Renowned Restaurateur Aims to Educate Young Palates

There’s a steady rain, but 12-year-old Paul Hoshi-Nagamoto hardly minds as he and three sixth-grade classmates pick fava beans from a vine in the damp soil.

This sure beats sitting in a classroom working on fractions.

The garden work at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School is intended as a learning experience. It’s also fun.

When asked what he likes about it, Paul mentions talking with his friends without getting into trouble with the teacher--”and throwing snails.”

Each of the sixth-graders spends an hour every other week in the school garden, doing everything from pulling weeds to harvesting dozens of vegetables that will be turned into exotic entrees.

They also take turns in the school’s kitchen, learning, among other things, the proper way to handle a knife, how to set a table for dinner, and basic cooking skills.

Renowned restaurateur Alice Waters started the Edible Schoolyard program in 1994. The idea is for youngsters to appreciate the ritual of eating and to develop a reverence for food--and not the kind that is microwaved or comes from a box.

“Food these days is like television,” Waters says. “It just came into our lives and we don’t know what we missed.”

Freezers and fast-food franchises have given Americans mistaken ideas about food preparation, she says: “It’s like having bad corn all year long. You can’t appreciate the good corn when you get it. Your palate’s dulled and you think of food as fuel.”

Every day for years, Waters drove past the school on her way to Chez Panisse, the Berkeley restaurant where she created the California cuisine craze. The two were worlds, not miles, apart.

Her opulent restaurant is booked weeks in advance for a $68 per person weekend dinner. On the menu one recent night: sauteed soft-shell crab, morel mushroom and green garlic tart and grilled guinea hen with mustard sauce.

The school was covered in graffiti and its grounds were overgrown. To Waters, a former cooking teacher, it epitomized education in decline. She thought the building was abandoned.

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Her passing criticism of the school in a newspaper article caught the eye of Principal Neil Smith, who arranged a meeting with Waters.

He challenged her to do something about it, and she did.

“I told him I didn’t just want a garden because there’s lots of schools that have gardens,” Waters says. “And I didn’t just want to do a cooking class because there are schools that have that. But what was important to me was the whole cycle, from the garden to the kitchen to the table and to the garden again.”

Everything in the 1-acre cultivated area is organic, a cornucopia that would rival the selection at a well stocked grocery store: coriander, carrots, garlic, artichokes, strawberries, spinach, celery, beets, cilantro, potatoes, parsley, five kinds of lettuce, apples and pears, and more.

It took two years of planning, weeding and care before the first harvest in 1996.

David Hawkins, who joined the program in 1996, oversees the garden and about 30 adult volunteers.

“A garden is a totally different context than a classroom,” Hawkins says. “It’s a cooperative thing. I think American schools are sick with competition and the whole grading system. Here they can actually learn without that kind of pressure.”

Running the kitchen is Esther Cook, a former chef who left the restaurant business to work with children.

Her lesson plans are often tied to other classes. When the children recently learned about Egypt in social studies, she taught them to prepare Middle Eastern dishes, including falafel, tabouli and mana’ish, a pastry with an oregano filling.

Though many of the children were unfamiliar with the kitchen or how to prepare the simplest foods, they were quick learners.

“To them, it’s a place where they feel quite respected because they’re given a lot of responsibilities,” she says. “They know that the tools and equipment they use are the real deal. They’re using 8-inch chef’s knives, professional-grade ovens and stoves and dishwashers.”

The sunny yellow-and-white kitchen was a dingy storage room until a fresh coat of paint, restored cabinets and donated major appliances transformed it.

Every kid knows about Twinkies, Doritos and Snickers, but how many can describe radicchio (a salad green), raita (a cucumber salad) or cumin (a spice)? These youngsters can.

Even so, breaking the junk-food cycle isn’t easy.

Because state law requires hot meals in public schools, many students buy lunch from a school snack bar that slings hot dogs, nachos and other fattening fare. On a recent day, kids schooled in the basics of healthy eating devoured greasy pepperoni pizza.

Changing such habits is part of Waters’ goal as she works to expand the program.

She’s trying to raise $3 million to build an advanced cafeteria kitchen and classroom at the school. Maybe someday, she says, the Edible Schoolyard will be a model for a national curriculum and lunch program.

It’s already getting national attention. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) are to tour the school in the fall.

And some students’ views are changing.

One boy took such an interest in the program that he wrote Waters, who offered him a summer job working in the Chez Panisse kitchen.

And 11-year-old Kevin McGlothen is rethinking his career plans.

“I really want to be a soccer player,” he says. “But if I can’t do that, I want to be a cook or a gardener.”