The Edible Schoolyard

As president of the Board of Directors and founder of The Edible Schoolyard, Alice Waters provides ongoing guidance and fundraising support to the program. Owner of Chez Panisse Restaurant and Café, and author of several cookbooks, Alice has served on the boards of The Land Institute, National Committee for Mothers and Others for Pesticide Limits, and as an advisor for Public Voice on Food Safety and Health.

For her efforts in establishing the Edible Schoolyard, Alice Waters was one of ten people in the nation awarded the John Stanford Education Heroes Award by U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley in 1999. In 1998, California Senator Barbara Boxer awarded Ms. Waters the Excellence in Education Award. She is currently affiliated with The Edible Schoolyard, the Chez Panisse Foundation, and Slow Food U.S.A. For her advocacy of local and sustainable agriculture, Ms. Waters was awarded the James Beard Humanitarian of the Year award in 1997.

For more information about Alice Waters, please visit the Chez Panisse web site.

VALUES IN PLACE

View the Values in Place Slide Show, created by Alice Waters with images from the Edible Schoolyard.

THE GARDEN, THE TABLE, AND EDUCATIONAL EQUALITY

Remarks by Alice Waters at A Garden in Every School: A Conference Promoting the Integration of Garden-Based Education, Cooking and Nutrition, and Sustainable Agriculture Awareness in Schools on March 14, 1997; A project of the Children's Gardening, Cooking, and Nutritional Network and the Center for Urban Education About Sustainable Agriculture (CUESA), sponsored by the Center for Ecoliteracy, the UC Cooperative Extension, and the California Department of Education.

About fourteen years ago I moved to the house where I live now, and started driving past Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School on my way home from work at Chez Panisse–usually late at night, or early in the morning. Of course, at those hours there were never any kids around, and I was troubled by what I could see from the street. The school didn't look so good. In fact, it almost looked abandoned. I would see the graffiti on the windows and the burnt-out grass, and I would wonder what happened. Who was using this school? Who was taking care of it?

These thoughts were in the back of my mind, when one day, in an interview, I was asked about education (I was a teacher once, in a Montessori school), and I remarked on how neglected King school looked. How can it be, I asked, in an enlightened community such as Berkeley, that the public schools are allowed to deteriorate like this? No wonder, in a way, that so many parents who can afford it, send their kids to private schools.

This interview appeared in print, and not long afterwards, Neil Smith, the principal of King Middle School, called me up. He wanted to talk about what I'd said, so I invited him to lunch. It turned out we were on the same wavelength. Although we were both worried about the next generation and felt the same urgency about what was going on out there in the world, we were both optimistic about how the schools could help. And before we knew it, we were on the way to launching the Edible Schoolyard project.

I learned that Neil and the administration, and the teachers, and the school district were all full of good will, willing to listen, and willing to experiment with new ideas. I also learned that on the inside there were people who cared about the school–there is a beautiful courtyard garden, and a grass baseball field and a renovated auditorium where until recently the seats were held together with duct tape.

The responsibility for the physical deterioration of this school, and so many like it, lies not with the brave and underpaid teachers and administrators. Not at all. I learned that it was my responsibility, as part of a larger society that pays lip service to education, but has not been willing to make it a national priority that every child is taught as well as every other child. If we were only willing to do this–if we were all willing to take responsibility for what Jonathan Kozol has called the "savage inequalities" of American education–then we could not only turn the situation at King School around–we could renovate schools everywhere, so that the kids will know that were really care about them.

Most education–all education–is primarily by example. How can we expect kids to respect themselves, or each other, or the community at large, when they are schooled in increasingly derelict places, many of which are much, much worse off than King? Such schools reflect all too well the carelessness, anarchy, and wrenching unfairness of our society, where the gap between the rich and poor just gets wider and wider, and where all to many kids–both rich and poor–are disconnected from civilized and human ways of living.

For a couple of years now, I've been quoting Francine du Plessix Grey, who wrote a little essay in the New Yorker after she way the movie "Kids." "Kids," you may remember, was a movie about a bunch of frighteningly amoral teenagers who are cruel, callous, and almost subhuman. Du Plessix Grey was haunted by the image of their fast food diet, which she described as "feral" and "boorishly gulped." And she went on to remark that the kids in this movie, like millions of others, "never seem to sit down to a proper meal at home." As she wrote: "...we may be witnessing the first generation in history that has not been required to participate in that primal rite of socialization, the family meal."

This is a deeply shocking thought to me. Like du Plessix Grey, I believe that "the family meal is not only the core curriculum in the school of civilizing discourse; it is also a set of protocols that curb our natural savagery and our animal greed, and cultivate a capacity for sharing and thoughtfulness.

"Dinner rituals have nothing to do with class, or working women's busy lives, or any particular family structure. I've had dinners of boiled potatoes with families in Siberia, suppers of deli cold cuts with single welfare mothers in Chicago, bowls of watery gruel in the Sahara–all made memorable by the grace with which they were offered and by the sight of youngsters learning through experience the art of human companionship. The teenagers in "Kids" are not only physically starved... by the junk food they consume... Far worse, they are deprived of the main course of civilized life–the practice of sitting down at the dinner table and observing the attendant conventions..." What du Plessix Grey calls "the ritual of nutrition," like any ritual, requires sacrifices–it takes time and effort to get dinner ready–but making these sacrifices nurtures both family and society. Cooking and eating together teaches us compassion.

I keep sharing this essay with people because its author has described exactly what I believe: We must value and respect each other, and we learn best how to do this at the table. And since the family meal has become more and more rare, we must start thinking about what the schools can do to teach these lessons. But the schools educate our children as if there were no family emergency on one hand, and no planetary emergency, on the other.

As educators from Socrates onward have recognized, the goal of education is not the mastery of various disciplines, but the mastery of one's self. Being responsible to one's self cannot be separated from being responsible to the planet. I know of no better way to get this lesson across than through a school curriculum in which food takes its place at the core level. From the garden, and the kitchen, and the table, you learn empathy–for each other and for all of creation; you learn compassion; and you learn patience and self-discipline. A curriculum that teaches these lessons gives children an orientation to the future–and it can give them hope.

Gardening, cooking, serving and eating, composting... These are truly basic things, but the lesson they could teach are obscured and drowned out by the clamor of the media and the insidious temptations of consumerism. Kids today are bombarded with a pop culture which teaches redemption through buying things. School gardens, on the other hand, turn pop culture upside-down: they teach redemption through a deep appreciation for the real, the authentic, and the lasting–for the things that money can't buy: the very things that matter most of all if we are going to lead sane, healthy, and sustainable lives. Kids who learn environmental and nutritional lessons through school gardening–and school cooking, and eating–learn ethics.

It doesn't take much persuasion to get schoolchildren to pay attention to a food curriculum. Eating has a natural inevitability: it's something you have to do every day. What's more, eating is something you can do every day that has the potential to bring you enormous pleasure. I realize that our society is uncomfortable with the notion that education might teach our children how to experience pleasure; but the sensual pleasure of eating beautiful food from the garden brings with it the moral satisfaction of doing the right thing for the planet and for yourself.

I have the feeling that I'm preaching to the choir today. After all, this conference has been possible because we all share these beliefs. But I want to add that despite our optimism, there remains a problem of political will: we are not yet committed as a nation to an equally good education for each and every one of our children.

We all have to keep pushing on the national front for money to make this happen. I have written the President, beseeching him to recognize that we need to articulate a new national goal: the rebuilding of the schools–which are, after all, our single most democratic institution. The frightening condition of the worst schools is a horrifying symbol of the kind of nation we have become: a nation where new prisons are cleaner, safer and more comfortable than old schools. Rebuilding the schools so that they are physically inviting, and inspiring–and perhaps even beautiful–is more important than wiring them for computers. We cannot expect computers to function as a kind of substitute for schools. Just as agribusiness, processed food, and supermarkets fail to provide the benefits of real communities–the kinds of communities that are nurtured by small-scale local agriculture, home-cooked family meals, and farmer's markets–the virtual classroom can never replace the real classroom in creating a socially responsible public.

Children deserve to be educated in places they can be proud of. It made me feel so good when I was in the garden here at King at few days ago, trying to make it look extra beautiful for this conference, when I overheard a student say to his friend, "Doesn't our garden look great?' And the kitchen, which we've just restored, is such a fantastic kitchen! I'd much rather be working here than in the kitchen at Chez Panisse.

If children everywhere felt real pride in their schools, perhaps we could become at last the nation we ought to be. We must restore our public schools. A federally funded, WPA-style employment program such as William Julius Wilson has advocated could help solve the epidemic of inner-city unemployment while functioning as a restoration corps for the schools. If the unemployed were put to work renovating their own neighborhood schools, the students would receive a message of empowerment and hope.

The aim of education is to provide children with a sense of purpose and a sense of possibility, and with skills and habits of thinking that will help them live in the world. A key way to learn these skills and habits is to learn how to eat well and how to eat right. A curriculum designed to educate both the senses and the conscience–a curriculum based on sustainable agriculture–will teach children their moral obligation to be caretakers and stewards of the finite resources of our planet. And it will teach them the joy of the table, the pleasures of real work, and the meaning of community.

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