Renegade Lunch Lady.

Having just finished our first practicum placements, I am sure that every student at OISE has had a taste (or at least a smell) of the cafeteria food that youth are consuming each day at school. Did anyone experience anything outstanding in their cafeterias? In my school, I was impressed at how hard the lunch lady worked and about the amount of food that was prepared from scratch each day -- unlike the prepackaged foods that Cooper speaks about in her presentation. From muffins to soups, to salads, the back kitchen in the cafeteria was a busy busy place. However, I am also certain that a good deal of the food being produced in that busy kitchen is still calorie laden, imported and probably not locally produced.

So what can we do about this? Some teachers, like Paul Finkelstein in Stratford, ON, are taking school lunches to a whole new level of healthy learning. His Screaming Avocado Cafe is a student-run cafe that serves up local, healthy meals to their classmates in place of a cafeteria. How can others implement programs similar to this one? Mr. Finkelstein will be a guest at the Connect Farm Seminar next Tuesday evening, so you can come out and learn for yourself.

Others, like Ann Cooper -- a "renegade lunch lady" from Berkeley, CA are pioneering the local lunch movement in schools across the United States. In this incredibly passionate and informative TED Talk, Cooper talks about the importance of not only educating youth about eating healthy, but also the bigger political issues regarding farm subsidies, government spending and health care.



From the TED site: "To help other school systems transform their own meal programs, she just launched a beta version of The Lunch Box, a website from her nonprofit F3: Food Family Farming Foundation. Inside The Lunch Box are budget models, menus and lots of recipes -- enter the number of servings you need, and the recipe page calculates how much of each ingredient you'll need. (Meatloaf for 600, anyone?)"

One of the important pieces that Cooper touches on in her talk is the idea of public-private partnerships. When I asked my colleagues at my practicum placement school about how the students were working with community groups, the teachers said that students were "very involved -- they make donations to community groups all the time." Making donations to community groups is great -- but, what about another, mutually beneficial sort of that relationship? It seems to me that many people view school-community relations as a one way street: Student Activity Councils operate fundraisers, canned food drives, or organize assemblies to benefit non-profits, or occasionally non-profits come into schools as guests to do presentations. But what about meaningful, ongoing partnerships?

One such partnership that has had great success in teaching kids about food is the organization Added Value in Brooklyn, NY. Founded by Youth Worker Ian Marvey on the premise of creating leadership amongst at-risk youth, Added Value is a farm located in the most unlikely of places -- on an old concrete baseball diamond in a low income neighborhood. The farm is run almost entirely by teenagers, who take home not only valuable income to their families, but also the fruits of their labour. Additional produce from the farm is also sold to local restaurants such as home/made, and the funds go towards creating education programs for youth. Added Value works in partnership with local schools during a 26 week Farm-to-Classroom program, in which "first graders at Red Hook’s PS 15 participate in weekly farm-based lessons, coupled with weekly cooking lessons. By taking part in farm activities, the students develop a working knowledge of plant biology, plant cycles, and a farmer’s work to grow food. Not to mention, an excitement for fruits and vegetables!" This program is much more than a one day field trip to a farm -- students become deeply invovled with the farm, community members, local businesses and each other, making connections between their actions on the farm, their health, the earth and their future.

In our readings for the School and Society Course, we read about Paulo Freire's Praxis process for education, which consists of five parts: identifying a problem, analysing the problem, developing a plan of action to address the problem, implementing the plan of action, and analysing that action. I've found that when it comes to student's reaching out into the community, the piece that is often missing the action and then reflection on that action. Often students learn about problems in the neighborhood and figure out a way to raise funds or awareness, but they don't often interact in a meaningful way with those involved in the actual problem or community group.

Overall, when thinking about how school lunches can be changed for the better, I believe that the solution needs to be student-driven, teacher facilitated, parent supported and include some sort of meaningful partnership with a community organization, such as the Stop or Food Share.

To find out more about these organizations, and how they can help you provide meaningful praxis oriented learning opportunities for your students, join us on Tuesday for the Connect Farm Seminar.