Let's have an edible schoolyard in EVERY school!

I was reading about the Edible Schoolyard created by Alice Waters yesterday ( http://www.edibleschoolyard.org/about-us ) and was thinking how amazing it would be for every school to have this opportunity.  From the blog:  The Edible Schoolyard (ESY), established in 1995, is a one-acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California. It is a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation, a non-profit organization founded by chef and author Alice Waters.

I wonder what it would take to get legislation passed to have this everywhere.  Wouldn't that be wonderful to have kids at school getting excited about farming?  This is the type of thing that can change not only the health of our children, but with exposure to how things grow, how to be creative, how to cultivate a garden, and be able to eat the food teaches our children to be self-sustaining human beings. 

I think our dependency on food would shift back from grocery stores to local farming.  I have often wondered, living in Georgia, why it is I cannot for the life of me, find a good Georgia Peach in the supermarkets during prime peach season, but I can get wonderful New Jersey Peaches.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Georgia's relationship to peaches...it is on our license plates, girls grow up being compared to "georgia peaches" (which given my experience isn't such a good compliment...)  But seriously, I've been told by a Georgia Peach farmer's daughter that they ship all of the good grade A peaches out of state, and leave the grade B (second rate) peaches here in state.  Crazy-Amazing.  So going local (buying from your nearby farmer) is the only way REALLY to get those delicious mouth watering peaches that the state is known for.

The other thing I think would happen, is that you would see many more people planting fruit and vegetables in their gardens rather than having grass, which is one dimensional.  I do believe in grass.  I have a 3 year old and it is important to me that my son grow up playing wildly in the yard and creating fantasy lands of explorers in that yard of grass and trees.  But in other parts of the yard, it is also important to designate a part to growing such yummy things as tomatos, cucumbers, zucchini, melons, and have apple trees, pears, plums, and yes, peaches.  Much of my childhood is full of memories of eating fruit right off of trees: pommegranites, apples, plums, delicious mouth watering berries...and some other fruit that I am forever searching for that we used to eat from a tree in Mrs Leonard's back yard in LA (the name of which I think will forever escape me). 

How wonderful would that be?  To have our children have that wonderful education of being able to grow their own food, and, to have memories of eating right off the tree rather than thinking their fruit and vegetables come from the grocery store...and that's it.  My dream.

America's Food Revolution

Looks like Jamie Oliver is in good company...do a bit of searching on the web, post something on facebook and you will see it is becoming a "Food Revolution" of sorts (referring to his TV show Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution and his talk at theTED conference, see  http://www.ted.com/talks/jamie_oliver.html for Jamie's talk)...

Michelle Obama has her organic garden at the White House.  She has started a program called Let's Move (http://letsmove.gov/) where they are out to alter the youth's relationship to food, gardening, eating right, the schools food system, exercising and a whole lot more.  It seems she has taken on the mission as hers as First Lady.  Thank you Michelle, you are a real woman/mom/person for seeing this as important. 

There are the 11 year old girls in NYC who on vacation in Ohio tasted a cherry tomato and were blown away by how good it tasted.  They started finding out where their food was coming from and what was in their food.  Check out their website... http://www.whatsonyourplateproject.org/  They have also made a movie about their adventure of discovering where their food comes from. 

When checking out the blog on http://www.whatsonyourplateproject.org/, I discovered this interesting blog: 
http://fedupwithschoollunch.blogspot.com/ .  This is a neat real life adventure.  A teacher has decided to eat the schools lunch that is served to the kids, everyday and blog about it.  Awesome.  Hopefully that will generate some awareness about what our kids are eating and that it is not locally grown.

What I would love to see is kids learning HANDS ON what it is like to grow food and what food grown in their garden tastes like (like the 11 year old girls).  One thing Jamie was shocked by in his TV segment was the lack of knowledge the kids had about what vegetables are.  They didn't know the difference between tomatos and potatos.

So I am inspired to garden this year, to get my son Hunter out into the garden helping us grow the tomatos, the cucumbers, and all of the other things we are growing, and then to teach him about what he is eating.  I am also inspired to shop locally for my produce so that my family's carbon footprint is not a growing footprint, but a local footprint.

I am joining Jamie's forces, First Lady Michelle Obama's...and other's.

My friends think I’m a regular Martha Stewart…

They think this because I make my own play dough and granola (among other reasons…one being I love to bake and I make great desserts).

The play dough happened because at my son’s preschool at the beginning of the school year we had to sign up for a month to provide play dough for the class. We could either make it (recipe provided for us) or buy it if we were so inclined to go that direction. I signed up for January and decided to make it. My philosophy was “why buy it?” Plus, there was this nagging thought in the back of my head…what other chemicals do they put in the store brands that are toxic. It might SAY non toxic, but to whose standards? The government’s? I don’t trust the government’s standards on non toxic (see other post on toxicity in our cosmetics).

So I made the play dough. I was doing it for a few reasons actually. First, it HAD to be cheaper than buying it…and in today’s economy, that is a big reason. Second, the reason stated above regarding toxicity. Third, I just couldn’t deal with the environmental aspect of buying all of those plastic little containers. I am trying to lower the carbon foot print of this family. Hard to do when there are all of these personal little sized items out there available to buy. Marketing individual sizes has certainly hit when it comes to our children. Yes, I want him to eat yogurt at lunch, but those little small containers just fill up our landfills – because you know those small plastic containers aren’t getting recycled at school! Plus, Hunter eats about three of those in one setting. Buying those cute little containers of play dough was out of the question.

So I made my own…and the only tough parts were stirring it fast enough in the big pot (my arms got tired…note to self, need to work out the upper arms) and getting it purple enough with the food coloring. Getting it purple enough (and not lavender) was actually the hardest part of the whole deal. Of course it had to be “purple month” in January and not blue, red or green! HA! But it turned out and was incredibly easy and it eased my mind when Hunter came home and I found out he had been eating the play dough (as all kids do at some point in their lives). At least I knew he wasn’t eating a whole bunch of chemicals.
And that is the final reason why I bake, make play dough, and make things from scratch (like cakes, muffins, cookies) rather than processed by a manufacturer…I know what the ingredients REALLY are!!! Call me Martha, but I like knowing that I can substitute apple sauce (with no added sugar) for the oil, and cut the sugar in half, etc., it makes me feel like I am doing the right thing on many different levels.

Composting

I love composting. What could be better? You cut up fruit and veggies and the scraps go in the compost. You make eggs and the shells go in the compost. The more difficult aspect of it is moving the indoor compost to the outdoor compost. We are currently going on our second indoor compost. I wonder when it will be the right time to trudge outdoors and empty the ceramic compost bin and the almost full bag that sits next to the ceramic bin into the outdoor bin. This is my husband's job, not mine. It's the gross part, that's why it's my husband's job.

Actually everything having to do with the compost once the veggies, fruit scraps, egg shells and coffee grounds move into any kind of bin, it falls into my husband's domain. I feel strongly about composting, and recycling -- as long as it is easy and clean. I suppose if I didn't have an aversion to worms, it might be easier to take on the outside stuff. I will trudge outside from time to time, don't get me wrong, but still infrequently. I don't like being grossed out. Yep, I'm a city girl, just trying to do the right thing. As my sister recently told me, "I don't want to be a farmer". Her husband is trying to slowly turn her into one...they have chickens and he has dug up part of her flower garden to plant more vegetables.

I wonder how it will be when it comes time to put "nature's gold" onto our plants to help them thrive, to feed them the magical food. This will be officially the first season where we will distribute the magical food. I suppose when I start reaping the rewards of the "gold", when I have beautiful flowers and lots of vegetables growing.

Composting is easy...and fun when you get right down to it...and I love knowing that I am doing something that is actually helping the ground and micro-organisms that live in my gardens. Have at it little guys! Just don't creep and crawl around me when I'm gardening...it freaks me out.