By Catherine Masters
AmeriCorps Farm to
School Program/Rooted
The student body of Lake View Elementary is rich in diversity. One of its greatest strengths as a community school is that it tends incredibly well to that diversity. Students represent many nationalities, ethnicities, religions and cultures. Some have parents or grandparents who immigrated from elsewhere in the world, and many students are immigrants themselves.
Staff and teachers at Lake View do their best to not only celebrate this diversity, but foster it and encourage students to blossom into their most authentic selves given their unique roots.
Last year Lake View was awarded a grant in which funds were to be spent on programming that nurtures community, food and health. A portion of that money went toward a school garden renovation — stripping the rotting wooden garden beds and replacing them with ADA-compliant galvanized steel beds, and placing mats across the wood chips to aid in garden accessibility. We planted crops that are culturally relevant to the community, who will be welcome to harvest from the garden as much as they like throughout the summer.
Signs (in English, Spanish, Arabic and Hmong) will invite the community to harvest from the garden. Signs will also lay out expectations for behavior in the garden.
The rest of the grant funds were used to support a Cultural Cooking Club, for which I lead in my role as Lake View’s AmeriCorps Farm to School Specialist with Rooted. The club enriched the after-school program with an opportunity for students to learn basic cooking skills; to encourage students’ interest in healthy, vegetable-forward food; and to expose students to a wide variety of foods from various cultures around the world.
Students gained comfort and skill with chopping, measuring, mixing and safety awareness around hand washing and hot stoves. Students wary of the unfamiliar food in the first few cooking clubs were, after a few weeks, eagerly eating up whole bowls and wanting to bring leftovers home. Students loved the space where they worked with vegetables and created nutritious and unique food.
The most striking element of the club is that students cooked food from their own culture or the cultures of their classmates and friends. Students have shown genuine gratitude and eagerness to cook foods from their own backgrounds. If they’re unfamiliar with where the food comes from, we reference the big map in the hallway outside our workroom that highlights the diversity of the student body, connecting photos of students to their families’ country of origin on the map.
Students have cooked dishes from Mexico, Laos, Ho-Chunk Nation, Morocco, Ethiopia, Honduras, Israel, Libya, Afghanistan and the southern U.S. They’ve tasted dishes such as pho, shakshuka, bolani, sheer khurma, macheteadas, baleadas, pico de gallo, and okra stew. As I write this, we are planning to cook Hmong spring rolls and cucumber water, Ghanese jollof rice, Nigerian akara, Egyptian ful medames, Sudaneses garasa, Mexican horchata, German potato pancakes, and Dominican mangu, among other tasty treats.
This summer we hope to host monthly dinner parties in the garden. Families will be able to harvest from the culturally relevant crops in the garden to cook and enjoy food together as a school community.
It is incredibly rewarding to serve in a school that puts so much earnest effort into tending to its students and their families. The marriage of the AmeriCorps Farm to School program and efforts of community organizers within the school is one made in heaven — my service is met with enthusiasm, which in turn helps fuel more energy and ideas.
I am incredibly grateful that my two years of service at this school have resulted in a grand garden renovation focused on accessibility and community. I am also grateful that it has brought forth a club that has created interest for students in healthy and diverse foods while fostering cooking skills, which will have lifelong relevance. I am honored to have a part in it all.