The Edible Schoolyard

Posted By elissa on Oct 13, 2011 | 1 comment

There’s a very cool article in the Telegraph about the “Edible Schoolyard” project at Martin Luther King Middle School started by Chef Alice Waters. I mentioned it briefly back in 2008, and it’s great to see that – 3 years later – it’s still thriving.

Almost everything imaginable is now grown here, from 20 different herbs and salad leaves to mulberry trees, raspberries, plums, sweetcorn and aubergines, cabbages, tomatoes, courgettes and grapes. In the corner, rare breed chickens and ducks peck away at the vegetable trimmings from the day before. The students even grow their own wheat to grind into flour for the making of pizzas, which they cook in an adobe brick oven.

Pupils take their classes for this part of the curriculum sitting in the shade of an arbour, and once they have collected their ingredients they take them to the garden kitchen, wash, prepare and cook them, and then serve the meal at tables laid by their fellow students. They then share the dishes with each other, something that few of them had experienced at home. Before this garden was created, the school lunch offering had been the ubiquitous can of pop and a dubious pre-packed snack. Now the young people sit at communal tables and discuss the merits and flavours of their prepared dishes.

That’s awesome: not only are the kids learning about growing food; they’re also learning about preparing/cooking food. The lessons there learning now can’t help but pay off for them later in life… which is what school is (or should be) all about.

If you’d like to help out, you can donate to the Edible Schoolyard Project here.