Project Inspires Gardens to Grow: Chef Alice Waters’ Health-Conscious Idea Has Found Way into S.C.

By Allison Askins, The State, Columbia, S.C.

Sep. 24–LUNCH LINE:

An occasional series about school lunches

Famed chef and healthy food crusader Alice Waters thinks America’s children deserve a better relationship with food than they are getting — at school and at home.

And she thinks schools can be a leader in the effort for change.

“The crisis right now of health and the environment and our culture is something unimaginable, and we need a curriculum in the public schools that begins in kindergarten and brings children into a new relationship with food,” Waters said in a telephone interview from her California office.

Waters, often credited with starting the movement toward eating more locally grown food, will bring her message to Charlotte on Thursday when she speaks at Queens University about her Edible Schoolyard project. The project has integrated a garden into the curriculum at a Berkeley, Calif., middle school, transforming the school and its experience with food.

Located at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, near Waters’ internationally recognized Chez Panisse restaurant, the Edible Schoolyard includes a large, organic garden that a staff of six teachers and one administrator use to feed the school’s children — literally and figuratively.

In addition to producing food crops, the garden’s life cycle is incorporated into other school lessons. Art, math, biology, language and ecology are all ripe for the picking.

As a result, Waters says she has seen children develop healthier diets and a healthier relationship with the food they eat.

For her work, the 63-year-old Waters received a John Stanford Education Heroes Award in 1999 from one of South Carolina’s own, former U.S. Secretary of Education Richard Riley.

“You have to really decide that feeding children … is something of great, great value — an essential education that we all need to live on the planet,” Waters said. “It’s digging your hands in the garden, really understanding stewardship.”

The idea is not foreign to S.C. educators or parents who have become involved in gardening programs at their schools.

“We learn from what we love and what feeds our soul,” said the Rev. Susan Heath, a parent and board member at Heathwood Hall Episcopal School in Columbia. Heath has been instrumental in the development of that school’s gardening program.

“Surely watching something grow and then feasting on it, sharing that bounty with others, feeds our souls as well as our bodies,” Heath said.

Vivian Pilant, director of the office of food service and nutrition for the S.C. Department of Education, has long followed Waters’ work and loves the idea of incorporating gardens into the state’s public schools. At least two public schools in the Midlands have gardens that they use for lessons — R.H. Fulmer Middle School in West Columbia and Brockman Elementary School in Columbia.

At Brockman, the school’s Montessori approach to education is a solid fit with gardens. Lessons already are steeped in the belief that children learn with their senses.

For example, Brockman pre-schoolers through third-graders have science lessons that identify roots and parts of plants.

“In the garden, they see the real thing to go with the pictures,” said Joyce Shealy, the parent-volunteer who oversees the school’s gardening program.

In fourth and fifth grade, students research plants and plot graphs based on plant growth.

“In the garden, they learn what living things do — grow, eat, need water,” Shealy said.

At R.H. Fulmer, children expand their art experience with teacher Melanie Ward’s garden. While sitting in the garden, they can sketch and learn about drawing the natural world. They also have painted pumpkins they’ve grown as a fall art project.

On a recent day at Heathwood Hall, pre-schoolers plucked beans from their garden and helped prepare beds for fall planting. Two weeks ago, the same children used basil leaves from their plants to create a pesto pizza they made themselves.

Waters thinks such programs can help reduce the nation’s obesity rate and encourage Americans to develop a healthier understanding and appreciation for the cost of food and the efforts that go into growing it.

“We need models built around the country where people can come in and feel what this is like,” she said.

Weston is already thinking in that direction.

Heathwood has a large greenhouse that administrators and faculty are hoping will one day be used to grow plants for community projects such as Habitat for Humanity.

Some may think this type of curriculum folds seamlessly into thinking at an independent, church-affiliated school. But Waters sees no obstacle to such teaching in public schools as well. It’s a matter of money and will, she said.

Integrated gardening programs can’t reach their full potential when they are totally dependent on volunteer labor and oversight, Waters said.

“It takes teachers to do this,” Waters said. “It’s not just hanging out in the cafeteria and buying slightly more expensive food. It’s integrating the entire experience.”

Reach Askins at (803) 771-8614.

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