’s biggest proponents, was helping run Fast Food Jeapordy, with groups of students from different schools competing for a flat of organic strawberries. One of the Jeapordy questions was: Which has the most calories? A six-inch turkey sandwich with veggies on wheat, a small strawberry smoothie, or a large coke? One group said the sandwich. Another group said the smoothie. Nobody had the right answer, the large coke.

Not far from the Jeapordy game, Jamie Smith was serving Agua Fresca made from organic strawberries and agave nectar, but students had to work for those strawberries too.

“Pick a word,” Jamie told a student, pointing to a stack of papers.

She picked up one that said “potatoes.”

“What do you think of first when you see that word?”

“Fries,” she said.

“Fries. Do you cook them yourself at home?”

“Yes,” she said. “Out of the package.”

It was the opportunity Jamie had been waiting for. He encouraged her to try making the fries from scratch so that she could see how much oil it took. And every time a new group of students approached the table, Jamie asked them how they liked the new food at school. Most of them said they didn’t.

“I don’t take it as an insult,” he said. “It’s a process. There are so many rules from the USDA I have to follow. But the food’s going to get better every year, and I’m going to break more and more rules.”

That’s why they call it a Food Revolution. That’s why “justice” is one of the key words in Food What’s mission statement. Organic healthy food isn’t just for Chez Panisse worshipers like this writer, whose offspring makes crepes with olive tapenade, and organic healthy food isn’t just for students whose school meals are subsidized. Until all of our students gather around the same table for organic food grown in their own communities, the parents and teachers talking about it are like the adults we can’t understand in a Charlie Brown movie. Kids do what their friends are doing. Jamie Oliver knows it, and so does Jamie Smith. The revolution begins and ends with our youth.

Dillard Academy — Goldsboro, North Carolina

When Cheryl Alston was tasked with helping underperforming students raise their test scores at Dillard Academy‘s Center for Academic, Social, Technology, Literacy, and Economic Solutions (CASTLES) she didn’t start with worksheets and drills. She got her students outside, gardening. “I had to find a hook, something not traditional, different, exciting.” CASTLES is an after-school and summer school program created to help struggling K-6 students in this socioeconomically-challenged area in rural North Carolina.

Thanks to CASTLES’ 21st Century Community Learning Center grant, a partnership with the Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS), and a local church with available land, and a growing number of other partnerships, the students at CASTLES work some 3 1/2 acres of peas, tomatoes, eggplant, greens, strawberries, cabbage, cucumbers and herbs. They sell some of the produce at a community mini-market and cook some of it for themselves using recipes gleaned from grandparents. They even write and perform songs about their garden, which they recently performed at a W. K. Kellogg Foundation conference in San Jose, California.

Alston, who previously taught high school chemistry partly through a small classroom garden, adapted curriculum for the garden. She knew she had something when children enrolled in the summer gardening program tested out of CASTLES in subsequent years. “This is it!,” she said to herself, “This is what we’ve got to do!” But as children bring home the lessons about cooking and gardening to their parents Alston is hoping the program does more than raise test scores. She’s hoping that students will teach their parents and then the community to eat healthier. “I’m waiting to hear about fewer cases of diabetes!” she laughs.

Cooking With Kids — Santa Fe, New Mexico

Santa Fe, New Mexico is known for its rich culinary tradition, but beyond from the hotels, art galleries, and restaurants there are communities struggling to find fresh produce and a healthy way of eating. Cookbook author and restauranteur Lynn Walters founded the non-profit Cooking With Kids: Hands-On Food and Nutrition Education in partnership with the Santa Fe Public Schools in 1995. What started as a small pilot program now serves over 4,450 Pre-K through 6th grade kids at 12 low-income schools.

Through the program, which takes place within the usual school day, students learn how different fruits and vegetables are grown. Local chef volunteers (like Rocky Durham, Fernando Olea, Martin Rios, and Johnny Vollertson) teach the students how to cook using fresh, affordable foods and recipes from a wide range of cultures. Students not only learn about nutrition and cooking, but also supplement their instruction in math, social studies, and science; the curriculum is tied to New Mexico’s state standards.

Walters was originally brought into the schools to improve their lunch program. She started holding brainstorming sessions and brought in chefs, thinking, “If the food is beter they’ll eat it.” Walters quickly learned this was not so simple and that she had to build acceptance of new foods by having the students participate in the preparation of the food as well. Now Cooking With Kids meals are served in the lunchroom twice a month. The program draws some 1200 parent volunteers, so the lessons are finding their way home. And CWK is preparing community events to take part in Santa Fe’s 400th celebration in 2010.


CitySprouts — Cambridge, Massachusetts

Since 2000 CitySprouts has been working with the Cambridge, Massachusetts public schools to develop and implement school garden programs. The program administrators have done an impressive job of building the institutional infrastructure to keep CitySprouts thriving, and this makes a significant difference. The garden programs are integrated into the school core curriculum and teachers are provided with at least three hours of training in the gardens. CitySprouts even offers an environmental stewardship and community leadership internship program for middle school through college students.

Currently there is a CitySprouts program in 10 out of the 12 K-8 schools, with plans to cover all schools this fall. And the garden curriculum goes beyond science; lessons extend into math, literacy, social studies and art, plus hands-on instruction on sustainable agriculture, the food cycle, and the natural environment.

As a community-minded program, CitySprouts offers after school and summer “Drop-Ins,” workshops open to the community on soil testing and garden cooking. In 2008 these workshops attracted more than 2,900 visits. As part of the program, the schools host farmer visits and cafeteria tastings of food grown in the garden–and speaking of the cafeteria, CitySprouts is working with Food Services to bring healthier, more local food into school lunches. It’s an ambitious, far-reaching program, but thoughtfully designed to provide plenty of support, buy-in, and benefits for the entire community.

Watch the kids at CitySprouts talk about their experiences:

Thurgood Marshall Academy — Southeast Washington, DC

A large, well-integrated program is wonderful, but a program can start with the inspiration of just one or two people. High school biology teacher Sarah Johnson started an organic garden two years ago at Thurgood Marshall Academy with two other teachers. It actually started as an outgrowth of the student green club she advised. Realizing that finding and eating nutritious food was a challenge for the students, Johnson applied for an Earth Day grant and a Washington Parks and People grant to build the first raised garden beds. Over the summer she taught a summer school class on “where our food comes from” and in the afternoon green club members met every single day to garden, harvest, and cook.

To enable multi-disciplinary lessons in the garden the students have planted tobacco and cotton for the history teachers, for example, as well as other plants mentioned in classic literature. In the garden cooking classes (using equipment from the lab) Johnson has found that “you’ll really inspire a desire in students to continue cooking if you don’t keep bound to a recipe.” She give her students an idea, like stir fry, and then lets them decide how to do it. Beyond the classroom she and her colleagues are working with DC Hunger Solution to get fresh food (including the garden’s produce) sold in the corner store across from school. Meanwhile, the gardeners sell some of their produce and some composting worm casings at farmers’ markets around the city.

Johnson says the school administrators took some convincing. Limited space was an issue, “but essentially we were just tenacious in getting it done, and now the administration is very excited about what we’re doing.” A common concern for school administrators is continuity–who will keep the garden going from year to year as staff and students change? TMA’s garden program is young, but so far the excitement and commitment of the students, who come in early and stay late daily, has impressed everyone. Johnson adds, “if there’s not student and teacher buy-in, then the administration will not be supportive. The garden will need this support and enthusiasm to survive; Johnson has just moved this summer to teach in Oakland, California. She has full confidence that the garden will continue in her absence.

Woodland Elementary West — Gages Lake, Illinois

Every spring at Woodland Elementary West, some 400 second-grade students plant vegetable seedlings in their classrooms. Over the months they will tend these seedlings, transplant them outdoors in the school garden, continue weeding and watering, and eventually harvest enough produce for class samples and a donation to the town food pantry.

Woodland’s program was initiated by the principal (now retired) and has been maintained by parents, administrators, and teachers. The school is fortunate to have a very large, campus-style school with ample space for gardening. Through the summer day-campers and parents tend the garden so that when 2nd graders return as 3rd graders in the fall they can harvest their produce. The school uses sustainable practices, like fish emulsion fertilizer and dish soap to repel aphids. The absence of chemicals means kids can touch the plants during tours and spend class time and recess in the garden.

In the last two years the school has donated 1,500 pounds of vegetables to the food pantry. “Pantries always have a need for ‘fresh’ food because it’s healthier than the usual canned staples,” says parent volunteer and gardening author Ann Nagro. “These students are not only learning sustainable agriculture and healthy eating habits, they are also learning that they can change their community.”


24th Street Schoolyard Garden — Los Angeles, California

24th Street Elementary School in Los Angeles, California, used to have a one-acre blacktop parking lot. The surrounding neighborhood of West Adam is a food desert, meaning groceries with fresh produce are scarce. Now that lot is a thriving garden with an outdoor kitchen featuring a pitfire pizza oven. Thanks to the support of teachers, administrators, parents, and some key community members like restauranteur Nancy Silverton, the 24th Street Schoolyard Garden is a source of fresh produce for the student and, increasingly, the community.

Through a variety of classes children in all grades spend some time in the garden each week, whether they are gardening or having a science lesson. Package designer Laurie Dill teaches 5th graders herb identification and even shows the kids how to package the herbs to sell to local chefs, who then come in to do cooking demonstrations. She notes that while most children in the class start out knowing next to nothing about where their food comes from, “once you get them talking about it and cooking they start making connections with what their families make. Kids are eating and tasting vegetables all the time in the garden. They take it home, often literally.”

24th Street is the prototype school for the Garden School Foundation, which works in partnership with Los Angeles Unified School District to bring gardens and kitchens to schools (among other goals). The foundation does fundraisers like an Eat the Magazine dinner organized by Edible Los Angeles at Grace and supporting businesses and organizations make both financial, labor, and in-kind donations. But the garden’s success began with the dedication of a small group of people. “If you can get the one receptive teacher the others will follow,” Dill says. “It all depends on principals and teachers who see the benefits.”

Watch this video to see the program in action.

CookShop Classroom — New York, NY

On a warm May day two kindergarten classrooms at Brooklyn’s Teunis E. Bergen School (PS 9) were infused with the grassy scent of fresh-cut vegetables and fruit. Students in one room were carefully slicing apples, green beans, cucumbers, carrots, green onions, and red bell peppers with plastic knives while students in the classroom next door practiced their writing and reading skills as they discussed a recipe for lettuce wraps. Moments later they would all be enthusiastically cramming the vegetable-filled lettuce wraps into their mouths, a spectacle rarely seen among any children.

These are the fruits of a program called CookShop Classroom, created by FoodChange (now part of FoodBank New York) in partnership with New York City’s Department of School Food and Columbia Teacher’s College. CookShop Classroom is a series of lessons centering around 10 different fruits and vegetables. One week the class learns about a particular food: where and how it’s grown, the different parts of the plant, how it gets to the city, what it looks and smells like and how it is typically prepared.

In these hands-on lessons students touch and sample the produce. The following week students prepare a dish using the fruit or vegetable they learned about the previous week. This experience is exactly what researchers say induces children to eat their vegetables: repeated exposure breeds familiarity, which leads to acceptance. Even better, as children learn to accept the CookShop vegetables they also learn to be more adventurous with other foods.

Learning to be adventurous is fun, as the kids themselves will tell you. “My favorite part was when we dipped the apples [into a savory sauce the students made]. They looked yummy and I ate them like a bunny rabbit!” a PS 9 kindergardener Bethlehem enthuses. “I like it best when we were learning how to cook. I liked learning about the ingredients.”


Mullberry Junction Community Garden — Minneapolis, Minnesota

If a school garden is not a possibility for you, a community garden might accommodate a children’s program. Joyce Perew was jogging past a community garden one morning when she noticed how dilapidated it looked. Between jobs at the time, she decided to investigate and suddenly found herself working with a teacher and a master gardener to rehabilitate the garden for an after-school and summer-school program. Perew and her collaborators found and created lesson plans around the garden, teaching students not only how to grow and cook fresh foods but also the kind of wacky lessons that really reach students, like how to make a battery out of a carrot.

Perew’s cooking lessons usually focused on one vegetable or fruit grown in the garden. She would teach a small group a recipe and provide puzzles, experiments, nutritional information, related literature, and crafts. In a group setting peer pressure actually worked in favor of the vegetables; if a few kids liked a dish, others would give it a chance. Perew also gave the kids lessons in ingredients label reading, teaching them where additives like MSG and malodextrine come from. They conducted taste tests, comparing highly-processed boxed foods with their home-made equivalents.

The garden classes had a surprising benefit. For each taste test the students were required to explain why they liked or disliked a food. “A lot of these kids have behavioral problems,” Perew explains, so asking kids to describe their experiences with the foods more specifically “helped kids learn to express themselves more articulately and appropriately.” The gardening and cooking program actually had a civilizing effect on the kids!


School Garden and Cooking Class Resources

Toolboxes:

• School Garden Wizard is a toolbox for starting and maintaining a school garden created through a partnership between the United States Botanic Garden and Chicago Botanic Garden.

• Register your school with KidsGardening.org and find articles and other resources to help with your school garden.

• The California Department of Education, in collaboration with the Center for Ecoliteracy, has distributed more than 25,000 print copies of Getting Started: A Guide for Creating School Gardens as Outdoor Classrooms. Download it here.

• Texas A&M Department of Horticulture’s has a school gardening website.

• Download Farm Aid’s Farm to School 101 Toolkit here.

• Sustainable Table’s guide to school garden and food projects.

• Gardening ABCs is a website dedicated to school gardens created by Anne Nagro, a parent volunteer with Woodland Elementary West in Illinois. She has also written a book on her school’s project, Our Generous Garden, available in a dual language (Spanish-English) edition by Dancing Rhinoceros Press.

• Joyce Perew, who taught at the Mulberry Junction community garden in Minneapolis, has lessons available for sale. Contact her at joycookingforkids@gmail.com.

Organizations that provide and/or support school garden and cooking programs:

• Slow Food in Schools works with local Slow Food chapters to create Garden to Table projects in K-12 schools.

• Alice Water’s Chez Panisse Foundation leads an Edible Schoolyard Academy for educators. In the future the organization will be forming affiliate model programs and will develop a suite of tools to help districts across the country change their school meal programs.

• RecipeForSuccess is a non-profit charity dedicated to combating childhood obesity by changing the way children understand, appreciate and eat their food.

• The Life Lab Science Program (by the University of California, Santa Cruz) is a nonprofit organization and has been working in the field of science and environmental education since 1979. With their award winning curricula and programs, the organization helps schools develop gardens where children can create “living laboratories” for the study of the natural world.

• The National Farm to School Network is a collaborative project of the Center for Food & Justice (CFJ), a division of the Urban & Environmental Policy Institute at Occidental College and the Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC). Farm to School brings healthy food from local farms to school children nationwide. The program teaches students about the path from farm to fork, and instills healthy eating habits that can last a lifetime. At the same time, use of local produce in school meals and educational activities provides a new direct market for farmers in the area and mitigates environmental impacts of transporting food long distances.

• Seeds of Solidarity is a nonprofit organization that provides people of all ages with the inspiration and practical tools to use renewable energy and grow food in their communities, Seeds of Solidarity has a number of school based garden partnerships, afterschool programs, and a teen program that teach young people to grow and cook fresh food.

• 21st Century Community Learning Center Grant supports the creation of community learning centers that provide academic enrichment opportunities during non-school hours for children, particularly students who attend high-poverty and low-performing schools.

• The W. K. Kellogg Foundation provides grants for projects focusing on education and learning, food, health and well-being.

• The Earth Day Network provides grants for classroom civic and environmental education with hands-on learning experiences that provide an opportunity for students to remedy local environmental concerns.

• Your school can raise up to $5000 for your school garden through Lowe’s Toolbox for Education.

• The National Gardening Association and The Home Depot offers a Youth Garden Grants program.

• Chlorox Green Works offers a Green Heroes grant program.

• Real School Gardens is a grassroots gardening program that helps children by supporting elementary school communities as they design, install and sustain outdoor classrooms (gardens).

• The Sylvia Center offers garden-to-table nutrition education year-round in classrooms all over New York City. From May through October, they host school and camp groups at Katchkie Farm, in Kinderhook, NY.

• City Blossoms is a Maryland-based organization that uses gardening to create environmental, nutritional, and cultural connections for children and youth.

• Growing Chefs offers educational programming in farming, gardening, and cooking with simple recipes using seasonal ingredients in the New York City metro area.

• Mud Baron helps schools in the Los Angeles area start and maintain gardens.

Read more about school garden projects around the country:

• Oregon’s planned Farm-to-School Program

• School gardens in Los Angeles

• New York City’s Garden to Cafe pilot program

• School Garden Project of Lane County, Oregon

Prepare yourself for some challenges:

• Zerofoodprint asks if Farm-to-School is a pipe dream.

Extra credit:

• What’s on Your Plate? is a documentary produced and directed by award-winning Catherine Gund about kids and food politics, narrated by two eleven-year-old New York City public school students.

• Look out for the forthcoming documentary A Community of Gardeners, which includes the Washington Youth Garden and the C. Melvin Sharpe Health School Garden.

• School Lunch Talk is a blog about public school food.

• Chef Ann Cooper, who revolutionized the Berkeley school system’s cafeterias, keeps a website and blog.

Photo credit: CookShop photo by Michael Harlan Turkell

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.