3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week we talked about the many historical moments that brought Russians to San Francisco over two centuries, including the fur trade, the Gold Rush, the Russian Civil War, and Soviet religious repression. We learned that the Russian Hill neighborhood was named for a small Russian cemetery that was discovered atop the hill during the Gold Rush, and that Little Russia is in the Richmond District, where some of our Harvey Milk students and staff now live.

In the classroom we watched a Russian American food entrepreneur named Anna Tvelova share her experiences coming to San Francisco and starting a business selling pirozhkis, a stuffed yeast-leavened bun that is baked or fried.

In the kitchen students made a vegetarian filling featuring cabbage, potatoes, hard-boiled eggs, smoked paprika, and dill, then rolled out the dough, topped each circle with filling, sealed them, and fried the pirozhki like pros. Some were a little tentative around working with hot oil, but in the end the third graders showed they are incredibly capable and safety conscious.

While making the pirozhki, students dreamed up their own fillings. The dough we used is equally delicious filled with something sweet (like apples, cinnamon, and honey) so we hope many will try the recipe at home!

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week we learned that different diets have different carbon footprints. In the classroom, we watched a video from the University of California and Vox called The Diet That Helps Fight Climate Change. One of our takeaways was that figuring out the impact of various foods on the environment is complicated and involves a lot of statistics. Scientists around the world are actively working on extracting meaning from the data we have, and new information is coming out every day. However, no matter how many calculations there are to consider, there is consensus that plant-based diets in general are both better for the earth and for our health.

The fourth and fifth graders had lots to share. Some are vegetarians, some have tried to eat vegan, and some had heard of ways that people are trying to tackle the problem of methane emissions in cattle (for example, by trapping the gas and using it to generate energy, or by experimenting with an artificial substitute for meat, like the Impossible Burger).

In the kitchen, we made a vegan recipe that highlights local seasonal produce (corn!), relies on Southeast Asian aromatics (shallots, garlic, ginger, spicy chili) instead of meat for flavor, and employs coconut milk instead of dairy for creaminess. It’s a meal that requires a lot of preparation, but students rose to the occasion. We’ve solved our outdoor electricity challenges for now by offering a single power tool station instead of tools at each table. Many chefs tried using an immersion blender once the ingredients were cooked through, which allowed them to puree the soup to their desired consistency right in the pot.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 5

This week we discussed the aftermath of the great earthquake and fires of 1906. In the classroom, we watched a short PBS documentary about the Italian American community in San Francisco called Up From the Ashes. We learned about Italian-driven economic activity at Fisherman’s Wharf and in North Beach around the turn of the century, the devastation Italian Americans faced after the earthquake, and how Amadeo Giannini’s Bank of Italy, which eventually became Bank of America, helped Italians and Italian Americans survive and thrive after a major catastrophe. The most special part of the week was when Mr. Orlando showed Room 213 a photo of his own Sicilian American ancestors, one of whom worked at the original Bank of Italy!

In the kitchen, students made a recipe with roots in ancient Rome, minestrone. They chopped carrots, cauliflower, and summer squash for the soup, snipped fresh herbs, and made jokes about the name of the pasta we used, known as orecchiette (or “little ears”). The vegetables were cooked with onion, garlic, tomatoes, cranberry beans, vegetable stock, and the cooking liquid from the beans. Once the table was set, many chefs chose to top off their soup with a few gratings of authentic Parmigiano Reggiano. Mangia!

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 1

We had a great day on Wednesday with three classes back to back, the first time we’ve made food together in person since the fall of 2019 and spring of 2020 with these now-much-taller fourth and fifth graders. In the classroom, we each shared a strength that we have as we will need all the assets in our community if we are to end the climate crisis. I read an excerpt from an essay the climate justice activist Xiye Bastida wrote that’s included in the anthology All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis about the need for intergenerational connection and the importance of lobbying at the local level for change.

In the kitchen, students cut and juiced lemons using a variety of tools, muddled blackberry and homegrown yerba buena, measured agave, prepared garnishes, and then set the table for our happy hour of sorts, bar snacks included! It’s true that we are a vegetarian program, but we wanted to pair something savory with the lemonade. Since we will be spending weeks discussing the impact of eating meat and what sustainable protein will look like in the future, chile-lime crickets seemed like an appropriate one-time exception to make. Many students tried them, and some thought they were delicious! Though crickets as food is a new concept for most of us, humans have been eating insects for thousands of years. Many of the food practices we must adopt to survive will similarly hearken back to our ancestors and move us out of our comfort zone.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week we watched a video from Newsy about the Chinese people who came to California as the Gold Rush started in the mid-19th century and helped build North America’s first transcontinental railroad. The Chinese nickname for San Francisco, Jiu Jin Shan (“Old Gold Mountain”), remains today. The issues raised by the video—immigration, pay equality, labor conditions, and whose stories get told—were alive in the 1800s and continue to figure prominently in our national conversations in 2021. Most students said they knew what it felt like to be excluded, and many expressed outrage when we compared the historical erasure of Chinese contributions to the railroad to a hypothetical Harvey Milk yearbook that only shared photos of one of the two third grade classrooms.

In the kitchen, we made lo mein, a dish that celebrates one of the great culinary inventions of all time, noodles! The third grade chefs minced the aromatics garlic and ginger and chopped an abundance of vegetables that all got thrown into a traditional Chinese high-heat cooking vessel known as a wok. Once the vegetables were cooked through, we added cooked noodles and a simple sauce of soy sauce, sesame oil, and ground white pepper. There were chopsticks available for anyone who wanted to practice. We were too deep in conversation to remember to snap any photos, but I can attest to the fact that there were many creative ways of using the chopsticks to transfer the food from plate to mouth.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we discussed how the Spanish, who ate wheat and considered it the food of the Bible, learned to eat corn, a food the Spanish considered suitable only for animals and the poor, from the Mexicans. The Spanish didn’t understand Mexican food culture very well, however, and completely missed the ancient process of nixtamalization, developed by Mesoamericans, that allows the human body to access all of corn’s nutrients when consumed. Eating a diet of only raw corn led some Europeans to develop pellagra, a vitamin deficiency with terrible symptoms, many of which resemble the characteristics of vampires, who perhaps not coincidentally first appeared in legends around the same time.

In the classroom, we watched two videos from Eater, Why Corn is the Most Sacred Crop and The Dark and Terrible History of Corn. San Francisco became a part of the Mexican Empire after the Mexican War of Independence ended in the early 1800s. Today, Mexican food culture continues to permeate our city and we owe a great debt to the Indigenous Aztec and Mayan people for domesticating corn from a wild grass. Their ingenuity allows people all over the world to now enjoy corn in so many delicious forms.

In the kitchen, students made their own corn tortillas, working with a masa dough made from masa harina, oil, salt, and hot water. We had some issues with the electricity so switched to camping stoves mid-week, which worked well! We learned to cook the tortillas on cast iron without any oil, to watch for a few brown spots that signal to us the tortilla is cooked, and to stack them inside a clean towel to keep them warm for serving. To accompany the tortillas, the third graders made a simple pico de gallo (also known as salsa bandera or salsa Mexicana as the colors represent the Mexican flag) using dry-farmed Early Girl and heirloom tomatoes. ¡Que rico!

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week we discussed the arrival of the Spanish in the 1700s to the present-day Bay Area. The Spanish mission system irrevocably changed the local landscape and its legacy lives on today in our neighborhood, whether that be in the name of our city (“San Francisco” for the Italian Catholic friar Francis of Assisi) or landmarks such as Mission Street, Mission Dolores Park, and Mission High School.

In the classroom, we watched a news clip from the summer of 2020 about protestors pulling down a statue in Golden Gate Park of the Spanish priest Junipero Serra, who also has a San Francisco public elementary school named after him. Some students thought the protestors should have found a more peaceful way of making their voices heard; others expressed positive feelings that the statue was torn down; others worried what would happen if we no longer remembered the past.

The Spanish brought with them livestock production and agricultural systems that highlighted their fundamentally different relationship to the land. In the kitchen, we made a salad featuring many of the ingredients the Europeans introduced, many of which California is now famous for producing (a nice tie-in with our second grade unit last year focusing on our state’s commodities and the farmworkers movement!). We cooked the wheatberries before class because they take longer than we have time for when we’re together, but the third graders did all the other components of the salad themselves - slicing olives, peeling and slicing Valencia oranges, mincing parsley, snipping green onions, and making a simple dressing of lemon juice, sherry vinegar, and extra-virgin olive oil. I’m proud of all the chefs who tried a bite, even if the flavors weren’t ultimately their favorite, and was delighted so many students asked for seconds.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 1

We are back! Working with students in person! In a new outdoor kitchen classroom created around a high-voltage box the modernization project left in the middle of our school’s former edible garden! It’s wonderful!

In preparation for welcoming our third grade students to Edible Social Studies this year, we reviewed many rituals and routines from our time together in first grade, talked about how the classes would be different this year with masks and being outdoors, and read a sweet book by Jillian Tamaki called Our Little Kitchen to remind us how every kitchen has its own energy and culture, just like the one we will create for the first time on the Harvey Milk campus.

Our third grade unit is an edible history of San Francisco. Students were asked to interview someone special in their lives about their history with the city. Many students reported that they have an adult at home who was born and raised in another country or state and moved to the Bay Area for work, safety, love, and/or education. We learned that the word “native” can be used to describe someone who was born here, but that words like “Native,” “Indigenous,” and “First Nations” refer to the Indigenous people of a specific place. Here in San Francisco, we recognize that our program and school operates on the land of the Ramaytush Ohlone people, who have lived here for time immemorial and continue to live and thrive here in the present day.

We are lucky in the Bay Area to have Ohlone leaders like Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino of mak-’amham raising awareness of Ohlone foodways and sharing recipes that we can recreate at school. A lot has changed about the food system in the past 250 years and the ingredients in our Ohlone Salad were sourced from local farms rather than gathered, but we all agreed to honor the spirit of Ohlone food even if our meal wasn’t entirely authentic.

In the classroom we watched a short video from PBS’s Native America series called Ohlone Foodways. In the kitchen classroom we made a salad of watercress, spinach (standing in for sorrel), blackberries, flowers, sunflower seeds, popped amaranth, and quail eggs. Students made a dressing by mixing elderberry shrub with sunflower oil and salt. A chef at the Strawberry table ate FIVE servings of salad! On Thursday, we had a special surprise guest, Coach Glenn, which made for a particularly poignant first week back cooking, eating, and laughing together after such a long time apart.

Finally, we want to give heartfelt thanks to the many members of our community who pitched in to install a commercial sink, figure out how to provide shade to our students while they work, sewed coverings so our maple-top work tables can withstand the elements, and who are giving their time to lead the Blueberry table all semester long. We couldn’t do what we do without you and we are so grateful for your energy and support.

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 4

Every Edible Social Studies unit ends with something sweet, and this year we thought strawberry shortcakes would be a fun treat for the kindergarteners to assemble and enjoy at the park. Our food rule for this lesson was Eat Together! A lot of nutritional dogma can feel restrictive, punitive, or totally divorced from pleasure, but more and more science is emerging on the role of relationships in our overall health and specifically the benefits of eating with friends and family. When we sit at the table (or on the grass) with each other and break bread, we are communicating, slowing down, often laughing, and strengthening social bonds.

We read Cathryn Falwell’s beautiful counting book Feast for 10, which depicts a family shopping for, preparing, and sitting down to enjoy a meal together. Each of the kindergarten chefs got to make their own strawberry shortcake. Some students piled the strawberries and cream on top of the cake, while others took a more deconstructed approach and enjoyed the components separately. Some tried the mint garnish and reported back that it tasted “fresh,” “spicy,” and “like toothpaste.” While everyone ate, we sang “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” a good reminder that we always have each other if we are ever feeling lonely. We ended class with a closing circle where everyone had the opportunity to share their favorite meal we shared together this year.

We want to thank our incredible kindergarten teaching team, Ms. Martinez and Ms. Vashti, for making Edible Social Studies work during such a chaotic transitional time this year and to all the students for their spirited engagement. We can’t wait to see them all again in first grade and hope everyone has a colorful, delicious summer break!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we celebrated the cycles of the year and started the circle by sharing our favorite season. One way we can keep our bodies healthy and contribute to a healthy community is to eat with the seasons, meaning eating plants that are naturally ripe and harvested during the present time of year. Fruits and vegetables that are in season are usually fresher, tastier, more nutritious, and more affordable. They are more likely to be grown by local farmers and don’t have to travel as far to get to the market, which means eating seasonally can also support a healthier planet.

In northern California, we are lucky to have a variety of produce growing no matter what time of year it is. Some fruits and vegetables grow year round, like broccoli and carrots, and others are a special treat at certain times, like peas and stone fruit. To celebrate the spring bounty, each kindergarten chef got a paper plate to use as a canvas and a container of locally grown, organic spring produce: arugula, chives, carrots, broccoli, edible flowers, blueberries, cherries, mandarins, purple daikon, dill, English peas, and spearmint. They also got cooked fusilli, a corkscrew-shaped pasta, just for a different shape (and taste)! Everyone got to work making and eating salad people (or salad pets), we read a book called In My Garden written by Charlotte Zolotow and illustrated by Philip Stead about a child enjoying the seasons, then sang a silly song about the seasons to the tune of “If You’re Happy And You Know It," which got everyone clapping, stomping, and shouting “Hooray!”

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week the kindergarten chefs discussed why and how to eat for a healthy planet. We started with a circle where they were invited to share something they love about nature. In rooms 107 and 111, we love plants, flowers, pandas, bugs, trees, and the ocean! Many students have heard of climate change, and already had ideas about what we can do to fight it. Even though the most impactful decisions that affect the environment must come at the policy level for systemic change, food waste and emissions from livestock are two important sources of greenhouse gasses that we as consumers can do something about. One simple thing we can do is to replace animal protein with plant protein in our diets more often.

Protein helps us build strong muscles, repairs damaged tissue, and keeps us feeling full when we need energy during the day. Beans are a great way to get protein from plants, and in the spring in Northern California, we’re lucky to have fresh fava beans at our local farmers markets. In class, the kindergarteners each got two blanched fava beans to peel and taste. Then they spread fava bean hummus on a piece of bread and garnished their toast with edible flower petals.

One thing that has changed in how we teach sustainability and healthy eating over the years is a shift away from focusing on the individual to instead recognizing all the people in a community. When we talk about organic produce like the fava beans we worked with this week, we talk about what pesticides do to our bodies but must also talk about the effect exposure to pesticides has on farmworkers’ health and the impact on the soil and water. We also cannot ignore that organic produce remains more expensive and therefore inaccessible to many. What can children do? Learn, ask questions, and when it’s time, vote!

We read the book I Love the Earth by Todd Parr and then had a dance party to a song called “The 3 R’s” by Jack Johnson. By chance a friend of mine reached out and said she had lemons from her backyard tree to donate to our school, so every chef left class with a lemon of their own to cook and/or eat with. I’m not sure how many of them will actually make it home, but hope they brought a few moments of delight while they lasted.

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 1

What a gift to be able to work with the kindergarteners in the outdoors after a year of Edible Social Studies via Zoom with grades 1-5! Over the month of May, we will be exploring what healthy bodies and healthy communities need to thrive. Each week we’ll learn a simple idea that we’ll carry with us as we build on our knowledge all the way into fifth grade. Our first class started with introductions. Every kindergarten chef shared their name and their favorite color. Many chefs have multiple favorite colors, and I loved how some students included metallic colors like gold and silver.

Next, we opened up our kits and discovered a rainbow fruit salad to help remind us that eating the rainbow, a variety of brightly colored fruits and vegetables, makes our bodies strong. Surrounding ourselves with a diversity of people also makes our families, schools, and neighborhoods strong.

Normally students would be in the school kitchen preparing the fruit salad themselves, but the modifications we need to make this year give them more time to enjoy the food and also allowed time for some live music. We read Lois Ehlert’s book Planting a Rainbow, which has beautiful illustrations of many colorful plants, including several that share the same name as some of our kindergarteners! Then we sang a song about the colors of the rainbow set to an old Appalachian folk tune. The ukulele was a big draw, so I’ll be sure to bring it back next week so we can sing more songs together at the park.

This year’s rainbow salad featured strawberries, Gold Nugget mandarins, mangoes, kiwis, blueberries, and blackberries, but as we’ll learn over the course of the unit, we can change the ingredients with the changing of the seasons. All deeply colored plants provide us with phytonutrients that help us grow. For those of you who would like to recreate the recipe at home, it’s posted below. Our suggestions are to wait until the fruit is ripe for maximum flavor, and to let kindergarteners practice cutting on their own. A crinkle cutter (think potatoes turned into Ruffles potato chips) is a particularly great culinary tool for this age group and works well on soft foods like fruit.

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

For our final first grade class of the year, we read the book Priya Dreams of Marigolds and Masala, written and illustrated by Meenal Patel. The story follows a family with roots in both India and the United States and celebrates the bright, colorful, and delicious traditions that can traverse time and place. Our units always end with something sweet, so for our last meal together we all enjoyed rice kheer, an Indian rice pudding seasoned with the masala (in this case cardamom, cloves, saffron, and rose) Priya dreams about.

We’ve explored a diversity of rice in all shapes and sizes, each with their own stories, and yet there are so many more dishes and family connections we didn’t have time to share with each other. I hope this unit prompts more discussion around the dinner table for all of us. While listening to music and eating the kheer, the first graders used some of the materials we’ve been working with (brown rice, wild rice, basmati rice, rice vermicelli) as well as black pearl rice, a grain we didn’t have a chance to taste, to make their own rice necklaces, mandalas, or hangings. Some chefs spelled out their names, others incorporated found objects from their own homes, and one managed to make a three-dimensional sculpture using the curve of the dried rice noodles.

Thank you to the entire Harvey Milk first grade community for making this distance learning unit happen given all the obstacles. I look forward to seeing you all next year in second grade!

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

At the start of each unit we always ask students to share something they are looking forward to or to find some way to connect to the topic as we embark on Edible Social Studies for the year. For our Everybody Cooks Rice unit, the initial prompt was simply to share a favorite rich dish. This helps me learn more about who is in the classroom, and also allows me to take what the kids share and incorporate their connections and ideas into our syllabus. Many first graders shared their love for Mexican rice, so this week we made Mexican rice tacos in class together. Because we aren’t able to cook together, I thought it would be a nice opportunity to support a local business that makes the best Mexican rice I’ve ever tasted, La Palma Mexicatessen, which has been operating in the Mission since 1953.

Our read aloud for the week was Isabel Quintero’s and Zeke Peña’s book My Papi Has a Motorcycle, which tells the story of a Mexican American child riding through her neighborhood and interacting with her community with her dad.

We’ve shared our recipe for a vegetarian version of Mexican rice below, but also encourage everyone to support local Mexican American businesses like La Palma, too, as they are the foundation of our city’s vibrant neighborhoods. In third grade, students will learn more about San Francisco’s history as a part of Mexico and Mexico’s influence on California food culture. I’m excited to start building cross-grade-level connections like these as we continue to pilot and improve on our program.

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week was ambitious! We distributed kits to the first graders so we could make Vietnamese spring rolls (gỏi cuốn) together over Zoom from all the various places from which students attend school during distance learning. We started by washing our hands, then dipping a sheet of rice paper into a bowl of water. Warm is ideal if you make the recipe again at home, but cold works just as well. When the paper began to soften, we removed it from the bowl and placed it on a flat surface. If you leave the paper in the water too long, it gets increasingly more sticky and difficult to work with.

Students loaded up the lower third of the rice paper with our fillings: lettuce, carrots, braised tofu, Thai basil, cilantro, spearmint, red cabbage, and rice noodles seasoned with toasted sesame oil. We folded from the bottom up over the filling, then folded the paper in from each side, then continued to roll up from the bottom to form our first spring roll. Each student received a small jar of dipping sauce that could be poured into a small dish or poured directly into the spring roll as we ate.

The read aloud for this week was the book A Different Pond by Bao Phi and illustrated by Thi Bui. In the story, a boy goes fishing with his father to feed their family. He hears stories from the country where his parents come from, Vietnam, and about a war that took his uncle’s life, and wonders what life is like there. In class we talked about the meaning of the word refugee and how the refugee experience is another important aspect of American culture. As the first grade chefs rolled and ate their second spring roll, we watched short videos of rice paper and rice noodles being made by hand in Vietnam. We learned that it’s the bamboo drying racks that make the cross hatched pattern on the rice paper and that really big rice paper is then cut into noodles on a machine.

After eating our final rolls, we had a little brain break and dance party to a song all about rice and how it’s eaten around the world from the new Netflix series produced by Barack and Michelle Obama called Waffles and Mochi. There’s a whole episode about rice, so it was a nice tie-in to what we’re studying this year in first grade. Congratulations to all our chefs for trying a recipe with a lot of steps during distance learning. You did it!

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.