Chelsea Chapman Talks about the Edible Schoolyard
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Laura B. Weiss -- School Library Journal, 3/29/2006
The Edible Schoolyard is a nonprofit cooking and gardening program located on the campus of Martin Luther King Junior Middle School in Berkeley, CA. The garden is tended by the school’s 900 students, and in 1997, the school’s cafeteria kitchen was refurbished to house the kitchen classroom, where students cook meals composed of the schoolyard crops.
The effort, which begun in 1995, grew out of a conversation between renowned chef and author Alice Waters and former King Middle School Principal Neil Smith. The project’s Web site contains resources and links. SLJ spoke to Chelsea Chapman, the program coordinator.
CC: [Waters and Smith] had this wonderful idea for the project, and they formed a steering committee to get some community buy-in. A core of teachers was really excited about the project. SLJ: What’s the basic idea? CC: We want to teach children better eating habits and give them a new relationship with food and the environment, and the method for doing it is hands-on experiential learning. The garden grows seasonal produce, providing food for the kitchen classroom. The kids’ favorite thing is the raspberries. The kids plant the crops and tend the crops throughout the year. They harvest the food, and they cook it in the kitchen classroom, and eat it. They are cooking really delicious dishes from scratch. SLJ: You talk about eco-literacy. What exactly is it? CC: Every child experiences every season in the garden and every season in the kitchen. We’re teaching about the cycles going on in the garden, whether it’s the plant cycle or the carbon cycle. They don’t have a lot of experience of the natural world. They may not have gone to the ocean before. SLJ: Are there other programs like yours in other parts of the country? CC: There are 3,000 school gardens in California. They’ve been around for a century. There are farm-to-school programs now in existence all over the country, connecting local farms with school food service. SLJ: Why should kids spend their time working in a garden? CC: We’re at a crisis point with kids’ health because of the disconnect between themselves and the sources of their food. Families shop at corner shops or liquor stores. Whether it’s because both parents are working, they are not eating with their families. Kids are being bombarded with fast food ads and unhealthy choices. They see 10,000 food ads every year and of those ads, 95 percent are for soda, sugar cereal, fast food, and candy. |
