Appetizing Education Revolution

By Robert Patterson

Almost sixteen years ago, a visionary chef and a visionary school principal were planning a small test. This project involved converting a typical tarmac schoolyard into a food garden. Very early on in the project, everything started to grow. The schoolchildren were getting excited. For the first time in most of their lives, they had a hands-on experience of how nature works. What they found was the garden provided them with all the science, math and reading that they required but in a more accessible context. The Edible Schoolyard (ESY), established in 1995, is a one acre garden and kitchen classroom at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School, Berkeley, California.

Here are just some of the questions that I began to ask after hearing of the ESY concept for the first time: “What if this was your children’s school, would it change things, how hard would this be to implement?” And, “Might making food the centre of our schools be the breakthrough to both having a better education for our children and a more sustainable food system for farmers?” I will attempt to fully address these questions in the following article.

The classroom can be a very abstract place for most children. Working in the garden offers a direct experience of most of what we, the people, need to know. It also 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? The ESY also gets at another aspect of school that needs to be changed: how our children eat and the resulting health crisis that is overwhelming all of 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 children don’t know a potato from a tomato. Many have never seen anyone cook a meal and most have never grown anything. How are these children ever going to eat better if they have no experience and 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 us know nothing about it? Knowing how to cook cannot happen from a book – it has to be experienced. And how do you expect to shift from junk food to real food if you have never even boiled an egg?

Unfortunately, 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 created community. Most of us have removed this core process from 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. We need to address this problem at its roots. We need to reintroduce our society to the habits that define it. This has to be experienced and school is the best place to bring this back. “Ah,” You may be thinking, “This example is in California and it would ever work here on PEI.” Although this began in 1994, and in a climate where it was possible to grow food throughout the school year, a cookie cutter version doesn’t really exist. The important point when implementing such a project 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 achieves the same great results. It’s all about culture. In New Orleans they did not have the weather to have much of a ESY, so they started by connecting to local farmers and bringing in the food. In time, they will have a garden – for now they are eating locally and doing the prep work to ensure that their garden will be a success.

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 form a group to start the work. Know that there is a lot of readiness out there. I have seen how the remarkable Naomi Cousins’s family farm works and how Naomi is giving farm tours to her school. There are a lot 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 one first test-school and work hard to tell the story widely. I am convinced that this will spread.

I hope I have made a reasonable case for how connecting food to the school helps the children. 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 certainly no pipe dream.

My daughter works for a company in Toronto called Real Food for Real Children. 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 this in Toronto, making a business by doing good. This is not impossible.

What if we made it a primary focus for our schools to 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? The first step would 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. Why not model this in food? Start with one school, and learn a lot. Go to a region of schools, and 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 truly rely on.

So the school becomes a place that not only offers our children a broader education that fills in the gaps of the current system, the school becomes the place where the community designs and operates the real new economy. Self-reliant PEI would then be able to provide its own food and energy, and the thousands of related jobs.

Now that I have successfully answered the questions I posed at the beginning of this article, If I may, I will leave you with a few more: “Who is against this, what is to lose, what is to gain?” And, perhaps most importantly, “Where do we start?”

The secret of a viable local food system…

…Easy Distribution.

How do we create a food system that pays the growers well, treats the natural world well, and offers good healthy food to people at a price they can afford? This triple question is the holy grail of our time.

Most people simply suggest that we develop new products or add new value. Most also assume that these new products are then sold into the existing distribution system.

What most miss is that it is the traditional distribution system that is in fact the problem. Its power is so great that it can and does push back at the margins of the producers. As a result, we get cheap food but at a great cost to human health, and degradation in the environment and in the spirit of the grower.

The issue is not new products or new value added but a new distribution system itself. We need a system that does not have this power imbalance; a system that enhances the margin of the growers enabling them to enhance their natural capital; a system that makes it easy also for the consumer to buy good food at a reasonable cost.

The good news is that there are signs of such a new system emerging all over North America and in Western Europe.

Some producers that are using the CSA model are doing well with the early adopters on the client side.

Some producers that now grow for Farmer’s Markets are doing very well. Sales have increased year over year, their margins are stable and compared to their neighbours who still produce a commodity for the system, they are doing well financially.

Farmer’s Markets and CSA’s have a lot of momentum.

But are they convenient and consistent enough to challenge the traditional distributors? Can they be as convenient as the supermarket? For if they are to challenge the traditional system, and to offer a lot of producers a real living and the consumer a much better quality product they have to be as convenient.

Well they aren’t right now. Many Farmer’s Markets are open only once or twice a week. Even when they are open, they don’t offer the assurance that what you want will be there.  I got to the Charlottetown market at 9am this morning – all the eggs were gone. With CSA the choice is even more limited. You get what you get from one grower.

So can we have a local system that gives all parties the choice and the assurance they need – margins to the producer and choice and ease of use to the consumer?

Yes we can have such a system.

Aaron Koleszar operates a delivery system that connects a number of growers directly to consumers. His site is www.organicveggiedelivery.com – you can see the wide variety that is on offer – this is much broader than a CSA box. This is much more reliable than the market. There is both variety and choice. In addition, he delivers 12 months of the year. So there is consistency as well.

Can such a system scale?

I think it can. Aaron is following an old PEI tradition that started 110 years ago. Back in the 1900’s there was very little cash. Farms were subsistence farms that largely fed the family. To get some cash – pin money really – farm wives would normally go into town on the train and individually sell their eggs and surplus milk from the farm.

Then someone like Aaron had a better idea. Why not start an egg and cheese co-op; collect eggs from the farms and make cheese from the surplus house cow milk; and sell on a much larger scale not only to Charlottetown but all over Canada using the railway? Such a system is made up of not a few large operations but of many small ones linked in a co-op network. As a network model, the co-ops made it easy to scale by reducing the need for large investments, made it easy to make more money off many small farms and made it easy for the consumer to get consistent and regular access to high quality product.

This is an established but largely forgotten model.

I asked Aaron if he would like to scale up his business But he was reluctant. Why? He likes being his own boss – he does not want to go into debt, he does not want to manage other people, he has a new baby and does not want to lose touch with his family. All these are things we take for granted in a traditional business model. But when I pressed him further, he said that what might work would be a network of people like him.

The traditional system demands a large, central and highly capitalized organization. The network fits PEI and the values and needs of most people here.

The way ahead would not be for Aaron to scale himself but to help him and others form a network. More coverage, more sources, more customers – with the costs being shared across the network.

I am hearing that there are talks of a similar venture  starting with beef – then what about a few pigs? What about seafood? ADL has a delivery system. What could be shared across such a network? See what

I mean?

I started to think about what that might look like. Can you imagine it too?

I imagine a network of overlapping delivery systems collecting all sorts of food from producers across the Island, sharing common things such as a web market,  tracking for goods and vehicles, maintenance, even sharing space on vehicles. I imagine links being made to CSA and to Farmer’s Markets. How about local processing and links to the schools?

What would happen to PEI if we had a viable local food system? There are hundreds of millions of dollars on the table. There are hundreds of jobs. If we had such a system what then – local energy? What else could be grown out of the network?

It all has to start somewhere – why not with Aaron?

Story by Robert Patterson