Alice Waters on Honest Family Food Values: Is It Up to All of Us?
In advance of her appearance at the New York Wine & Food Festival October 12 (tickets are still available) on a panel called Beyond Chicken Nuggets: How to Raise a Healthy Eater, Alice Waters did a Q&A with the New York Times' Tara Parker-Pope. Waters broke no new ground in the interview, but if you've never heard Alice on the subject, it's worth checking out. She championed her Edible Schoolyard initiative in her beloved Berkeley, California, and stressed the value of families cooking and eating together. Waters and her fellow panelists are going to talk about how parents can improve the quality of food their children eat.
Here are Waters' suggestions:
"Bring kids into a whole relationship with food that’s connected to nature and our culture."
"We need a program in the public school system, an everyday experience for kids that is nourishing, that brings them to the ideas of stewardship of the land, like the hands-on experience that the kids have at the school in Berkeley in the garden. They come there with their math class maybe and measure and weigh vegetables. They begin to learn about the compost heap, and about biodiversity, what’s ripe and what’s not ripe. It’s opening up these pathways through the mind."
She goes on:
"It takes teachers to breath life into it. It takes a revolution in the cafeteria to make it happen. What parents can do is go into the schools and see what’s going on in cafeterias. They can write to superintendents and encourage teachers in schools to engage the children in these hands-on ways."
"Create a garden, bring children to farms for field trips. I think it’s important that parents and teachers get together to do one or two things they can accomplish well — a teaching garden, connecting with farms nearby, weave food into the curriculum. Buy foods from nearby farms and have that food served in the cafeteria."
Waters' compelling conclusion: "Children are hungry for food, but they are also hungry for care. This food comes with care. That’s the magic of it."
In other words, it's going to take an all-hands-on-deck approach to uproot long-established school-lunch and cafeteria policies. What can our army of serious eaters do?
We need to make honest food our collective cause. It's happening in one school in Berkeley, a few toney private schools in New York and elsewhere, schools like Yale and Kenyon, and even in some disadvantaged neighborhoods like Brooklyn, New York's Red Hook, but these are drops in the proverbial milk bucket. We need to make this our cause in all 50 states.
We need money for lobbyists to advocate on behalf of honest food to the Congress so that farm bills contain provisions to make food part of the curriculum at public elementary schools. We need a state by state advocacy effort, because so many educational spending decisions are local ones.
Alice is the zealot who's articulating a clear vision, but it's up to the rest of us to make it happen. If the Slow Food movement needs a specific cause to champion, honest food in schools might be just something all of us who care about food and the future can get behind.
What do you think, serious eaters?
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11 Comments:
yeah
great
srhcb at 9:34PM on 09/28/08
The majority of American children are being taught to eat junk food not only at home but in school. Cafeterias are notorious for serving chicken nuggets and other unwholesome, unhealthy foods. Just last week a mom in my neighborhood was lamenting the food situation at her child's school, here in Jersey City. I was disgusted to hear that Super Donuts and Chocolate cereal were the typical breakfast foods offered. She and other parents are looking for ways to initiate food changes, school by school but the road is not easy. I applaud Alice Waters and her efforts and would love to be able to give parents concrete steps to take towards healthier school foods.
http://www.izzyeats.com/2008/09/doughnuts-for-breakfast-what-is-health.html
izzy's mama at 10:25PM on 09/28/08
"Children are hungry for food, but they are also hungry for care. This food comes with care. That’s the magic of it."
Well said.
erinlovestoeat at 11:21PM on 09/28/08
I ran for election to my local school board when I lived in NJ and that's where major changes can take place. I am proud of my contributions to the curriculum and the cafeteria food - you need to educate the children, and show them all the aspects involved, including farming, economics, smart shopping, nutrition, cooking, as well as providing healthy, delicious food. I was lucky to have support from members, teachers and parents. If I didn't have to move to another state, I would probably still be serving. Board members have power and can accomplish a lot.
PerkyMac at 1:52AM on 09/29/08
I've always been a proponent of cooking at home because that's how I was raised and I think it's a healthier approach than teaching a kid to default to a takeout or fast food meal. Having said that, I think I got on a more "vocal" bandwagon after I watched Semi-Homemade for the first time. Since then, I've glued a bullhorn to my mouth and invited about a zillion "dine out" addicts to my house to see what real food actually tastes like.
Though Chef Waters' message is potent and true - it's not news. I hope more people get the message and start teaching their kids it's better to control what goes in the pan. It's the only way to really control what goes in your mouth.
therealchiffonade at 5:05AM on 09/29/08
To get fresh veggies and meat AND have well-made healthy meals, local governments needs to raise taxes and raise the price of lunch. I think kids bring home a lot more habits from school than the other way around. There's peer pressure to do things as expected.
$1.25/lunch (actually $3.75) doesn't buy a lot - the current cost of lunch where I am from originally. The cost of meals to students is capped to 1/3 the cost to make the meal.
There will likely be issues with raising taxes and the price of lunch, as is always the case when asking people to pay more for things that, at this very moment, do not affect them, whether it's for transportation, parks and recreation, education, etc.
In addition to lunch, each child pays $120/year for bussing, which is obviously too cheap to be operationally sound (cost is ~$600/child). Bussing should be axed in non-rural areas and the balance put into food or books. All the schools I can think of across the state have public transportation bus stops in front of schools...unless they uprooted them since I've visited these schools. :P
Cassaendra at 8:03AM on 09/29/08
I don't totally understand the logistics of school garden programs outside California. In areas where there is a limited growing season, children will be out of shool during the months with the most work and much of the harvest. It would be great if parents and students would volunteer to manage the garden over the summer, but it seems difficult to organize - if that many parents were interested in programs like this, children would learn about healthy food and gardening at home.
I think it is a great idea in theory, but I'd like to read about the cost and effort required to put it into practice in an area with harsh winters.
artychoke at 8:39AM on 09/29/08
I'm sick of two things:
1) using war metaphors for everything. Let's stop doing that. We don't need to be an "army." We don't need to call it a "revolution." Yes, it would in fact be a kind of revolution were we to try to change the food in school cafeterias across the country; but, calling it that doesn't help anything and confuses the point.
2) people who point at one part of a very large idea and say "well that might not work in this one school, so I don't think its doable period" or something similar. How about we try to come up with something that _would_ work in such a situation. As much as I get tired of hearing the same person over and over (Waters, in this case), she is basically right about all of this and she's got some really good ideas. Further, this is the best way I've heard her put her ideas so far. She was clearly listing off the beginning of a series of possibilities when she suggested planting a garden.
Ed, I think its a great idea to excite Serious Eaters to try to help with this effort. Do you have any thoughts about what form an organization might take? Does Waters' Berkely project have literature that might be adapted to give other schools ideas? It seems like Serious Eats might be able to work with, say, Seeds for Change to help supply seeds/seedlings or help connect schools to local farms or organic growers to help get things started. Even if it were to be an after school program at the beginning, say put middle schools in touch with CSAs or some such thing, it could be a good start.
I'd love to be involved in helping educate more people about food and how it can be fun and good. Thanks for using the space you've made to ponder such a thing!
ccbweb at 10:16AM on 09/29/08
I think the whole idea is nice- in a perfect world. My children live in a house of whole foods and garden loving. They help me plant seeds and nurture plants, and get all excited about the harvest, and then they proceed to declare their hate at the dinner table. Not every child is going to enjoy eating their vegetables- no matter how involved in the process they are. It's all well and good to promote gardening and growing your own food, it's completely another to actually do it. I enjoy my vegetable gardening, but I am also a SAHM. I have the time to garden, but even then, there are times where I neglect my gardening because I am just busy with other things. What's the solution here? We can't all be like Jamie Oliver (whom I adore, btw) and hire a full-time gardener year round.
As to the school lunches, I wish anyone who desires to take up that torch all the luck in the world. I tried once. One time I mentioned how appalling our school lunches are and I was chewed right into the ground. It's all about $$$ in the school lunch program. I was read the riot act about how difficult it is to feed a school full of children the required amount of nutrients in an affordable manner. How on earth did I think that roasted broccoli was going to appeal to the masses? Here in podunk our schools have an 87% participation rate in school lunch- and at the grade school level it costs the kids $1.80 per day. The kids love eating the pizza and chicken nuggets, they eat well, and the waste is less when they eat it, so why would they try and change that up to feature salads and whole grains? The bread is so white it glows- but that's okay, because it matches the loathsome white whipped butter to spread on it.
*sigh* I for one would love to see a change, but I think they whole notion is just idealistic unless someone can come up with the funding for change. Our school board has been scrambling to find money simply to cover the rapidly rising costs of food- to try and persuade an overhaul... it simply wouldn't happen and you'd be laughed right out the door.
ErikaWaz at 10:35AM on 09/29/08
What if they did away with purchased lunches for any kid whose family income was above a certain level? I mean we have the 'subsidized' free lunch program in place here in FL for low-income families...what if they just kept those kinds of programs and everyone else had to bring their lunch? Wouldn't that put the responsibility of a nutritious lunch squarely back in the hands of the parents?
And instead of "revolution" what about a "revitalization"?
pjacob01 at 12:33PM on 09/29/08
"pjacob01" - I think it's dangerous to suggest a "must pack lunch" program for families with greater incomes because it only sets the "poor" students apart.
My high school had two cafeteria lines: one for the normal daily meal and one for "a la carte" items, like apples or granola bars. Perhaps schools could cut down their food costs and enable more student choice by going to an all "a la carte" system - healthy (or at least healthier) wraps and sandwiches, fruit, veggies, etc. Kids will only eat what they want anyway, so this could cut down on the cost of a child's lunch at the same time as eliminating waste for the food no one wants.
anastasia7173 at 1:53PM on 09/29/08