2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 9

For our culminating class, the second graders learned a Spanish folk song called “De Colores,” which is the unofficial anthem of the United Farm Workers. We sang along in the classroom to a rendition by the group Las Cafeteras and friends.

In the kitchen, we again celebrated the agricultural bounty of California, this time with mini olive oil cakes made with California olive oil, eggs, and wheat. Students sliced first-of-the-season organic strawberries, made fresh whipped cream, picked edible flower petals, and candied kumquats for a beautiful, colorful dessert that was even more fun to eat together than it was to make.

Thank you to all the farmworkers who work tirelessly every day to feed us. Thank you to Ms. Reynolds and Ms. Butler and to all our incredible volunteers for their help with this unit: Arabella, Aurélie, Janette, Jodi, and Rebecca. See everyone in third grade!

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week, the first graders worked with edible rice paper and rice vermicelli. In the classroom, we read a book called Duck for Turkey Day about how a Vietnamese American child and her classmates enjoy different foods at home for the same holiday. In the kitchen, we made Vietnamese spring rolls.

Students got to work prepping fresh herbs (mint, cilantro, Thai basil), cucumber, carrot, cabbage, lettuce, and braised tofu into long, thin shapes, then rehydrated the rice paper in a bowl of water. Once the rice paper was wet and placed on the worktable, we piled on the fillings of our choice, including the rice noodles coated in sesame oil and edible flower petals.

There was enough for every chef to make at least two rolls, so all had ample practice rolling the wrapper up over the filling, folding in the sides, then continuing to roll up until all of the paper is folded around the filling. We made a simple vegan dipping sauce featuring lots of fresh lime juice and optional minced serrano chiles. One of the kids at Strawberry table exclaimed, “I love this so much!”

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 8

We’ve spent many weeks learning about the problems within our farm labor system. This week, we celebrated a model, community supported agriculture (CSA), that connects consumers directly to the people who feed us. In the classroom, we watched Dixon farmer Lorraine Walker, a friend of our program, introduce Eatwell Farm, which is located about 70 miles north of Harvey Milk. CSA members of the farm get a weekly newsletter detailing what’s happening around the farm, a weekly box of produce with an option to purchase eggs, and seasonal opportunities to visit the farm to harvest strawberries or lavender, make tomato sauce, pick olives, or just hang out. Members can donate to a burrito fund to show appreciation for the farm crew, and can donate their farm boxes if they’re away to benefit community members who are living with cancer and others who need access to high-quality organic produce.

In the kitchen, the second graders made a stir-fry from everything in the Eatwell CSA box this week: green garlic, spring onion, arugula, cauliflower, bok choy, fennel, radishes, kale, and mandarins. We marinated firm Hodo tofu (made in Oakland!) in soy sauce, sesame oil, and the mandarin juice, added garlic and ginger to the aromatics in the wok, and stir-fried all the vegetables together until they were cooked and well coated with sauce, then enjoyed our work over a bed of warm brown rice. This is a great clean-out-the-fridge recipe, and we hope students will carry the basics of how to make a simple meal such as this one into adulthood and that access to CSA boxes from local farms continues to increase for everyone in our community.

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we explored one of the great pairings in many food cultures around the world, rice and beans! In the kitchen, the first graders prepared aromatics for Jamaican rice and peas, mincing garlic and ginger, slicing green onions, and pulling leaves off of fresh thyme. Everything went into the pot with cooked kidney beans, white rice, and coconut milk. While we waited for the rice to cook, we had a chance to try Jamaican sorrel tea and read a wonderful book by Sandra L. Richards called Rice and Rocks, which took us on a journey to Puerto Rico, New Orleans (where Ms. Webb is originally from and where Louis Armstrong used to sign his name “Red Beans and Ricely Yours”), and to Japan (where Ms. Chie is originally from) to learn about sekihan, a red beans and rice dish from Japan.

It was special to be able to connect the curriculum to our incredible first grade teaching team, whose families have roots in New Orleans and Jamaica, respectively, and to get our chefs thinking about how what they eat might be the same as and different from other kids in their community.

2nd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 7

In the classroom, we celebrated Black History Month by listening to two poems written and read by contemporary Black artists. The first, Jordan Chaney’s “Conflict,” is dedicated to America’s migrant workers. The second, “A Love Letter to Future Generations,” is by Naima Penniman of Soul Fire Farm in New York.

In the kitchen, the second graders made hot tamales, a speciality of the Mississippi Delta that some historians believe grew out of the meeting of migrant Mexican farm laborers and African Americans picking cotton side by side in the early twentieth century. Hot tamales are traditionally filled with pork, but our vegan version incorporated sweet corn and poblano peppers. Unlike Mexican tamales, the dough is made with cornmeal instead of masa harina. Everyone had a lot of fun working with the corn husks and the dough, but it was a messy endeavor with a reward at the end that was worth the wait! Black history is American history. Black food is American food.

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.