1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 2

In the classroom this week, the first graders read The Star Maiden, a retelling of an Ojibway legend. We deduced from the illustrations that the Ojibway (also known as the Chippewa) are close to the natural world and that based on the clothing the people in the pictures wore that they were living a long time ago. One of the illustrations showed the Ojibway with a harvest of wild rice, or manoomin, the food that grows on water.

In the kitchen, students made a manoomin salad with wild arugula, roasted butternut squash, dried cranberries, and toasted pumpkin seeds. They learned to make an emulsified salad dressing by slowly drizzling oil into acid drop by drop. In our closing circle, we looked at the book The Story of Manoomin, which features pictures of present-day Anishinaabe children and teaches Ojibway words and phrases related to the rice harvest. Over the course of their time at Harvey Milk, the first graders will continue to explore Indigenous peoples and Indigenous foodways in acknowledgement of the fact that native peoples like the Ojibway are still here and thriving.

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week we celebrated two icons of the farm labor movement, Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta. In the classroom, we read Side by Side/Lado a Lado: The Story of Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez by Monica Brown and illustrated by Joe Cepeda. The second graders were fascinated by the many ways these two leaders fought for change, including organizing labor strikes, long marches, boycotts, and even hunger strikes to protest low wages, poor working conditions, and harmful pesticide use.

In the kitchen, we made an iconic breakfast dish that originated on Mexican farms, huevos rancheros. Students warmed corn tortillas, made a fresh salsa, sliced avocado, and learned to fry eggs. This is a deceptively complicated dish requiring a lot of technical skill with knives and heat - the chefs handled it all with aplomb! You can see how they scored the meal (out of 10) in the last photo.

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 1

We kicked off our Everybody Cooks Rice unit with Yangsook Choi’s book The Name Jar in the classroom. The first graders could relate to the main character Unhei’s nervousness as she moves far away from her grandmother to a new country and starts a new school. Many students told stories about their own names and the meanings behind them.

In the kitchen we made kimbap, which features cooked short-grain rice rolled inside seaweed with lots of delicious cooked vegetables and eggs. Kimbap looks similar to Japanese sushi, but the “bap,” or rice, is seasoned with sesame oil instead of vinegar and sushi rolls frequently contain raw, rather than cooked, ingredients. Each chef got to choose their own fillings and practice rolling kimbap with a bamboo mat. Some of the fillings were familiar to many, like sesame seeds, carrots, spinach, and cucumber, and some were new to most of us, like pickled radish and braised burdock. Kimbap is colorful and fun to eat, and the first graders make for delightful snack companions at the table. We can’t wait for more culinary adventures ahead!

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 5

The second graders learned about the life and times of Larry Itliong this week. In the classroom we read excerpts from the book Journey for Justice by Dawn B. Mabalon and Gayle Romasanta and illustrated by Andre Sibayan. We watched a Smithsonian Folklife short film about the role Filipinos played in the formation of the United Farm Workers as told from the perspective of the Chicano social activist and musician Augustín Lira. Many students in California learn about Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta, but Larry Itliong’s contributions to the fight for farm labor justice often go unmentioned.

In the kitchen we made lumpia, a spring roll popular in Filipino food culture, from scratch. First, students filled and rolled lumpia wrappers for frying. Then we made our own batch of filling, consisting of lots of fresh vegetables, to share with either the next class or our wonderful community of volunteers.

The process of making lumpia together connects to the dumplings we made last week and to the Vietnamese spring rolls we made with rice paper in first grade Edible Social Studies, reminding us of the ways in which food from around the world is both similar and different. We enjoyed the lumpia with a tomato-based chili garlic sauce and a Thai chili pineapple hot sauce. One student had fourths and Ms. Butler said she enjoyed them so much she would write a poem about them.

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 4

We celebrated the Lunar New Year this week by making dumplings, a traditional Chinese symbol of good fortune. In the classroom, we watched a short video about an initiative in Sonoma to commemorate the contributions Chinese farmworkers made to the burgeoning wine industry in the 19th century. Chinese people were some of California’s first farmworkers, a history many of us aren’t taught in school.

In the kitchen, students folded dumplings by hand. While the dumplings steamed, we prepared another batch of filling ingredients: garlic, ginger, tofu, carrots, shiitake mushrooms, Napa cabbage, Chinese chives, and cilantro. (One of our mighty parent volunteers diced the shallots, savings students from tears!) We set the table with chopsticks for everyone to practice eating with, and served the hot dumplings with a simple dipping sauce of soy sauce and rice vinegar. Many students expressed doubts about a recipe containing mushrooms, and we’re happy to report there were quite a few converts. Happy New Year to all!

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 3

It was the 100th day of school this week, and the second graders spent our time together in the classroom looking at a couple of issues of the San Francisco Call newspaper from 1903, more than 100 years ago! We read from two articles describing a strike in the sugar beet fields of Oxnard, California organized by Japanese and Mexican farmworkers. The Japanese Mexican Labor Association was one of America’s first multiracial labor unions, and the strike won the workers better wages and the right to negotiate directly with the farms.

In the kitchen, students made a roasted beet salad incorporating both Japanese and Mexican foodways. They blanched the greens; peeled and sliced three types of beets; made a dressing from miso, ginger, and Cara Cara orange juice; and garnished the salad with sliced green onion and toasted pepitas. Everyone was excited to compare notes on how vividly the red beets dyed their fingers and to nourish our growing fava beans with leftover water from the table. Watch out for magenta pee after eating this salad!

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 2

In the classroom this week we learned that many of the farmworkers in the United States work in California, most of the farmworkers in California are of Mexican descent, and most are undocumented. We watched a short KQED Arts and Culture film about the Mexican American artist Arleene Correa Valencia’s work to increase the visibility of her community in the Napa Valley. After watching the stories of farmworkers continuing to pick fruit during wildfires, many students shared their own personal experiences with the effects of climate change and expressed sadness at the conditions agricultural laborers face today.

In the kitchen, we made fresh guacamole with California-grown Bacon avocados and Hass avocados from Mexico. (California produces approximately 90% of America’s avocados, but the season for most varieties does not start until February or March.) Students mashed avocado, squeezed fresh lime juice, minced cilantro and garlic, and seasoned to taste with salt and pepper. We enjoyed the guacamole with yellow and blue corn tortilla chips from local food producer Sabor Mexicano.

The second grade Edible Social Studies unit is perfectly timed with our building out of the outdoor classroom garden this winter, so we closed our class by planting fava beans. Each second grade student was able to make a hole in the soil of one of our planting troughs, deposit a soaked fava bean, and cover it back up. We look forward to watching the beans grow and tending them over the next few weeks as we continue to learn more about the hardworking, resilient people who feed our communities.

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 1

The second graders will spend the next two months exploring the role farmworkers play in our community, so we started off our unit by learning about the many fruits, vegetables, and nuts that are grown in our state that feed people all over the country. In the classroom, we watched a short film about the many American agricultural products, including almonds, lettuce, carrots, garlic, avocados, lemons, broccoli, grapes, artichokes, olives, pistachios, and strawberries, that are mainly or solely grown in California.

In the kitchen, we made a salad featuring organic California-grown produce: Little Gem lettuce and Nantes carrots from County Line Harvest in the Coachella Valley, fennel from Frecker Farms in Carpinteria, watermelon radish from Riverdog Farm in Yolo County, Kishu mandarins from Blossom Bluff Orchards in Fresno County, Moro blood oranges from Tulare County, and Medjool dates I brought back from a winter break trip to San Marcos Date Farm in Desert Hot Springs!

It’s mind-boggling that these chefs have never been in the kitchen classroom at Harvey Milk before this due to the early months of COVID school closures in the spring of 2020 falling right before we were to start the kindergarten Edible Social Studies unit and because our entire Everybody Cooks Rice unit in first grade was done over Zoom in the spring of 2021. The second graders acclimated to the work quickly and everyone had a great time chopping, slicing, peeling, mashing, whisking, and emulsifying in our new outdoor kitchen, as if they’d been doing it together forever. It was a beautiful, delicious salad enjoyed with beautiful company and we hardly had any leftovers.

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 10

In lieu of taking a field trip to check out what happens to everything San Francisco throws away, we watched a great video in the classroom about the Recology San Francisco Transfer Station and Recycling Center. Students learned about how food waste gets moved off site and turns to compost over a 60-day period, how the contents of the blue bin are sorted and bundled, and how our trash is moved to a landfill site in Vacaville. We also learned about Recology’s artist-in-residence program and sculpture garden.

In the kitchen classroom, students filled their own individual glass jars with the food waste candy from the previous week’s prep to take home. All that citrus they juiced generated more than 1,000 pieces of candied citrus peel! Each table then played a game designed to challenge us to determine which bin to sort items into. For every item pulled out of a bag, we had to determine whether to place it in the green bin, blue bin, black bin, or whether it was inappropriate to place it in a Recology bin at all. The fourth and fifth graders easily sorted items like leftovers and clean paper into the correct bins, but had questions about items like broken glass, batteries, and cat litter, for example. Hopefully we all learned something by doing the activity together and can be ambassadors to the rest of our school community.

For our final meal together, we scooped the citrus sorbet mixed with the food waste candy into sugar cones and gave a toast to another completed Edible Social Studies unit. Each student shared their favorite lesson or lessons from our 10-week unit while we enjoyed the frozen treat in the cold, drizzly weather. For our final circle together, we shared an appreciation for an ingredient, a recipe, a classmate, or an experience. We closed with a quote from All We Can Save, the same book we read from in our first class this semester. Kim Cobb, a climate scientist at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says, “Science tells us that it’s not too late, but we have to pull hard, every day, together, to make a difference… You don’t have to know where we’ll end up. You just have to know what path we’re on.”

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 9

We continued our exploration of food waste in the classroom by watching Los Angeles-based chef Kwame Onwuachi talk about how he solves for food waste at his restaurant and in his person life. Last week we learned a recipe for how to give raw produce new life using a simple edible rice wrapper to make a spring roll. This week, the fourth and fifth grade chefs made a cooked meal of vegetable pancakes that easily transforms whatever you have on hand into something delicious and nutritious.

Students grated, ribboned, and sliced lacinato (also known as "dino”) kale, carrot, purple cabbage, leek, and Russet potato, squeezed out as much moisture as they could, then formed a batter by combining the vegetables with flour, eggs, salt, pepper, baking powder, and chopped herbs. They fried the pancakes and enjoyed the finished product with Maldon salt and a squeeze of fresh lemon juice.

To prepare for our grand finale dessert, a citrus sorbet with food waste candy (also known as candied citrus peel), those who had time worked their way through a giant plate of citrus, juicing Ruby Red grapefruits, Meyer lemons, limes, Valencia oranges, and navel oranges and reserving their peels for the candying process. Due to our electricity access challenges, we didn’t have time to candy in the kitchen classroom, but students did watch one of the masters of the craft, Jacques Pépin, demonstrate on one of his PBS shows. Everyone particularly enjoyed the theatrical part where he ignites a fire by squeezing the essential oils from an orange rind into the stove.

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 8

There are a few recipes that students are always asking to make every year, and spring rolls is one of them. We first introduce Vietnamese spring rolls as part of our first grade Edible Social Studies theme “everybody cooks rice” and we’ve now added it to our fifth-grade lineup as well. This time, though, we’re talking about food waste, and spring rolls are a fun and creative way to use up leftovers. I told the chefs that someday when they’re 35 years old and staring into their fridges, I hope they’ll remember this activity from elementary school and find some inspiration.

In the classroom we watched a film called Food Wastage Footprint from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and talked about the parts of the food system where food waste occurs (e.g. farmers not being able to sell imperfect produce, markets and restaurants throwing away leftovers, and consumers buying more groceries than they can consume). When food waste goes into the landfill and rots, it emits methane, the same potent greenhouse gas cows burp into the atmosphere. (In the green bin, food waste gets routed to special facilities where oxygen is introduced, allowing microbes to decompose organic matter and transforming it into humus that can then be returned to enrich the land.)

In the kitchen we learned how to rehydrate rice paper, an inexpensive ingredient that is easy to find at many local grocery stores. We filled our rolls with tofu, fresh herbs, rice vermicelli, and a mix of colorful vegetables. Our dipping sauce recreated the flavors of a classic Southeast Asian peanut sauce, but used sunflower seed butter instead, and some of the students enjoyed the sauce spiked with drops of pineapple sriracha.

For our closing circle, we shared one thing we personally can do to fight climate change. The fourth and fifth graders talked a lot about eating plants instead of animals, sorting waste into the correct bin, walking instead of driving when possible, and writing letters to people in positions of power encouraging them to use their influence to center the climate crisis and the action we all must take.

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 7

One of the more interesting things about exploring climate change and the food system with the fourth and fifth graders right now is how much innovation is happening in the Bay Area in real time. In the classroom we watched a news clip from the spring featuring experiments at UC Davis that showed dairy and beef cows belched significantly less methane when seaweed was added to their diet. We then read an article that was published in the San Francisco Chronicle in late October celebrating the results of one of the first commercial farm trials in Marin County: working dairy cows who ate the seaweed powder added to their feed reduced their methane emissions by over 50% and some by over 85%.

In the kitchen, we made a Japanese-inspired soba noodle salad featuring three types of seaweed: dulse, wakame, and nori. Students rehydrated the dulse and wakame leaves and chopped Japanese cucumbers, watermelon radish, and carrots to add to the salad. They made a dressing with lots of ginger, soy, and acid. Like the cows on the farm, there was a range of reactions to the seaweed. Some chefs loved it, some preferred some types but not others, and some could not get over the way the seaweed smelled or its texture. Some of us noticed a marked boost in energy after eating the seaweed salad. All in all, we agreed seaweed is an exciting addition to the diet-change-for-climate-change toolkit, whether it be for cows or for humans.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 10

For our final third grade class of the year, we brought it full circle and returned to Indigenous foodways. In the classroom, we watched four generations of Ohlone women alive today talk about the importance of the oak tree and passing down traditions. Students shared what they’ve taken away from our journey through the history of San Francisco and explored the idea of being “ancestors in training." We discussed what our responsibilities might be to future third graders and what we can learn from Indigenous peoples, who are still here, thriving, and will continue to be here for generations to come.

In the kitchen we made acorn brownies using flour from acorns collected and processed by a woman named Sue Chin in the East Bay. We enjoyed the brownies with an Ohlone tea, made with ingredients Indigenous people still gather locally: yerba buena, white sage, rose hips, stinging nettle, and bay laurel. The third graders filled nut milk bags with the dried plants and we used them as giant tea bags, which worked wonderfully.

The brownies were gooey and nutty, and the bitter tea a perfect complement to the sweet chocolate. At each table while we ate, we went around the circle and shared our favorite recipe from the unit. In our closing circle as a full class, we shared appreciations and gratitude for what we’ve experienced together. It’s been an incredible ten weeks, and I look forward to working with all of our amazing chefs in fourth grade next year!

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 6

Last week, the fourth and fifth graders explored the science behind regenerative agriculture, which has roots in ancient, Indigenous practices. This week, we explored the new science behind one of the most high-profile companies trying to solve the climate crisis through food, Bay Area-based Impossible Foods.

In the classroom, students watched a short film produced by Impossible Foods called For the Love of Meat. In it, founder and CEO Pat Brown talks about how the Impossible team isolated the components of what makes meat smell and taste like meat and found a way to derive those sensory imprints from plants instead of from animals. We talked about what a company tries to impart when they market their work (e.g. images of happy people relaxing together while floating on cartoon burgers under sunny skies) and what we still didn’t know after watching the film (e.g. how is Impossible meat made, what are the ingredients, and how much does it cost?).

After the film, we read the ingredients of the Impossible burger aloud. They include methylcellulose, mixed tocopherols, zinc gluconate, and cultured dextrose. Several students remembered a phrase they learned from their first grade teacher: “If you can’t read it, don’t eat it,” which sparked a discussion about processed foods and why everyone is generally told to avoid them. And I shared with them that even though the price point of the Impossible burger meat I purchased for class was similar to the average price of a pound of ground beef, it turned out the Impossible meat was sold in a 12-ounce package (or 3/4 of a pound), meaning the cost is actually significantly more because the consumer gets less food for the same amount of money.

In the kitchen, we seasoned Impossible burger meat with salt and pepper, shaped the meat into patties, cooked them on a skillet, and served our own Impossible sliders with ketchup and mustard, shredded lettuce, onion, tomato, and toasted pretzel buns. They were a hit! A few students who are vegetarians found the burgers to be too similar to meat and therefore unappetizing. Others proclaimed they would absolutely switch to eating Impossible burgers instead of hamburgers. Still others said they liked the flavor, but were skeptical of highly processed foods. No matter where we landed, I think we all deepened our understanding of how complex the climate crisis is, and how complex some of the solutions are as well.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 9

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.

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

All three 4/5 classrooms braved the rainy weather this week and made it outside to prepare a batch of warm refried beans! Thank you to all the students, our teachers, and community volunteers for stepping up and making it happen.

In the classroom this week, the fourth and fifth graders learned about regenerative agriculture and in particular, the argument some ranchers are advancing that it’s not the cow, but the how. We watched a video from the New Mexico Healthy Soil Working Group featuring farmers and ranchers discussing the important role large herbivores play in the ecosystem and how allowing cattle to graze, eat their natural diet of grass, and resting grazed lands for long periods—practices with origins in Indigenous communities—can contribute to, not undermine, the fight against climate change. Students shared their guesses as to why grass-fed beef and dairy products are more expensive in the grocery store than their feedlot-produced counterparts.

In the kitchen we made refried beans with grass-fed butter from Sierra Nevada Cheese Company (fewer than 3 cows per acre that are on pasture for 300+ days out of the year). Everyone had a choice of garnishes, including spring onion, radish, cilantro, lime, and queso fresco. We enjoyed the refried beans with tortilla chips produced by local company Sabor Mexicano. While many experts and activists disagree on whether there is a way forward with cattle ranching given the dire circumstances our climate is in, it was an important discussion to have with students about how food is produced and what our priorities should be as we prepare to feed future generations.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 8

This week the third graders discussed the Second Great Migration in the mid-twentieth century, which brought millions of African Americans from the American South to cities like Oakland and San Francisco in the West, the Midwest, and the Northeast. In San Francisco, many African Americans found high-skill, well-paid jobs in the defense industry, including at the Hunters Point Naval Shipyard.

In the classroom students watched chefs Michael Twitty and BJ Dennis cook collard greens and talk about African American foodways and the intersection of traditional African culinary practices (e.g. eating greens with their juices or growing rice) with new ingredients native to the Americas or introduced by Europeans. We learned the word “potlikker,” the nutritious, flavorful liquid that’s left over after the greens are done cooking, and how enslaved African Americans saved it to feed to their families when slave owners ignored it and would otherwise have thrown it out.

In the kitchen we made a vegan version of collards with onions, garlic, smoked salt, smoked paprika, apple cider vinegar, and vegetable stock. The smell was intoxicating! Though it was a tight timeframe in which to properly cook the greens until totally soft, we were able to enjoy the collards with fresh cornbread, the potlikker, and, of course, hot sauce. We had a surprise special guest, Coach Antoine, during Ms. Grace’s class. He made sure to taste the collards prepared by each table and declared all three the winners.

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

This week the fourth and fifth graders explored what would happen if everyone ate beans instead of beef. It turns out it could make quite a difference in our fight against climate change!

In the kitchen students made a centuries-old Middle Eastern savory dish featuring beans, hummus. The recipe we used incorporated traditional hummus ingredients such as garlic, sesame, and lemon while also adding in parsley for a bright flavor and beautiful color. Some chefs worked on building the hummus in the food processor, then pulsing the ingredients while drizzling in olive oil. Other chefs worked on making za’atar, a spice mixture common in the cuisine of many countries in the Middle East, grinding a total of 10 ingredients in the mortar and pestle. The fourth and fifth graders loved the za’atar, and we sprinkled it on the hummus, on our plates, and ate it straight when we ran out of pita. Leftover za’atar is great with scrambled eggs, yogurt, flatbread, grilled vegetables, and whatever else suits your fancy.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 7

This week the third graders watched a short film called Exclusion: The Presidio’s Role in World War II Japanese American Incarceration that tells the story of both Lieutenant General John L. DeWitt’s signing of the executive order from the Presidio that evacuated and interned people of Japanese descent from California, Oregon, Washington, and the territory that is now Alaska and the Japanese-American soldier-linguists who were trained in the Japanese language and helped the U.S. win the war from an abandoned army hangar on Crissy Field. Students had a lot of impassioned ideas to share about what they would have done had they been alive during that time.

In the kitchen, we learned how to make temaki, a sushi hand roll that doesn’t require a sushi mat. Everyone had a choice of a variety of fun fillings: furikake (a Japanese rice seasoning), pickled ginger, carrot, Japanese cucumber (grown by the Japanese-American-owned Hikari Farms), oshinko (pickled daikon radish), braised tofu from Oakland-based Hodo Foods, green onion, sunflower sprouts, and, of course, sushi rice. We talked about how important it is to see others as human beings in addition to learning about and celebrating cultures that are new or different.

4th and 5th Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week students watched a stop-motion animation film from the NPR series Skunk Bear called The Carbon Footprint of a Sandwich. Many of us were surprised to learn that the fertilizer used to grow wheat, the bacon, and the lettuce are all resource-intensive components of a BLT sandwich. We got to thinking about everything from the tractor that plants seeds in the ground to the microbes in the soil that burp out CO2 to the factory that produces the plastic bags the bakery uses to ship loaves of bread to consumers.

One way we could approach this information is to make changes to the way we eat, but we also discussed what we could do if we were the president of the United States to effect change on the systems level. The fourth and fifth graders had many great ideas, like incentivizing farmers to use compost instead of industrial fertilizers, serving less meat for school lunches, and eating a coconut bacon sandwich on TV for everyone to see how good a plant-based diet can be.

In the kitchen students sliced multigrain sourdough from Berkeley-based Starter Bakery, Haas avocados, and Purple Cherokee heirloom tomatoes; washed and dried Little Gem lettuce; and seasoned unsweetened coconut flakes with a variety of ingredients meant to evoke bacon’s complex fatty, smoky, sweet, and salty flavor profile. Each class prepared the coconut bacon for the next class, as we’ve only got access to one electrical outlet in the outdoor kitchen and had to bake the trays slowly two at a time in a toaster oven. It worked! The final sandwiches showcased the fourth and fifth graders’ knife skills and teamwork, and hopefully minted a few lifelong coconut bacon lovers.