Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week the first graders immersed themselves in the food culture of New Orleans, Ms. Webb’s hometown! The read aloud was Nancy Parker’s book The Adventures of Yat and Dat: What’s Cookin’? about two birds who travel around the city sampling the best foods New Orleans has to offer at all the famous restaurants, from barbeque shrimp to beignets to gumbo to étouffée and crawfish.

In class we ate a vegan version of red beans and rice, garnishing our meal together with fresh parsley, thyme, and oregano. It was impressive how some of our first grade chefs were able to lick their kit containers totally clean! While the dish is indisputably delicious, red beans and rice also expresses the painful legacy of colonization, slavery, and the history of the American South with the West African, French, Spanish, Caribbean, and Indigenous influences that make up Creole cuisine.

We watched a short film from Eater called How New Orleans Came to Make Red Beans and Rice a City Wide Staple and learned that red beans and rice was traditionally cooked on Mondays using the leftover pork bones from Sunday dinner. Largely women of color who did the domestic labor would do the wash on Mondays, so red beans, which can cook unattended for hours, was a perfect meal to prepare on a busy day of the week. We learned that red beans and rice was the favorite food of famous jazz musician and New Orleans native Louis Armstrong, who signed his correspondence with “red beans and ricely yours.” At the end of class we held a Zoom dance party watching him and his band perform a rousing rendition of “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week the first graders tasted a rice that has been growing and harvested by hand in present-day North America for thousands of years: wild rice, or manoomin, as it is known to the Anishinaabe Indigenous peoples. Together students sprinkled wild rice salad containing roasted butternut squash, dried cranberries, and wild arugula with toasted pumpkin seeds and drizzled a dressing over it made with lemon juice, mustard, and extra-virgin olive oil.

Our non-fiction read aloud for the week, The Sacred Harvest: Ojibway Wild Rice Gathering by Gordon Regguinti with photographs by Dale Kakkak, tells the story of Glen, an 11-year-old boy from the Leech Lake Reservation in Northern Minnesota and follows him as he learns his family’s traditions around harvesting, parching, drying, jigging, winnowing, cooking, and eating wild rice.

In class we watched excerpts from a film, Mnomen (Wild Rice) - The Food That Grows On Water, in which members of the Gun Lake Tribe in Michigan share their people’s profound spiritual relationship with wild rice. My personal favorite was the footage of the special moccasins the Pottawatomi Indians wear to dance on the rice to separate the kernels from the hulls. We learned that wild rice is often the first food the Anishinaabe feed their babies and the last food fed to elders, as well as an integral part of burial ceremonies after death. Some first graders shared their first foods from when they were infants, and we all did a quick jig with our feet as a brain break before we said our goodbyes for the week.

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 1

The first grade history-social science framework adopted by the California State Board of Education includes the question “How do many people make one nation?” I can’t think of a better way to address this prompt than through the exploration of food in the United States. Our first grade Edible Social Studies unit starts with Norah Dooley’s and Peter J. Thornton’s book Everybody Cooks Rice. The protagonist, Carrie, goes looking for her brother Anthony and ends up taking a journey through the kitchens of her neighbors, who bring culinary traditions from Barbados, Puerto Rico, Vietnam, India, China, Haiti, and Italy to their now-also-American rice dishes.

In class, the first graders each introduced themselves and had the opportunity to share something about rice. Many students professed a love for Mexican rice, some shared about a delicious dish a family member makes, one student said she only likes plain white rice, and another mentioned having tried candy wrapped in edible rice paper. Together we used scissors to snip the green onions that came with the kit this week to garnish fried rice and sampled a dish that people in China began eating thousands of years ago as a way to use up leftover food. Special thanks to the many adults who helped students heat up the fried rice so they could enjoy it at home or from a learning hub warm.

When school was in person, I would start with a read aloud before we moved to the kitchen to cook, but since our class is now on Zoom and we have limited time together, students watched a read aloud of Grace Lin’s The Ugly Vegetables before class. I certainly wouldn’t call any of the vegetables featured in our fried rice ugly, but the unusual color of watermelon radish and purple cabbage definitely sets it apart. In the book, a Chinese American family grows vegetables in their garden that don’t look like the beautiful ornamental flowers in the neighbors’ gardens. Ultimately, after much hard work and patience, the vegetables are harvested and made into a soup that is enjoyed by everyone in the community.

While we ate, the first grade chefs watched a short clip from the Netflix show Ugly Delicious, which dedicated an entire episode to fried rice. In the clip, local San Franciscan and chef Brandon Jew cooks steak fried rice and talks about the iconic restaurants of San Francisco’s Chinatown and finding his way as a Chinese-American cook at his own restaurant, Mister Jiu’s. My hope is that our first graders will take our simple recipe and use it to reinvent leftovers into their teenage years and beyond!

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

For our final lesson of the year, the second graders enjoyed buttermilk scones with strawberry jam. The wheat, the butter, the lemon, the raisins, and the strawberries were all produced locally and organically by small family farms. As we ate together, we discussed how President Biden sent the U.S. Citizenship Act to Congress on his first day in office on January 20, 2021. The bill, if passed, would require overtime pay, provide immediate eligibility for legal status, and presents a three-year path to citizenship for farmworkers. We looked at a photo of Biden’s Oval Office, where a bronze bust of César Chávez is now prominently displayed amongst photographs of the President’s family. It is heartening to see our government placing the issues farmworkers face front and center.

Several students requested we sing De Colores again when we first did it together a couple of weeks ago, so we broke out the instruments and noisemakers and had another rousing rendition of the farmworkers’ anthem (with Ms. Butler reprising her accompaniment on the box grater). For our closing circle, the second grade chefs could share something they are taking away from this exploration of farmworkers and/or an appreciation. Many students gave a shoutout to the winter salad we ate in week 4 and many also thanked the agricultural laborers who feed us every day.

I had a chance to show everyone the mandarinquat sprouts that have been quietly growing in one of my kitchen cabinets since our first class. They are ready to plant in soil soon and I’m hoping they will continue to thrive in Ms. Reynolds’ and Ms. Butlers’ classrooms when we’re able to return to school. Thank you to the whole grade-level community for helping make this distance learning unit a success. See you in third grade, chefs!

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

This week the second graders focused on the continuing challenges that farmworkers face (low wages, immigration policy, access to healthcare, and, during wildfire season and the COVID pandemic, access to PPE, governmental economic relief, and vaccination). We made a shift this year in how we talk about change. Individual choices and actions matter (a lot!), but structural problems require systemic solutions. By continuing to educate themselves about the world around them, by being ready to vote when they turn 18, and by getting involved in policy, today’s second graders are our hope for a better, more just tomorrow.

In terms of finding a tangible action we can all do right now, we talked about how knowing where your food comes from and how it’s grown and harvested goes a long way towards supporting a thriving, ethical food system. Our lesson was a stir-fry featuring produce from Eatwell Farm, Hodo tofu, and brown rice from Chico Rice. I’ve been a member of Eatwell for 14 years, and every week I receive their CSA (community supported agriculture) box, pasture-raised eggs, and have access to products from their local food producer friends, which is how I came to be able to pick up everything I needed for this week’s class from another member’s apartment just a few blocks from my own.

Lorraine Walker, the farmer/owner at Eatwell, sent a photo of the Eatwell crew planting seed potatoes for the students to see, and in class we learned all the names of the farmworkers and what each person is in charge of (e.g. tractor, chickens, pack house, weeding the orchard). We’ve learned that the majority of farmworkers in California are Mexican, so it’s not surprising to learn that the crew at Eatwell are from Mexico. Many of them are family and a few work on the farm only seasonally, helping out during the late spring/summer/early fall when farm production is at its height.

While we ate together, we listened to the poet Jordan Chaney read his poem Conflict. The second graders are currently studying poetry with Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Butler. Poetry, along with music, are our school’s civil rights themes for the second grade curriculum. In his toast to migrant laborers, Chaney evokes the beauty, struggle, and dissonance of our food system and reminds that every single person in the food chain matters.

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week the second graders explored what challenges farmworkers have faced in the past. Only a few years after the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee signed contracts with several Delano growers, the Salad Bowl strike over territorial rights between the UFW and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters led to the first labor law statute establishing the right of farmworkers in California to collective bargaining.

In class, we assembled a salad of California-grown produce, featuring baby head lettuces, watermelon radish, carrot, edible flowers, Pixie tangerine, raisins, and our housemade TBP dressing. Students watched a short film called The Hands That Feed Us, narrated and photographed by documentary photographer Matt Black. We discussed the poor living conditions revealed in the photos, lack of access to running water, fear of deportation, the presence of children working in the fields, and how all the human rights issues of our time (immigration, a living wage, education, the environment, health and safety, housing) are present in the plight of farmworkers today. Students remarked that the photos looked like they were from a long time ago and were surprised to learn the images depicted present-day farmworkers’ lives.

The story of farmworkers’ challenges is also the story of organization, resilience, and strength. We ended class by raising our voices together in song, singing the unofficial anthem of the United Farm Workers, the Spanish-language folk song “De Colores.” Students and some of their adults played the shakers, piano, guitar, ukulele, the wooden spoons, and even a vegetable box grater as we celebrated the beauty of the natural world and how we are more powerful when we work together.

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we explored who the farmworkers in California are. Indigenous, Chinese, Japanese, African-American, South Asian, Filipino, and Mexican people are some of the groups who have contributed to California’s sizable agricultural economic output. In class the second graders learned about the grape strike in Delano, California in the 1960s when Filipino farmworkers walked off the job to protest exploitative labor practices. In response, grape farmers simply hired Mexican farmworkers to cross the picket lines. Larry Itliong, a Filipino labor leader, approached César Chávez and convinced him and his fellow Mexican farmworkers to join the Filipino farmworkers in solidarity to fight together for justice. Five years later, the United Farm Workers Organizing Committee, representing the merging of the predominantly Filipino Agricultural Workers Organizing Committee and the predominantly Mexican National Farmworkers Association, won collective bargaining rights.

To commemorate this historic alliance, students blended coconut milk and Okinawan sweet potato (a wonderful native substitute for ube, a popular ingredient in Filipino cuisine) into homemade Mexipino milkshakes we called licuados de ube. Each second grader received a cocktail umbrella in addition to the ingredients at home so we could also host a little party for the 100th day of school. While we enjoyed our licuados, we studied two photos from 1921. One shows the corner of Market and Romain Streets, a few blocks from where Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy now stands; the other shows a farmers market at the corner of Market and 10th Streets. (Scroll down to see the photos below.) The second graders noticed the horses, the undeveloped land, construction equipment, the farmers’ trucks, the gender and dress of the farmers, and the lack of color in the pictures. In 1921, there were 74 commercial farms in San Francisco. A lot has changed!

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week the second graders explored what products are grown in California. Our state supplies a large amount of the fruits, vegetables, and nuts consumed by people across the United States and has the largest population of farmworkers in the country. We enjoyed tortilla chips produced by local producer Sabor Mexicano and homemade guacamole students garnished with cilantro in our Zoom class. The corn, avocados, onion, garlic, and cilantro were all grown in California.

We watched a short video highlighting some of California’s top commodities and learned that the top 10 agricultural products in our state are dairy products and milk, grapes, almonds, cattle and calves, pistachios, strawberries, lettuce, flowers, tomatoes, and citrus.

California was once part of Mexico, borders Mexico today, and thrives economically due in large part to the labor of the many Mexican and Mexican American farmworkers who tend and harvest the produce that feeds America. Guacamole, with its brilliant balance of acid and fat and the textural complement of tortilla chips, is a great introduction to Mexican food culture and a fun and simple recipe kids of all ages can make together with their families.

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 1

This year, the second graders are exploring the role of farmworkers in our community. We started the unit by sampling several fruits produced in California. The home kits contained a mix of organic citrus grown in the San Joaquin Valley (Marisol clementines, Satsuma mandarins, Kishu mandarins), organic mandarinquats, organic Medjool dates grown in the Coachella Valley, and gremolata Castelvetrano olives prepared by local food producer Bayview Pasta.

Together we came up with a definition of a “farm”: land where people grow fruits and vegetables and tend animals for food. I added that the U.S. government classifies a farm as a place that sells crops and/or animal products for a profit. Students defined “farmworkers” as the people who harvest fruits and vegetables, milk cows, and do all the tasks needed to keep a farm operating and thriving.

Before class, students watched a short video from KQED Arts & Culture: Portraits of Immigrant Farmworkers Bring More Visibility to Their Labor. Over the course of the next few weeks we will be touching on the themes of immigration, land ownership, worker safety, and the resilience of the farmworker community raised in the profile of Bay Area artist Arleene Correa Valencia. California produces over a third of the country’s vegetables and two-thirds of the country’s fruits and nuts, so we’re in an important place to be discussing these issues.

The second graders experienced a lot of flavors in a short amount of time! The mandarins were very sweet, the mandarinquats quite sour, the olives bitter and salty, and the dates very soft and rich. It was fun to see the full range of reactions from love to disdain, but the best part was trying new things as a group. We placed the mandarinquat seeds, the olive pit, and the date pit in between layers of moist paper towel and placed the seeds in a sealed plastic bag. Students will store these in a warm, dark place and we’ll continue to check on the seeds every week to share and document any changes.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 7

For our final class of the semester, we celebrated with a recipe from the Ohlone chefs at mak-’amham. Each fourth and fifth grader received a jar of chia porridge (made with oat milk since we are a nut-free school), a jar of blackberry coulis, and a container of edible flowers. In class, we drizzled the coulis on top of the porridge, then made our own edible art by garnishing with flower petals in an array of bright colors. Most students seemed to really enjoy the finished dish, which features modern cultivated varieties of several native ingredients (chia, agave, California bay laurel, California blackberry). We learned that chia seeds can absorb up to 12 times their weight in liquid and are highly nutritious. We looked at a photo of the chia plant, which, like the common herb sage, is a member of the Salvia genus, and then laughed at some photos of that ‘80s darling the chia pet (particularly one of a chia Chewbacca).

Students watched a short PBS film about Cafe Ohlone and were excited to see the acorn brownies, yerba buena, a blackberry sauce, and edible flowers highlighted. For our closing circle, we shared our favorite meal from the semester (the brownies and the Three Sisters Stew were definitely the most popular, with many chefs also giving a shoutout to the spinach salad) and any reflections as we continue to learn with and from Indigenous peoples. One student exclaimed, “I didn’t realize there were so many different foods we can eat!” and another expressed gratitude that “instead of reading about Indigenous food, I got to actually taste it.”

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week students watched a video from Place-Based Learning Communities at Humboldt State University called History of Native California, which features Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, Payómkawichum, Kumeyaay, Cupeño, Tolowa Dee-Ni', Wiyot, Nor Rel Muk Wintu, and Chumash people telling their stories.

In class, we enjoyed our own Pacific Ocean version of chips and dip and ate nori chips with a sesame seaweed guacamole garnished with a Japanese rice seasoning called furikake. All in all we tried three types of seaweed: nori, wakame, and dulse.

My biggest takeaway from this unit has been the call from Indigenous people for the rest of us to learn with and from the Indigenous community and not just about it. It’s a principle I’d like to apply more intentionally as we continue to grow our program. Another theme that has come up a lot in our discussions around Native communities is the work of cultural preservation, particularly around language preservation. With all this in mind, in class we took a few minutes to learn to count to ten in the Hupa language from Hupa elders. After teaching three classes, I’ve retained a few numbers, but definitely need to keep practicing!

This week’s kit included a cleaned clam shell, and in breakout rooms students tried to come up with as many uses as they could think of for the shells in everyday life. Some of the ideas they came up with were spoon, cup, shovel, knife, necklace, treasure box, eye patch, paint, pottery patch, and money. We learned that tribes including the Hupa traded clam shell beads for other natural resources like obsidian, use them as fish hooks, and are known for their clam shell necklaces.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

This week we talked about agriculture, as opposed to foods that are hunted and gathered, and focused specifically on a companion planting technique invented and perfected by Indigenous peoples in present-day Mexico who then shared it with other Native peoples throughout North America. Students first watched a short film, An Oneida Elder Speaks About the Three Sisters Garden, where an Indigenous leader describes the deep relationship people have had with corn, squash, and beans for centuries.

Most of the fourth and fifth graders have had exposure to the Three Sisters in a garden class at Harvey Milk before and we had fun reviewing the concepts together. The eldest sister, the corn, is the tallest and provides structural support for the middle sister, the beans. The beans climb up the corn stalk and pull nitrogen, a major component of chlorophyll, from the air and fix it back into the soil, providing the plants with important nutrients to survive and thrive. The youngest sister, the squash, grows along the ground. Its broad, round leaves help the soil retain moisture and prickles on its stem help to ward off pests.

In what is now Southern California, the Mohave and Quechan are two tribes that farm corn. We talked about the difference between gathering acorns beneath native oak trees and the forces, perhaps both accidental or intentional, that led humans to domesticate a wild grass and slowly increase its nutritional content, help it to become easier to store, and turn it into the juicy sweet corn we know today - a true technological marvel as impressive as the iPhone!

Together, we ate a bowl of Three Sisters stew, made from a recipe from the Chickasaw Nation. Students garnished the soup with fresh parsley, and many delighted in showing their empty bowls to each other on the Zoom. Our breakout room prompt for the week, inspired by the Oneida Kanehelatúksla, or Thanksgiving address, was to share something we are thankful for.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week we returned to the desert and learned about the Indigenous peoples of the Colorado River Basin, including the Mohave and the Southern Pauite. Students watched two films, the first featuring Mohave elders discussing their long history with the mesquite tree and the second featuring rangers from the Desert National Wildlife Refuge discussing the mesquite’s cultural and ecological importance to the area.

We tasted organic mesquite meal (also called mesquite flour or mesquite flour) by itself and remarked on its surprising sweetness. Students compared the flavor to cinnamon, coconut, and chocolate! We then each made our own mesquite butter by mixing 1/2 ounce of unsalted grass-fed butter with 1/2 teaspoon of mesquite meal. We slathered the mesquite butter on a slice of mesquite cornbread. The mesquite gave the butter and the bread a beautiful dark golden hue and added an unexpected richness and slight smokiness to the food.

In our breakout rooms, students discussed the complexities involved when one food culture comes into conflict with another and offered their ideas as future leaders and ancestors-in-training for how to better share natural resources between different groups of peoples in the future.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we talked about the Wintun (Wintu, Nomlaki, and Patwin) people and made a salad with two plants native to North America (sunflowers and blueberries) and the cultivated descendant of the kind of wild leafy greens that supplemented an Indigenous diet that also included acorn and King salmon. We incorporated three parts of the sunflower plant: the tuber (similar to the root, but with the added ability to reproduce), the sprouts, and the seeds. The seeds were toasted and the salad dressing was made with a particularly delicious extra-virgin olive oil sold under the label Séka Hills, which is produced by the Yoche Dehe Wintun Nation in Yolo County. It was special to honor Indigenous food traditions both old and new in the same meal!

We watched a video called Seeds of Our Ancestors: Native Youth Awakening to Foodways, which showcases young Native people learning about their cultural heritage through food. Inspired by their curiosity and pride, in breakout rooms during our class everyone shared a recipe they would like to learn how to make.

Students compared the taste of the raw sunchoke to water chestnut, jicama, artichoke, and apple. Some asked where they could find sunchokes in the store, so I’m hopeful more families will give them a try. The most popular item in this week’s kit was surprisingly the dressing. It was a simple vinaigrette made with garlic, shallots, apple cider vinegar, Meyer lemon juice, stone-ground mustard, the Séka Hills olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme from my balcony planter garden. Perhaps that is the greatest secret to the best tasting food revealed - that it was made with ingredients grown by someone you know who cares about you.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 2

When one of our second grade teachers at Harvey Milk contacted me to ask if I could use a LOT of prickly pears for a lesson, I was thrilled that there was such a strong connection with our fourth and fifth grade unit on Indigenous food cultures and the native edible plants of California.

I was able to harvest nearly a hundred prickly pears off of the giant cactus pictured below, and there were easily hundreds of fruits left after I had filled my bags. After burning off the spines over an open flame, the pears were gently washed and placed into students’ home kits with a small jar of prickly pear nectar and a can of club soda.

In class this week, students watched a short film called Birdsong Guides a Tribe Home about the Cahuilla people (who live in and around what is now called Palm Springs in Southern California). We cut our prickly pears in half and tasted the fruit fresh. Some noticed its vibrant color, some commented on the fruit’s many seeds, and some made comparisons to strawberry, banana, watermelon, and flowers. Some students who don’t like mushy textures disliked the soft, watery quality of the prickly pear - an idea that aided our conversation about how for desert people, water is life.

We learned that prickly pears were eaten fresh, but also dried for storage to be eaten in the winter. Indigenous peoples made chewing gum from prickly pear. The seeds were dried and ground into flour. The spines were used for tattooing, and anthropologists have discovered tattoo instruments made from prickly pear spines that are 2,000 years old!

We then made our own prickly pear sodas. As I was planning for the lesson, I thought it would be better for students to be able to eat the prickly pears fresh and then also have some prickly pear nectar to mix with the club soda. I’m not equipped to juice enough prickly pears for 78 participants, so I purchased prickly pear nectar from a cactus farm in Arizona. The color of the nectar is certainly very dramatic and enticing, but I was dismayed to find that due to the addition of malic acid as a preservative, the resulting product smelled and tasted nothing like the bright, fruity flavor prickly pears are known for. The nectar tasted almost like tomato juice and many students said it smelled like pickles. There’s nothing wrong with pickles, of course, but it certainly was not what we were going for with our homemade sodas.

Ah well, I hope we were able to model for everyone how things don’t always turn out the way you plan, and we used the snafu as an opportunity to discuss the difference between a whole food like the fresh prickly pear grown in a backyard near our school and an industrialized version like the farmed and mass-produced nectar from out of state. Most students chose to make their soda using the fresh scooped-out fruit mixed with the club soda, which made for a very refreshing drink. If we teach this lesson again, I will have students add agave syrup to taste. It’s made from the agave plant, another staple of the Cahuilla diet.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 1

Our exploration of Indigenous food cultures started with the acorn, a source of sustenance for a majority of the native peoples who have lived off the land we now call California for thousands of years. Before our first Zoom class, the fourth and fifth graders watched two short films with their homeroom teacher: How This Native American Elder Reclaimed Sacred Land in the Bay Area and Tending the Wild: Decolonizing the Diet. The first Edible Social Studies kits this week contained a handful of (mostly Live Oak) acorns gathered in the East Bay and the Peninsula, a reusable tea bag, loose leaf yerba buena tea, and an acorn brownie.

In class, we used all of our senses to make a cup of tea together from the wild mint that grew so abundantly around what is now San Francisco that the Spanish colonizers named the land Yerba Buena (“good herb”) after it. We then enjoyed the refreshing drink with the acorn brownie while discussing both the opportunities and challenges we have when studying Indigenous food cultures. Many Indigenous food staples are not commercially available and centuries of intentional cultural erasure has resulted in few Indigenous voices being celebrated and amplified even at a time when so much attention is being paid to chefs, restaurants, and cookbooks.

One student remarked on a phrase used by Ann-Marie Sayers, the Ohlone woman featured in the film about Indian Canyon, about the impact of our actions on our descendants seven generations from now. We tied this idea to our other fourth/fifth grade Edible Social Studies unit on the intersection of climate change and the food system, which we taught last year and will bring back next year. Especially during a year of unprecedented wildfires, I could really feel everyone drawing a connection from the past to our present, lived experiences.

The acorn was a staple of many Indigenous diets. In breakout rooms, students shared a few of their family’s food staples with each other. Rice and beans, cheese, salad, fruit, broccoli, and meat were a just a few of the foods students designated as important to them and their loved ones.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 7

For our final week of third grade Edible Social Studies, students recreated the iconic rainbow flag, which Gilbert Baker first created in San Francisco, as an iconic dessert, the parfait. Each home kit included red pomegranate seeds (representing life), orange mangoes (representing healing), yellow persimmons (representing sun), green kiwi compote (representing nature), blueberries (representing harmony), violet blackberry compote (representing spirit), brown chocolate chips and Black Mission figs to highlight the specific experiences of LGBTQ+ communities of color and one of the inclusive pride flags that debuted in 2018, and vanilla yogurt.

Before class in their homeroom, students watched a video, The Gay Betsy Ross, that includes footage of Gilbert Baker talking about what was happening in San Francisco in the 1970s and telling the story of how the flag came to be. In our live Zoom, we discussed the unique role our school’s namesake, Harvey Milk, and our school’s neighborhood, the Castro, played and continue to play in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. Not every elementary school has rainbow stairs leading up to the library and students who walk across rainbow crosswalks on their way to school each day!

In our breakout rooms, while enjoying the parfaits together, the third graders each shared something that makes them proud. The responses ranged from “I’m proud I made this parfait!” to “I’m proud when I work on something really hard all by myself.” I’m really going to miss these incredible young learners, but look forward to working with them again next year.

My deepest gratitude to our third grade classroom teachers Mr. Swick and Ms. Grace, who always go above and beyond, and to all the adults in our school community who helped deliver kits to other families, picked up kits at school every week, and who are supporting student distance learning every day in a myriad of ways.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week we focused on the Second Great Migration, a time from the 1940s through 1970s when millions of African Americans left the South and moved to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, including to the San Francisco Bay Area. From African people braiding seeds into their hair before being forced to board ships to growing their own food as an act of sovereignty in Colonial America and reserving the nutritious pot likker from greens they served to White slaveowners for their own children, food has represented resistance, rebellion, and revolution for Black people in America for hundreds of years.

When we eat collard greens in their juices, we honor the ingenuity of African-American cooks who took recipes from home and created a truly American cuisine with the mix of transplanted and native ingredients they found in a new land.

Normally when we teach this lesson at school, we don’t have enough time or the proper equipment to bake, but our distance learning kit model this semester allowed us to send home a slice of homemade cornbread to each third grader to help mop up that delicious pot likker during class! In breakout rooms on our Zoom, they shared what foods they would bring if they had to go to a faraway place. A sample of their responses: mac and cheese, wontons, mango, dragonfruit, and strawberry shortcake. Ms. Grace shared that instead of ready-to-eat food, she would bring a cow and wheat so she could survive for longer. We hope that our program can play a small part in all of our students growing up to be more self sufficient, food literate, and nourished.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

Our class ran over this week, mostly because it involved more hands-on working with ingredients than the last few. It’s a hard balance to strike, but I could see how engaged all the students were on the Zoom, because who doesn’t like to work with their hands?! I want to keep trying to provide opportunities for all kids in our community to engage in learning with all their senses, but I’m not going to lie - it’s a challenge to design recipes that can be assembled in such a short amount of time, that taste good, and that are accessible for students who don’t have an adult nearby able to assist in real time. Thank you to all our third graders for their perseverance every week, it is truly inspiring!

This week students watched a short video from the Smithsonian sharing a Japanese American’s reflection on what it was like to be interned by the US Government during World War II. This is the first year we’ve used the voice of someone who was a child at that time, and I think it helped the third graders connect to what the experience must have been like. We weren’t able to go into more detail in class, but the story of how the Presidio of San Francisco specifically played a part is fascinating and worth looking into for those who’d like to continue the conversation at home.

We were excited to incorporate fresh produce for the first time in the home kits, and even though plastic knives are not ideal kitchen tools, everyone found a way to make it work. Rolling temaki in a group is a lovely way to celebrate Japanese food culture. I was pleasantly surprised by how we managed to connect, even via a screen, and applaud all the students who were brave enough to share in our breakout room discussions about times when others may have made assumptions about them based on their appearance. It was a good reminder that we are not alone, and that together we can effect change in our community.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week our chefs watched two videos in preparation for our live class: Remembering Chinese Railroad Workers, which highlights the contributions Chinese laborers made to the completion of the transcontinental railroad during the 1860s, and Chinese Egg Noodles, which showcases a Chinese food invention that certainly changed the international culinary landscape for the better.

I tried out a new food preservation technique this week by vacuum sealing bags of lo mein that were then distributed to the third graders at home for safekeeping in the fridge. We warmed the noodles up by submerging the bags in hot water before cutting them open and eating together during class. It worked better than expected and we will definitely be doing more vacuum sealing for certain items as long as we need to send home kits this year!

I am struck by how different cohorts of students respond to the material in different ways, classroom to classroom and year to year. This semester, what resonated with the third graders in our discussion about Chinese railroad workers and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the fact that the workers were paid less than their Irish counterparts, even when they often performed work that was more dangerous. One chef compared the situation to NBA players earning more than WNBA players because of the erroneous idea that some people are superior to other people.

In breakout rooms on Zoom, students brainstormed ways we can make others feel included. This is a topic everyone can relate to, and responses included extending an invitation to someone when no one else does, offering a wider range of options to accommodate different preferences within a group setting, and being an upstander when you observe bullying. Edible Social Studies is at its best when the kids are happily eating together and connecting important moments in our community’s history with the ongoing fight for civil rights in our society today. Thank you, third graders, for bringing your empathy, passion, and creativity to class this week.