I felt strongly about finding an expert who would challenge the expected image of a beekeeper, someone who could show my students that some beekeepers look and sound like they do. One of my schools has a roughly 90% white teaching staff and a student body that’s only about 22% white, which means the majority of students are missing out on daily opportunities to learn from leaders who look like them. As FoodCorps service members, we know the importance of representation in school. From participating in Elevating Equity trainings with Rachel Willis, Ed.M., reading Lisa Delpit’s Other People’s Children, and seeing headlines like this one touting the measurable benefits of a diverse teaching staff—not to mention our own experiences in direct service—we can’t ignore the reality that having Black and Brown teachers helps Black and Brown students.

In reading the above linked Brookings Institution article, I thought of all the ways my service might be more meaningful if I was Puerto Rican like many of my students. As the research suggests, there are only so many Spanish pronunciations I can fumble during a lesson before I lose their attention, and I often struggle to come up with relevant analogies to further explain what I’m teaching; I try to stay up-to-date with their favorite music and games, but I’m sure my lessons would be more on point if my references better reflected their lived experiences. Another way to flip the script on traditional power structures is to source women leaders, particularly in STEM fields, in which there still exists a gender gap dramatically in favor of men.

With that in mind, I set out with the intention of connecting with a leader who would represent the community I serve to explain beekeeping to my students. Unfortunately, the group photos and member lists on the beekeeping sites were overwhelmingly not in my favor. But it never hurts to ask, so I wrote to these associations asking for experts, noting that I would love to have a “female-identifying person [a phrase with which I unintentionally erased trans women—due diligence is important, and I should have used ‘woman’] or person of color” as my guest in order to empower my students. I still don’t know if that was a good idea, but at the time I thought it might help my mission.

Of the few replies I received, one was from a white cis man, a self-proclaimed “person of color” (since “white IS a color you know”), who, in a series of responses, derided my message and accused me of fundamentally misunderstanding the “colorblind” beekeeping community and harboring a “hidden agenda” of promoting “non-white people” “at the cost of white people.”

Eyeroll. That is my agenda, sans punitive damages. Obviously, this man was not chosen to come speak. But the incident reminded me of the many ways my students experience ignorance at school. Between the lack of representation, the constant referral to Puerto Rican food and identity as “Spanish,” and mine and many other teachers’ monolingualism, the area for improvement is vast. By incorporating other languages into lessons and making international dishes at cooking club, I’m doing what I can to make the classroom more inclusive. But I can always do better.

If you’re not paying attention, it’s easy to obstruct social justice with your words and behaviors (see my misuse of appropriate identifiers in my email). If you’re a white male beekeeper who keeps to yourself, you may never be confronted about updating your worldview. But when you are entrusted with shaping the minds of young people in the classroom, being informed is part of the job. Teaching “other people’s children” has been and continues to be a daunting task, and I never feel fully satisfied with my attempts to make my students feel seen and supported. I’m learning more from them than they are from me, and while I’m hopeful that my site will find service members better fit to elevate the Chicopee community, I know many of my students will continue to be challenged every day to feel appreciated at school. I’ve done at least a fraction of my job as a service member if they can look to the garden and future cooking clubs as safe spaces to celebrate whatever language, crop, or special dish they hold closest to their hearts.

Learn more about FoodCorps’ commitment to equity, justice, and inclusion.

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When you’re at your wits’ end trying to get a kid to taste a new vegetable, you resort to the Trojan Horse method: hiding the offending food in other dishes. The logic goes as such: you love Little One, Little One hates healthy food, but you’ll be darned if Little One isn’t eating healthy, whether they know it or not. Thanks to generational wisdom (and Pinterest), we all know a million different ways to hide a whole range of veggies from picky eaters. My mom was no stranger to pureeing eggplant into my lasagna. I, too, once took secret joy in sneaking beans into meals cooked for a legume-hating but fiber-poor ex boyfriend. From butternut squash stirred into mac and cheese to meatballs packed with tiny mushroom chunks, invisible veggies just go down easier with those who can’t even look at a cauliflower floret without gagging. This includes many of my students, who won’t hesitate to proclaim that the turnip greens I’ve just harvested and lovingly prepared for them look “absolutely disgusting. YEEUUCHHH”

Part of my job as a FoodCorps service member is to encourage these pint-sized naysayers to try healthy foods in a fun and controlled environment so that they’ll actually eat the vegetables on their school lunch tray instead of throwing them away. I do this by conducting taste tests of locally-sourced produce on a monthly basis with my co-service member, Kelly. My goal when selecting a taste test recipe is to ensure the veggie appears prominently in the dish, so the kids can recognize it and eat it when it resurfaces in future meals. This is especially important when the vegetable is brand new to them; whereas nearly every kid knows what carrots look like before they’re mashed up into a souffle, fewer have encountered an intact beet or radish. Admittedly, it’s hard to reconcile this vision with veggies so brazenly healthy that they scare kids away on sight. Is it a coincidence that the veggies with the worst reputations for flavor tend to be dark green? Broccoli, collards, and green beans each incited horror among my sisters and I at our childhood family dinners. Those scary green mounds were the visual embodiments of sheer, unadulterated nutrition! There was no way stuff that looked like that would taste good!

So, with kale on the docket for November’s Harvest of the Month taste test, Kelly and I considered our options: mask the leafy green threat in fruity smoothies? Blend up some kale hummus? Try kale pesto pasta? Each of these recipes would render the original kale leaves unidentifiable, but we guessed that with its big, fluffy leaves and deep green hue, it’d be a tough sell if left raw.

But kids can surprise us. Before the monthly sampling kicked off, I had tested a kale salad recipe with some of my Stefanik Elementary students. Each kid picked their own leaf from the beautiful purple kale plants growing in the school garden. They watched, some eagerly, some with heavy skepticism, as I tossed the leaves in orange juice vinaigrette and passed them out like leafy popsicles. Overwhelmingly, the students told me they loved it and picked their stems clean. Armed with those positive preliminary reviews, Kelly and I decided to buck kid-friendly kitchen logic and serve raw kale salad to everyone.

​This salad had no frills beyond its sweet and tangy dressing–no croutons to distract from all those frighteningly fresh greens, nor Craisins to incentivize both chewing and swallowing. Right before our kickoff taste test at Bowe Elementary, I got cold feet, panicking that the Stefanik kids were only jazzed about eating raw kale because they’d picked it themselves. To my shock and delight, a majority of the Bowe students who tried the salad voted that they’d either liked it or loved it! We went on to tally a 69% positive response on average at Lambert-Lavoie, Stefanik, and Litwin during subsequent taste tests. I loved the kale taste test because it proved that, while having your kid help prepare their own healthy food (picking kale, dressing a salad, stirring a pot, whatever) is a sure-fire way to get them to taste it, kids won’t always balk at a food based on looks alone. It helps that Kelly and I bring lots of energy to these events and reward brave tasters with stickers. But at the end of the day, kids will face their ultimate food foes on their own and decide they aren’t so disgusting after all. Now hopefully, when they see kale again in their school lunch, they won’t be afraid to dig in.​

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