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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1. Seeds & seedlings

The first signs of spring awakening are seed coming of packets and getting into the soil. Lindsay Hall’s students in Traverse City, Michigan might not be able to pronounce “embryo” and “cotyledon” yet, but they’re excited by how cool seeds are.

2. First sprouts

Jordyn Kessler’s elementary schoolers in Chicopee, MA aren’t daydreaming when the look out their classroom window, they’re peeking at their sprouts! Windows covered by sprout houses and sills covered by seed cups are sure signs of a healthy school food environment.

3. Garden builds and work days

You can’t just jump right into the school garden when the weather starts to warm up. First things first: garden beds need to be built, signs need to be put up, and weeds need to be pulled. Thankfully, volunteers from the school community can help get the job done fast. In just one garden workday, Mariah Marten-Ray in Paso Robles, CA and volunteers prepped 38 garden beds and covered the space in between with wood chips.

4. Dirty hands

It’s not just volunteers getting their hands dirty. The Garfield Elementary chapter of Sprout Scouts, the trademark FoodCorps after school club, recently took advantage of their first sunny day outdoors to prep the soil and plant spinach seeds. “Despite some hesitation, Scouts were pretty excited to show off their dirty hands,” shares Service Member Nathan Spalding.

5. Square feet

Gardens are a fun tool for young mathematicians. Dasia Harmon’s Atlanta students discussed what a square foot is, how to measure one, and how many seeds belong in each square foot of a garden bed. For all of their hard work crunching numbers, the elementary schoolers will soon be rewarded with carrots, beets, and spinach!

6. First harvests

Even in places with mild winters like Oakland, CA, spring can give plants an extra energizing and productive push. FoodCorps Member Lydia Yamaguchi sums it up nicely: “ITS SPRING AND EVERYTHING IS BUDDING AND FLOWERING AND GROWING IN THE GARDEN AND I LOVE IT.” 

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I walked down the hall past the school’s new composting posters to Ms. Clayton’s classroom, one of the first participants in the garden programs of my service site, Backyard Growers. Today the class, Ms. Clayton, and I set some rules and norms for how we should act when I come visit. This class is a group I will be working with regularly to make garden-based connections to the class curriculum. I go once a month to lead lessons on food systems and to get them excited about growing vegetables and trying new things. Today was a whirlwind. The students took a “vegetable preference survey,” that measures how familiar they are with certain vegetables and serves as a starting point to measure any improvement they make over the course of the year, signed the group norms, and they were on their way to gym class.

I chatted with Ms. Clayton as we walked down the hall and was about to leave when I saw that the gym teacher was teaching a lesson on MyPlate, the USDA’s guidelines for recommended healthy eating. My supervisor and I had just designed new nutrition curriculum for the gym classes. We knew this teacher had expressed interest in the material, but didn’t know she had read through the lesson plans, made them her own, and already started teaching it! I poked my head in the gym and waved at her and was welcomed in to join Ms. Clayton’s class as the gym teacher explained how many items of each food group you need on your plate. Then, the students did a relay where each team had to race to get the right amount of items for each food group. The gym teacher had taken an idea we created in our nutrition curriculum and tweaked it a bit – making it a whole lot cooler. Kids were shouting “we need one more protein!” and dashing to get an orange bean bag like their lives depended on it. I helped some of them out and chatted with the janitor.

As they were playing, The Open Door‚ a local food pantry and hunger relief organization—was setting up their mobile market in the gym. They provide a mobile market for staff and parents at Veterans every Friday after school. There I sat, while the students ran around collecting healthy foods for their “plates”, fresh off a discussion of how they’re going to be my “little agriculturists” who try new things. I looked over and saw on my right the bulletin board Backyard Growers had created focused on the question “Where does your food come from?” On my left, the food pantry was setting up their awesome mobile market . All of this was happening in the cafeteria that we hold our taste-tests in and serve vegetables the students grow in the school garden for lunch. This moment gave me a glimpse into the community food system and its interconnectedness. This was a school embodying a culture of health.

Rachel from the food pantry swooped in with kale from Alprilla Farm right down the road. She whipped up some green smoothies for the kids hanging around in the gym while their parents picked them up and went through the mobile market. Some students said “I’ve had this before!” recognizing the smoothie from when the previous FoodCorps service member did a Green Monster smoothie tasting event last year with them, and they happily slurped them down. It was amazing to get to discuss vegetable preferences in the classroom with Jojo, help her complete the right number of fruits for her MyPlate, encourage her to try a green smoothie, and then wave goodbye to her as I worked in the garden bed and she heads home with her parent.

This is what it’s about: the intersection of gym, classroom, cafeteria, and the garden. As I weeded in the garden I saw students walking home up the sidewalk with “I tried it” stickers on their foreheads. It was a surreal and gratifying moment. At Backyard Growers we talk about approaching school food environments from all angles and here it was, happening all around me on a Friday afternoon.

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Last month, I had the privilege of attending the 4th Annual Urban Farming Conference, held at Northeastern University, co-hosted by the Urban Farming Institute (UFI) and City Growers. It was a sold out convergence of 400 people, all of them passionate about strengthening the food system, and all of them doing this work in Massachusetts. That alone felt so invigorating; to have 400 people come together to learn together about how to better nourish our communities right here. But more than that, it was a day that put community-building at the forefront, and that amplified the voices of those often lost in the food movement. To reference an MLK quote shared by the keynote speaker, Greg Watson, “Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” To me, it was a motivating day filled with incredible black and brown leaders in the food movement sharing their stories, frustrations, wisdom, and vision. It was a day where a woman I had just met thanked me for feeling, as tears of inspiration streamed down my face.

“Those who love peace must learn to organize as effectively as those who love war.” -Dr. MLK Jr.

Of the nine FoodCorps service site organizations in MA in partnership with The Food Project, there were five organizations of our service site partners present–Nuestras Raices, Groundwork Lawrence, Mill City Grows, CitySprouts, and The Food Project–with a handful of staff members from each of them and even some youth coming from as far as two hours away in Holyoke!

There were 28 sessions over 4 time slots, plus the keynote, and closing panel. The keynote speaker was Greg Watson, Director of Policy and Systems Design of the Schumacher Center for New Economics. He eloquently shared the history of the agroecology movement in Cuba. Watson spoke of the multi-directional agricultural revolution born out of science (practices including polyculture, mulching, compost, nitrogen-fixing plants, intensive planting) and organization (strategies including land distribution, family farms, urban agriculture, farmer to farmer knowledge sharing, gender equality, cooperatives, resource efficiency).

The second session I attended was a panel on growing community (and not just food) moderated by Dave Madan of theMOVE. The panel included Belene Tesfaye, Director of Education at City Soil; Luisa Oliviera with the Mayor’s Office of Strategic Planning and Community Development for the City of Somerville; and Karen Washington of Rise and Root Farm in NY. There was a call to better listen to the youth voice, not just as a shallowly seen and not heard, “window dressing” for raising money from panelist members. This sentiment was reinforced by members of the audience, including two inspiring young people from the Groundwork Somerville and Lawrence Green Teams. Washington calls for a whole new food economy that does not replicate capitalism. She demands that we look at the systems we are creating as advocates for food change. We must use the resources we have and also identify when it is time to give up the power that we are holding. With an air of jest but in complete earnest, Washington shared her practice of calling people out for being too attached to their jobs. Her meaning was to point to those of us in the room coming from a place of privilege, whether that be white privilege or otherwise, to give up our jobs and find someone from the communities we are serving to take our places. Because at the end of the day, those of us sitting in places with systematic advantage, will be fine and figure out how to find another way to pay the rent.

Washington calls for a whole new food economy that does not replicate capitalism. She demands that we look at the systems we are creating as advocates for food change. We must use the resources we have and also identify when it is time to give up the power that we are holding.

In the third session I attended, there was a focus on cultural crop production, markets and profits, featuring Anne Cody and Neftali Duran of Nuestras Raices and Frank Mangnan of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at UMASS Amherst. Most poignantly, Duran reminds us to adopt food ways not just through the food itself. Beyond that, we must learn about the context of a crop in how it is grown and what it means to the people who grow it–to know the monetary, social, and personal value of a crop before you start selling it. He cited the Irish potato famine as a staunch example of appropriating a crop native to the Andes, where there were thousands of varieties impressively adapted to each aspect of the microclimates, to where one species was grown and failed massively across Ireland. Cody encouraged doing research online and asking around to learn what produce is in demand.

Duran reminds us to adopt food ways not just through the food itself.

That said, for folks who run farmer’s markets, there is much opportunity to expand crops available by better knowing what makes up the diets of the communities being served. This is even happening within our FoodCorps MA sites: Nuestras Raices grows gandules, ajicitos dulces, spicy peppers, calabaza, and culantro. CitySprouts has grown bok choy, fenugreek, thai basil, lentils, okra, shiso, lalo, and black eyed peas. And the Food Project grows tongue of fire shell beans, asian cucumbers, asian cabbage, and collards.

Professor Magnan has spent a significant time growing seeds not conventionally grown in the United States with his students, to provide to Nuestras Raices and others interested. His students created a locally aired television commercial (above) which advertised making sofrito — a latinx sauce base of tomato, garlic, and onion– from scratch to avoid the significant number of added ingredients in processed sofrito. The commercial was very much reminiscent of the garden education that FoodCorps service members do: in the encouragement of creating a culture around food of care. This includes breaking down the food that we eat to understand what we are eating from a nutritional, cultural, environmental, and social point of view. Raising a nation of young people that care about the food they are putting into their bodies and know how to do basic food prep is creating a nation of more resilient people.

Raising a nation of young people that care about the food they are putting into their bodies and know how to do basic food prep is creating a nation of more resilient people.

The last session I attended related to the way education in the classroom can be backed by what is available in the lunchroom. Jen Faigel and Seth Morrison from Commonwealth Kitchen, Nico Lustig from Franklin County Community Development Corporation, and Tim Wilcox from The Kitchen Garden Farm, spoke about getting value-added products to market. For FoodCorps, the piece of interest in this session was the opportunity that opens up for farm to school processing. Processing facilities like Commonwealth Kitchen and Franklin County allow farmers to focus on being farmers. These facilities can also turn their produce into value-added products to grow their market niche and extend sales past the growing season. It also lets farmers sell vegetables that might have aesthetic blemishes but can be turned into a high quality prepared food item. Joe Czajkowski Farm has worked with Franklin County Food Processing Center to sell to Chicopee, Holyoke, and Gloucester Public Schools of the FoodCorps communities. Commonwealth Kitchen is talking with the Boston Public Schools FNS and Mass Farm to School about possibilities for a healthy breakfast item, like a muffin baked with local apples.

The closing panel featured Greg Watson, Karen Washington, and Lydia Sisson of Mill City Grows. What are the ways we can build a new economy infrastructure and keep community building? After telling her story of how Mill City Grows came to be, with a community expressing a desire and her figuring out what she could do as an outsider, Sisson emphasized listening. Washington reiterated her point from her smaller session earlier, that we have to share power first and then give it up to those who don’t have it. She acknowledged, this can be scary to realize we have to do this. She also shared her wariness for short term engagement from programs like FoodCorps and parachuting quickly in and out of communities. So to be in the position of a FoodCorps service member, requires being humble and doing so much listening like Sisson vocalized. It requires not coming in with an agenda but listening ears. Sisson shared her discussion with her co-founder Francey Slater in the car on the drive to the conference that day about their exit strategy and how to figure out how to best pass on their organization to the community of Lowell. I left the conference feeling a little bit better, a little bit more assured that we will figure it out. And as Washington said, “Boston is in the house.”

She also shared her wariness for short term engagement from programs like FoodCorps and parachuting quickly in and out of communities. So to be in the position of a FoodCorps service member, requires being humble and doing so much listening like Sisson vocalized.

Photo credit- Bailey, Craig. “4th Annual Massachusetts Farming Conference.” Urban Farming Institute of Boston. 2014. Web. 11 Apr. 2016. <https://urbanfarminginstitute.org/2nd-annual-massachusetts-farming-conference/comment-page-1/>

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