The Delicious Revolution:
Transforming Education through School Lunch Curriculum
By Alice
Waters
For me life is given
meaning and beauty by the daily ritual of the table—a
ritual that can express tradition, character, sustainability,
and diversity. These are some of the values I learned, almost
unconsciously, at my family table as a child. But what beliefs
and values do today's children learn at the table? And at
whose table do they dine?
The family meal has undergone a steady devaluation. Today,
children's meals are likely to have been cooked by strangers,
consist of highly processed foods, and are likely to be taken
greedily, in haste, and, all too often, alone.
Public education must
help restore the daily ritual of the table in children's
lives and desperately needs a curriculum offering alternatives
to fast-food messages saturating contemporary culture—messages
telling us, among other things, that food is cheap and speed
is a virtue. Fast food values are pervasive (especially in
poor communities). Our public school cafeterias often serve
fast food.
What we need is a
systematic overhaul of education inspired by the International
Slow Food movement. This eco-gastronomic movement, founded
by Carlo Petrini, celebrates diversity, tradition, and
character. “Slow Schools” promotes
community and gives children values that testing cannot
measure like concentration, judgment and a chance to flourish.
How do we begin to turn public schools into slow schools?
The Edible Schoolyard at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School,
in Berkeley, California, provides a hopeful model. A decade
ago, this public school was surrounded by a large, blacktop
schoolyard. The school's cafeteria had been closed, unable
to accommodate students. Microwaved, packaged food was sold
from a shack at the end of the parking lot. Noticing the blacktop
was large enough for a garden, community members began speaking
with other parents and teachers about initiating an edible
landscape. Students could plant and care for a garden and even
learn to cook, serve, and sit down and eat together in a renovated
cafeteria and lunchroom. These ideas would have been nothing
more than well intentioned fantasies had King School's principal
not been enlightened. He understood that a garden and a renovated
cafeteria and lunchroom meant more than just beautifying school
grounds they were central elements of a revolution in the
school's lunch program and curriculum.
Presently, the Edible Schoolyard consists of a one-acre organic
garden and a kitchen-classroom. In the garden, students are
involved in all aspects of planting and cultivation; in the
kitchen-classroom, they prepare, serve, and eat food, some
of which they have grown themselves. These activities are woven
into the curriculum as part of the school day. A new ecologically
designed cafeteria is being built and when completed, lunch
will be an everyday, hands-on experience and an essential part
of school life.
A slow school education is an opportunity that should be universally
available since kids aren't eating at home with their families
anymore. In fact, in the U.S., many children never eat with
their families (an observation confirmed by our King School
experience). Our most democratic institution, the public school
system, now has an obligation to feed our children in a civilized
way around a table. Today, twenty percent of the U.S. population
is in school. If every school had a lunch program serving only
sustainably farmed, local products to students, our domestic
food culture would change as people once again would grow up
learning how to cook wholesome, delicious food.
What we are calling for is a revolution in public education, a
real Delicious Revolution. When hearts and minds of our children
are captured by a school lunch curriculum, enriched with
experience in the garden, sustainability will become the
lens through which they see the world.#
Alice Waters, a world-renowned chef in Berkeley, has had a lifelong
interest in education. She has authored many cookbooks and created
the Chez Panisse Foundation to underwrite educational programs
about growing, cooking and sharing food, including the Edible
Schoolyard Program. She is vice president of Slow Food International
and received the James Beard Lifetime Achievement Award in 2004.
Chez Panisse was voted best restaurant in the U.S. by Gourmet
magazine in 2001. Excerpted for Education Update from a speech
delivered at Slow Food International Conference, Italy 2003.
