This week the third graders learned about the creation of the rainbow flag right here in San Francisco, a homegrown symbol for the LGBTQ+ community that now resonates all over the world. In the classroom, we watched a documentary story from In the Life Media about Gilbert Baker and heard him explain his process and describe the experience of watching his flag first unfurled in United Nations Plaza in San Francisco in 1978.
In the kitchen, we made Pride parfaits, constructing an edible version of Baker’s six-stripe version of the flag: red pomegranate to represent life, orange cantaloupe to represent healing, yellow mango to represent the sun, green kiwi to represent nature, blueberries to represent serenity, and violet dragonfruit and grapes to represent spirit. In 2017, the city of Philadelphia debuted an inclusive Pride flag that added brown and black stripes to the rainbow to draw attention to both the contributions Black and Brown people have made to the LGBTQ+ community and the specific challenges they face in the ongoing fight for justice. We represented these stripes in our parfaits with toasted coconut and sesame seeds.
There was a lot of knife work involved in this lesson and elbow grease to get the heavy cream whipped into soft peaks. The chefs were up to the task and are so confident working with all of our tools and ingredients. Several students noticed that from where we were working in the outdoor classroom, we could see FIVE rainbow flags hanging in the windows of our neighbors and decorating public streetlights. It was meaningful to explore a topic that is so close to home, and also so fun and delicious to make together as a group.
