The Edible Schoolyard

The Edible Schoolyard kitchen is housed in a colorful bungalow that sits at the gardens southern border. Warm, bright and cheerful, the kitchen is a backdrop for enthusiastic students who view the garden through the north-facing windows - making the tacit connection between seasonality, plants, and food.

The kitchen is an experiential learning classroom that focuses on the relationship between food and life. Daily educational opportunities are designed to integrate culture, history, language, ecology, biology, and other classroom-related subject areas into the preparation of food from the garden. Kitchen classes follow a diverse selection of recipes to prepare a variety of delicious, seasonal, nutritious, dishes from daily garden harvests. The kitchen program integrates students’ recipes, and strives to include foods from their rich variety of ethnic backgrounds.

As the heart and hearth of King Middle School, The Edible Schoolyard kitchen is the venue for school celebrations such as Family Writing Night, English Language Learners Dinner, and Dia de Los Muertos.

HOW OUR KITHCEN CAME TO BE

In the spring of 2001, a two-year earthquake retrofit commenced at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School. The original Edible Schoolyard kitchen (circa 1935) formerly housed at the west end of campus in the main school building, was relocated to a 40-year old bungalow adjacent to The Edible Schoolyard garden.

The rejuvenation of the neglected building into a spacious, welcoming kitchen classroom was made possible by the use of fixtures and fittings from the circa 1935 classroom. Redwood drawers, shelves, and cabinets crafted from old growth wood recycled out of the original kitchen meld with fresh paint, handcrafted worktables and craftsman countertops. The focus of the kitchen design is the richness, beauty and architecture of the recycled materials.

For both its beauty in form and inventiveness in the reuse of construction materials, the new kitchen classroom won International Design Magazine’s 2002 Design Distinction Contest, in the Environmental Category, and was featured in the September 2002 issue.

FROM SEED TO TABLE

Student participation in all aspects of the Seed to Table experience occurs as they prepare beds, plant seeds and seedlings, tend crops, and harvest produce. Through these engaging activities, students begin to understand the cycle of food production. Vegetables, grains, and fruits, grown in soil rich with the compost of last year’s harvest, are elements of seasonal recipes prepared by students in the kitchen. Students and teachers sit together to eat at tables set with flowers from the garden, adults facilitate conversation, and cleanup is a collective responsibility. They complete the Seed to Table cycle by taking vegetable scraps back to the garden at the end of each kitchen class. The Seed to Table experience exposes children to food production, ecology, and nutrition, and fosters an appreciation of meaningful work, and of fresh and natural food.

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