Friday, December 4, 2009

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.

Seminar - Only 3 Days Away!


Only three days until the Connect Farm Seminar!

We're excited to announce that we have added additional speakers to the lineup for our seminar on Tuesday at OISE. Meredith Hayes from Foodshare and Kristen Schroeder from Real Food for Real Kids will be joining our panel of experts on Tuesday night.

See the Seminar Information page for more information on these great panelists, who will have incredible knowledge to share with you about their work in local farming and education.

This event is shaping up to be something that you won't want to miss! The event is free and open to the public as well as OISE Students, so please feel free to pass the word. We have created a facebook event and U of T Students should remember to register through SUPO's website, so that you can receive your certificate of completion for this workshop.

We look forward to seeing you on Tuesday at 5:15pm in Room 5-250!

Thursday, December 3, 2009

Lesson plan delay - UPDATE

12/03/09
*UPDATE* The lesson plan has been uploaded and it is ready for you to use. You can find the lesson plan by clicking the link on the right, or by clicking here. Thank you for your patience!

11/24/09
The lesson plan is not currently up right now, hopefully there is a way soon to do this. In the meantime, send me a message if you have questions about it and check out the summary, it is basically what the lesson plan is without a template!

Monday, November 30, 2009

A winter treat

When winter rolls in eating local gets incredibly hard, especially if you did not plan ahead. Winter renders local fresh fruit and veg almost non-existent, however, there is a wonderful food that is only produced in the winter. The worlds supply of Maple Syrup is primarily tapped and produced in Ontario and Quebec. This makes Maple Syrup a wonderful local treat. Maple syrup is widely available especially from local craft markets and grocery stores. Combined with local eggs (produced all year round), local milk and any frozen fruit from the summer and fall you nearly have all you need to produce a wonderful meal that can be used for any sitting of the day.

Here is a basic blueberry pancake and maple syrup recipe.

1 1/4 to 1 1/2 cups flour
2 teaspoons baking powder
3/4 teaspoon salt
1 1/2 cups milk
1-2 cups Blueberries
1 egg
2 - 3 tablespoons oil for cooking

Dry to dry, wet to wet and combine. Dish out into a hot pan with olive oil.
Cook over medium heat until firm with a slight spring.
Add Ontario Maple Syrup to taste.

As a variation try Crepes

1 cup flour
2 Eggs
1 cup Milk
1/2 cup Water
1 tbsp, melted Butter
pinch of Salt
Fresh Raspberries: 1 cup
1 tbsp Suggar
Icing Sugar to dust
Maple Syrup to top

Mix all ingredients and cook in olive oil. Be sure to spread the batter out thin.
No need to flip the crepe since they are so thin.
place on a plate and fill with berries. Fold over and dust with icing sugar and/or Ontario Maple Syrup.