What if this was your kid's school? What if this was the main classroom at your school?
Would it change things? How hard would this be to do?
Might making food the centre of our schools be the breakthrough to both having a better education for our kids and a more sustainable food system for farmers?
As with many good ideas this one started very small and a long time ago.
Back in 1994 in one school in California, a visionary chef and a visionary principal planned a small test. Called the Edible School Yard, this involved converting a typical tarmac school yard into a food garden.
This small test started to change everything. For the first time in most of these kids lives, they had a hands on experience of how nature works.
In the garden is all the science, math and reading that they need but in a more accessible context.
The class room can be a very abstract place for most kids. Working in the garden offers a direct experience of most of what we need to know. AND it teaches us perhaps the most important lesson of all - how nature works and how we can influence it but not control it. It teaches us how the world really works and our place in it. What could be more important than that?
It also gets at another aspect of school that needs to be changed. How our children eat and the health crisis that is overwhelming us.
As Jamie Oliver found out, making a shift from junk food to good food, cannot happen as a result of exhortation - it has to be experienced.
To eat better, we have to know personally about food. Many Island kids don't know a potato from a tomato. Many have never seen anyone cook a meal. Most have never grown anything.
How are they going to ever eat better if they have no experience? What will happen when they are parents?
In the last 30 years we have cut ourselves off from food. How can we connect to those who grow food, if most of know nothing about it? Knowing how to cook cannot happen from a book - it has to be experienced. How can you shift from junk food to real food if you have never even boiled an egg?
We have also cut ourselves off from the most important process that happens when we get food communally, cook it communally and eat it communally. This for millennia was the core process that creates community. Most of us have removed this core process for our lives.
So we worry about bullying and anti social behaviour at school and in society and hope that more rules will make it better. But they don't and won't. What will is to add back this core process. And so create the habits again that build our ability to be social.
This has to be experienced. School is the best place to bring this back.
Ah you may be saying, this example is in California and it would ever work here on PEI.
In 1994 this began very small and in a climate where it was possible to grow food in the school year. But we don't have to have a cookie cutter version. The important point is to ensure that the main points are covered. Here is how a school in post hurricane New Orleans is dealing with a very different environment but still uses the same principles and still gets the same good results.
It's all about culture. In New Orleans they did not have the weather to have much of a mini farm at the school, so they started by connecting to local farmers and bringing in the food. They will be having a garden in time - but they needed more time and preparation to ensure that this would work.
How could we do this? Ask for help. Go down and see what is being done elsewhere.Start small and where the conditions are best for success. Learn how to do this in the PEI context - the details will not be the same as in California.
Use this knowledge to from a group to start the work. Know that there is a lot of readiness out there. Here is the remarkable Naomi Cousins in a short talk showing us how her family farm works and how they are giving farm tours to her school. There are lots of farmers who would want to get involved.
There are parents who want to help and I bet there are teachers who want to do this too.
Focus all this support around the first test school and work hard to tell the story widely. Think of what "success" and measure for it. be open with how we are doing.
I am convinced that this will spread.
I hope I have made a reasonable case for how connecting food to the school helps the kids. Now let's look at what happens to those that grow food.
People who grow food need hope. Hope for a future where they will have a market for what they grow. A market that will be able to survive all the turbulence to come. Many are working towards this individually but there is no critical mass. The schools can be this catalyst.
This is no pipe dream.
My daughter works for a company in Toronto called Real Food for Real Kids. The big idea here was to offer real food grown locally to children in daycare and kindergarten.
Now it is the largest buyer of local food in the GTA and feeds nearly 10,000 children a day.
A private for profit organization is doing just this in Toronto. making a business by doing good. This is not impossible.
What if we made the strategic goal that our schools will become the centre of a local food system where we ensured that all the food eaten at school came locally and was prepared on site locally? Where the first step will be to test the model and then commit the demand in the control of the government.
This is the model that PEI used for wind and is now using for heating with BioMass. With wind, the Feds and the Province contracted to buy a block of power thus providing the demand to build the larger network. With Biomass heating PEI is now planning to heat 5 more schools - the test was at Evangeline. With luck this larger test will then allow for a system wide switch to biomass and the growth of a large local business with lots of local jobs.
Why not model this in food. Start with one school. Learn a lot. Go to a region of schools. Learn how to do this in a system. Then expand provincially. In total this is a lot of demand. If the School Boards, UPEI and Holland College, the manors and the hospitals committed to source and cook locally, we would have enough demand to support a local system that would start to offer growers on PEI a market that they could rely on.
So the school becomes a place that not only offers our kids a broader education that fills in the gaps of the current system AND the school becomes the place where the community designs and operates the real new economy. The economy where a self relient PEI, provides its own food and energy and thousands of related jobs.
Who is against this? What is to lose? What is to gain? So where do we start?
