3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week we explored the rapid change that occurred in mid-19th century California, with the discovery of gold, statehood, and the building of the transcontinental railroad. In the classroom, the third graders watched a short film from Newsy (now Scripps News) called Remembering Chinese Railroad Workers. Though Chinese people made up 90% of the workforce that built the railroad that helped build America, their contributions were largely erased from the narrative about the railroad. We discussed how the themes of unequal pay for equal work, fear of immigration and job insecurity, racial divides, forgotten history, and the legacy of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 continue to inform our current political climate.

In the kitchen, we celebrated the noodle (or mian in Mandarin), a Chinese culinary invention that has influenced foodways around the world, and made a simple stirred dish in the wok (a technique called lao in Mandarin) with carrots, bell pepper, bok choy, and baby broccoli. Noodles symbolize long life in Chinese culture, so we made sure not to break them while we practiced eating with chopsticks!

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

Our theme this week was the importance of young people in sustaining cultural legacies and specifically the importance of passing down knowledge of what to eat and what not to eat if your foodways center on the land. In the classroom, students watched a short film called Seeds of Our Ancestors: Native Youth Awakening to Foodways.

In the kitchen, we made a sunflower salad with five expressions of the sunflower, a plant native to North America: the seeds, the sprouts, the flower petals, the oil, and the tuber/root (also known as sunchoke or Jerusalem artichoke), which unfortunately we could not source so substituted with jicama, another root with a similar flavor and texture.

The salad was very popular, with some students having four servings! A key ingredient is certainly the paste made from the shallot, which gives the dressing a wonderful savory quality. In our closing circle, we went around the circle and each person shared a dish they would like to learn how to cook in the future.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we discussed the Mexican War of Independence in the early 19th century, which led to San Francisco becoming a part of the Mexican Empire. In the classroom, we learned that Indigenous people like the Mayans worshipped corn as a god. The Spanish, who ate wheat, though of corn as food fit only for livestock and the poor. They didn’t understand the Mesoamerican tradition of nixtamalization and ate corn raw, leading some scholars to link the resulting disease of malnutrition with the birth of vampires in the cultural imagination.

In the kitchen, the third graders made corn tortillas from a simple masa dough and with wooden tortilla presses. We paired the fresh tortillas with a simple Mexican salsa. The meal was beautiful and delicious, and it was wonderful to see how well both classes are working together as a team toward a common goal.

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

This week we explored the foods of the desert, where water is life. In the classroom, the fourth and fifth graders watched a short film called Birdsong Guides A Tribe Home featuring modern Cahuilla people talking about preserving their Indigenous cultural traditions in what is now known as Palm Springs in Southern California. We learned that Indigenous peoples made chewing gum from prickly pears, dried the fruits for storage and sustenance during the winter, and used the spines for tattooing. In the film, we observed the traditional roasting of agave, a succulent some of us were familiar with in syrup form that is marketed as a natural sweetener.

In the kitchen, we made two recipes: a prickly pear soda and a cactus pad salsa. A friend of our program harvested the prickly pear fruits for us in Sonoma County before class, and we blowtorched the spines off as best we could before the students worked with them. Student cut the fruits in half, scooped out the flesh, then pressed it through a strainer to extract the juice and leave out the seeds. We added sparkling water and agave syrup to the resulting deep magenta puree to make a refreshing soda that tasted even better with a splash of lime added right before serving.

The fourth and fifth graders diced and blanched the nopales before mixing them with the other salsa ingredients: tomatoes, onion, garlic, lime, salt, pepper, ground cumin, oregano, and fresh cilantro harvested straight from our classroom garden. We enjoyed the salsa with corn chips from local food producer Sabor Mexicano.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 2

In the 1700s, the Spanish arrived in what is now called the San Francisco Bay Area and the Ohlone ways of life changed forever. Europeans brought the mission system; new foods such as wheat, sugar, and grapes; and animal husbandry, which required a different relationship to the land and produced dairy products that many Native peoples could not consume.

In the classroom, the third graders watched a news clip from the summer of 2020, when protestors in Golden Gate Park pulled down a statue of the Spanish priest Junípero Serra, who enslaved and murdered Ohlone people in the 18th century. Some students connected to the anger the protestors felt; others brainstormed different actions the protestors could have taken to express their dissent. We discussed how a community decides which people and whose stories to venerate and how many of us know at least a few Spanish names and words (for example, the city of “San Francisco”) but most of us do not know the corresponding names and words in Chochenyo, one of the Ohlone languages.

In the kitchen, we made a wheatberry salad featuring many of the ingredients California is now famous for that were introduced by the Spanish, including olives and citrus. Both hard and soft wheatberries work well for this recipe, as well as any cooked grains such as farro, barley, or rye berries.

4th/5th Grade Edible Social Studies

It felt so good to be back in the kitchen classroom with our fourth and fifth graders this fall after a long delay! We will spend the semester exploring Indigenous foodways, and our first class was all about the acorn, an important food staple for many Native peoples on the land we now call California.

In the classroom, we passed out a variety of acorns that were gathered on a recent hike in the East Bay so students could examine them with their hands. Some were big and the color of coffee; others were slender and pale green; most of them had caps that easily fell off, indicating their ripeness. September and October is acorn season; it’s a wonderful time to forage for them all over the Bay Area if you find yourself in the presence of oak trees. We watched a North Fork Mono cultural educator named Lois Conner Bohna share about the importance of acorn to her people and illustrate the labor-intensive process Indigenous people use to transform the hard, tannic fruit into a source of sustenance and nourishment.

In the kitchen, we made strawberry acorn pancakes using local, handmade acorn flour. Everyone got right to work slicing strawberries and mixing the batter as a team. The chefs were excellent at flipping the pancakes at just the right moment when one side was nicely browned. When both sides of each pancake were golden and cooked, we stacked them up and served them warm and topped with maple syrup. The acorn has a deep, nutty flavor most of us had never tasted before. It is truly an ancient, special treat.

3rd Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 1

This fall, the third graders will be exploring the history of San Francisco in 10 meals. We started at the very beginning, with the Ohlone, the Indigenous people who have thrived off this land since time immemorial. In the classroom, students watched a short film about two Ohlone cultural leaders and chefs, Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, and their project, Cafe Ohlone, in the East Bay. We learned that Ohlone foodways involve foraging from the abundance of edible plants, fish, waterfowl, and land animals that make what we now call the Bay Area one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots.

In the kitchen, we made an Ohlone salad—not a recreation of the Ohlone diet as most of our ingredients were sourced from Northern California farms, but rather an attempt to honor native plants and the spirit of eating locally and seasonally. We washed and dried watercress, chopped blackberries, picked edible flower petals, diced hard-boiled duck egg, and made a simple dressing featuring elderberry juice. Everyone worked as a team and it was a great way to introduce our new third grade teaching team to our program as the third grade chefs showed off their accumulated knowledge and how to prepare food and enjoy it together in community.

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 8

Our final class of the year was all about the power of food and how food can change the world. In the classroom, we read Pies from Nowhere: How Georgia Gilmore Sustained the Montgomery Bus Boycott written by Dee Romito and illustrated by Laura Freeman.

In the kitchen, we made our own no-bake pies celebrating first-of-the-season cherries! The kindergarten chefs made a simple pie crust with crushed graham crackers, butter, salt, and sugar; filled mini pie tins; filled the crusts with a mixture of cream cheese and whipped cream and marinated cherries; and added a final topping of whipped cream, edible flowers, and sprigs of peppermint from our school kitchen garden.

Because the pies need time to chill in the fridge, Ms. Vashti’s class ate pies started by Ms. Joyce, Ms. Vee’s class ate pies made by Ms. Vashti’s class, and Ms. Vee’s class made pies that were then shared with the Harvey Milk staff. You can take this recipe and use whatever fruit you have on hand. It was a sweet end to our time together this year, and a reminder that all of us can make a difference in the world. We can’t wait for more culinary adventures next year!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 7

Our theme this week was foodways - what people eat and how they eat. In the classroom, we read the book My Food, Your Food, Our Food written by Emma Carlson Berne and illustrated by Sharon Sordo, which explores how our food traditions are alike and how they are different. The more exposure we have to foods from around the world, the more we discover new tastes and textures we love, the more we notice there isn’t only one way to be healthy. You can listen to or download the song version of the book here.

In the kitchen, the kindergarten chefs worked with fonio, an ancient grain from West Africa. Students cooked the fonio with onions, ginger, greens, curry, and tomato paste in coconut oil, then added the fonio and vegetable stock, brought the mixture to a boil, and let the grains cook by simply steaming in the hot pot with the lid on and the heat turned off for five minutes. Chopped tomatoes, yams, black-eyed peas, and peppers topped off our brightly colored grain bowls. Most of us tried a new food today, and liked it!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 6

Hooray, it’s May! This week the kindergarteners talked about the seasons. In the classroom, we read our first non-fiction book of the unit, The Reason for the Seasons by Ellie Peterson, and learned that we have seasons because of the tilt of the Earth.

In the kitchen, we celebrated all things spring by making a salad with baby spinach, spring onion, asparagus, English peas, strawberries, and a cider-pumpkin seed dressing. We couldn’t find any flax seed oil at our local grocery stores in time for class, so we had a good conversation about how to substitute what you have on hand when you’re working with recipes.

Nowadays it’s easy to forget that many edible plants have seasons. Our global supply chain ensures that produce is available all year round at the store. But eating with the seasons can often help support local farmers; allows us to maximize on ripeness, taste, and even nutrients; and can often be better for the environment because the food doesn’t have to travel as far to get to our plates. If you compare a strawberry from Mexico you eat in December versus a strawberry from Davis you eat in May, you can definitely tell the difference!

In addition to eating with the seasons, human beings have long created rituals and celebrations related to the specific time of year. We discussed some of our favorite holidays and how they’re connected to what’s growing (for example, pumpkins at Halloween, or evergreens for the winter solstice). In short, the seasons are awesome, and we want to learn more!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 5

Our theme this week was all about the power of coming together as a community to create something larger than ourselves. In the classroom, we read Marcia Brown’s retelling of the European folktale Stone Soup. In the kitchen, we made our own version of the soup (using potatoes to represent the stones)!

There was a LOT of chopping of vegetables and mincing of herbs, as well as some waiting involved while the ingredients cooked. Without the hard work of everyone at our tables, we would never have been able to finish the recipe within the confines of the class time. Not only is cooking together a healthy act, but also sitting down together to eat. The kindergarteners will hear many, often confusing, messages as they grow up about what constitutes a healthy diet. In this lesson our intent is to celebrate the magic of sharing a meal—any meal—with people you love, just like we have the privilege of doing every day at our school.

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 9

For the final week of our unit, we read Meenal Patel’s book Priya Dreams of Marigolds and Masala about an American child who keeps her family’s cultural traditions alive across geography and generations. In the kitchen, we made rice kheer, a sweet pudding popular in the Indian subcontinent.

The first graders crushed spices in a mortar and pestle, then cooked them with basmati rice in ghee before adding soymilk and allowing the mixture to simmer and thicken. While we waited, we made mandalas using all sorts of colorful and interesting grains of rice glued to round pieces of wood.

The kheer was finished off with golden raisins, sugar, rose water, saffron, and rose petals. We’ve used some of these ingredients before in a dish originally from Iran, but they were transformed into something entirely new in a rice pudding. Check out the works of art below. We can’t wait to see everyone next year in second grade!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week was all about celebrating creativity and art in both our food and in our communities. In the classroom we read the book Maybe Something Beautiful: How Art Transformed a Neighborhood. In the kitchen, we made salad people, working with different colors, textures, and tastes. Some chefs chose to go the abstract route; others made salad cats. Some of the most popular materials were the kalamata olives and the chick pea pasta. Everyone’s work of art was singular and delicious. You can try this at home with whatever you have on hand, drizzled with a little olive oil or your favorite dressing!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 3

Earth Day is coming soon, and this week the kindergarteners discussed what we can do to help keep the planet healthy. In the classroom we read Todd Parr’s book I Love the Earth and Melanie Walsh’s book 10 Things I Can Do to Help My World. In addition to turning off the lights when we’re not using them and doing our best to conserve water, what we eat also has a huge impact on the environment. We will explore diet and climate change more with our fifth grade Edible Social Studies unit, but this year our focus is simple. It takes less energy and water to produce plant protein like beans than animal protein like beef, and there’s no more stunning sign of spring than the fava bean. Fava beans are not only fun to work with in the kitchen when there are many friends around to pitch in, but also planting them nourishes the soil.

With the backdrop of the tall fava plants the second graders started growing from seeds only in February, the kindergarteners got to work shelling the beans from their velvety pods. A big two-pound stack yielded a small bowlful of raw fava beans, which we then blanched in salted boiling water for about a minute. After shocking the cooked beans in cold water, we peeled them again, removing the outer layer of the seed coat to reveal the bright green beans underneath.

The peeled and cooked beans went into a food processor with tahini, lemon juice, garlic, dill, and olive oil. We enjoyed our homemade fava bean hummus with crackers and slices of rainbow carrot and cucumber. Room 111’s class was interrupted by rain (hooray!), but everyone cheerfully moved indoors for a special treat at their desks. We love the earth and we love fava bean hummus!

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 8

In the classroom this week the first graders read Thank you, Omu! by Oge Mora. We could practically taste Omu’s thick red stew that she cooked all day long after looking at Mora’s beautiful collage illustrations, so of course we had to make our own stew in the kitchen classroom.

Jollof rice is made in several West African countries and is often served with meat. We made a vegan version with coconut oil, onions, and a vibrant mixture of tomatoes and bell peppers cooked down with garlic, ginger, thyme, and a mildly spicy African curry blend. The first graders made a quick Nigerian coleslaw with cabbage, carrots, and mayonnaise—the cool crunchiness of the slaw perfectly complemented the heat of the jollof rice. Several students had fourths. They have learned to work together so well this year, and we look forward to one final class, dessert, next week!

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 2

This week we explored the wisdom of Indigenous foodways and learned that popcorn has been enjoyed by Native peoples for thousands of years. In the classroom we read Tomie dePaola’s The Popcorn Book, in which we learned that one-thousand-year-old popcorn kernels were discovered in Peru and could still be popped!

In the kitchen classroom the kindergarteners made a Peruvian spice blend, popped fresh popcorn, and cut up fresh fruit for chicha morada, a refreshing Peruvian beverage made with purple corn and spices. We had so much fun grinding the spice blend in the mortar and pestle, chopping pineapple and green apple, squeezing limes, and customizing our own bowls of popcorn with our homemade spice mix, melted butter, nutritional yeast, and the Japanese rice seasoning furikake.

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 7

Our lesson this week was a great example of how ideas travel around the world. Arroz chaufa from Peru takes its inspiration from Chinese fried rice. The vegetarian version we made together featured ají panca, a mild Peruvian red pepper that gives the dish a bold, fruity flavor.

In the classroom the first graders read a Peruvian folktale, Un Lazo a la Luna (Moon Rope). In the kitchen, they got to work cracking and whisking eggs, chopping red bell peppers, snipping green onions, and measuring out soy sauce and sesame oil.

This is a simple yet satisfying dish that is a great way to turn cold leftover rice into something special. We can all continue in the make-it-your-own tradition by adding our favorite vegetables, protein, or seasoning.

Kindergarten Edible Social Studies: Week 1

We had great fun in our first Edible Social Studies classes together. In the classroom, the kindergarteners read Lois Ehlert’s colorful book Planting A Rainbow, which features some plants that Rooms 107 and 111 are already growing by the window! We discussed how colorful fruits and vegetables provide healthy phytonutrients to our growing bodies. Similarly, the diversity of our school community only makes us stronger.

In the kitchen, we made a rainbow fruit salad, cutting up first-of-the-season California strawberries, peeling and segmenting Golden Nugget mandarins, slicing mangoes, peeling kiwis, and combining them with blueberries and blackberries. In the process, we learned to use some new tools, got messy, worked together, and got to enjoy a sweet snack outside.

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 6

We continued our exploration of all the food cultures that make up America with Rashin Kheiriyeh’s picture book Saffron Ice Cream about an Iranian American child’s first visit to the beach in New York City. In the kitchen, the first graders worked with saffron, cinnamon, fresh turmeric, candied citrus peel, raisins, and dried rose petals and made havij polo, a Persian carrot rice dish. Everyone marveled at the vibrantly colored ingredients, especially the turmeric, which dyed our fingers and the worktables a brilliant yellow.

The sweetest thing about this week’s lesson was the fact that our recipe incorporated two ingredients made by other grade levels during their own Edible Social Studies units this year. The fourth and fifth graders were studying the intersection of the food system and climate change last semester, and during a lesson on food waste, they candied the peel of lemons, oranges, and limes - turning stuff that would normally be thrown away into something not only edible but considered a delicacy.

Just before serving the havij polo, the first grade chefs drizzled a simple syrup over the rice that was the byproduct of candied kumquats the second graders made last week for their final class on the farmworkers movement and the history of agricultural labor in California. We love intergenerational moments in the kitchen classroom almost as much as we love all the interesting flavors in this Persian rice!

1st Grade Edible Social Studies: Week 5

In the classroom this week, the first graders read Maurice Sendak’s classic Chicken Soup with Rice and shared their birthdays as we went through each month of the year.

In the kitchen we made a vegetarian avgolemono soup, a dish with roots in Spain, Turkey, Italy, and Greece. The chefs got busy prepping celery, carrots, garlic, lemon juice, and egg. The soup came together fairly quickly with cooked rice, Aneto vegetable broth, and a garnish of fresh dill, oregano, and parsley. We are so impressed with the first graders’ teamwork and their positive attitudes. The soup was deliciously creamy and savory and another wonderful example of how rice is enjoyed around the world and at home in the United States.