Pesto, Change-o

Mrs. T's class invited us to bask in their basil bounty! 

We went over to their classroom to whip up a little pesto. 

This recipe calls for pine nuts, which are better but also more expensive. We used walnuts.

A kind parent volunteer boiled a huge batch of pasta, and each child had a taste of pesto pasta.  Yumm! 

I love the idea of helping children restore the connection between garden and food.  In college, I attended a course called Sustainable Agriculture, taught by environmentalist David Orr.  We read Rooted in the Land and visited an Amish farmer who talked about the importance of place and the benefits of small-scale family farming.  That course got me thinking more consciously about the divide our culture has developed between food and its source.  Recently, I've been thinking and learning (and excited) about these ideas again.

It is interesting the way--when you're paying attention--events and resources sometimes seem to conspire to push in the same direction.  At the 2010 American Montessori Society annual conference in Boston, I attended a fabulous workshop on practical life in the elementary classroom.  The presenter talked about a class with a wonderful snack program in which the children do the planning, the budgeting, the shopping, and then, for example, make yogurt and assemble fresh fruit yogurt parfaits for all.  A few weeks later, due to a cold, rainy day (for the first time in its history), I spent a good bit of my time at the Annual Herbal Forum at Round Top in the cozy (and dry) make-shift book shop. It was there that I stumbled upon Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea by Alice Waters. The photographs alone made me salivate, and the philosophy is perfectly in line with Montessori practical life activities for older children. With sledgehammer-like subtlety, I hinted to my mother that it would make a good birthday present. She dutifully complied.

Although I can't remember where, I had heard about the Edible Schoolyard several years ago. Alice Waters is the chef/owner of Chez Panisse and one of the founding chefs behind the eat-local, slow-food movement, but she is also a former Montessori teacher. The book got me poking around on the Edible Schoolyard website. Their blog makes me swoon!  In a fit of book lust, I ordered up The Garden Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom and The Kitchen Companion. 

Soon after, a friend (and fellow Montessori teacher) who raises chickens and I had a conversation about her slight reluctance to eat the eggs from her backyard chickens.  We've become so disconnected from our food sources that we sometimes feel a little uncomfortable at first when this natural connection is restored, when you know the chicken who laid the egg and when you're in more direct contact with the anatomy of egg-laying.  We made a date to see an outdoor screening of "What's on Your Plate?" at the Houston Arboretum (part of a series of films examining our food supply).  The documentary follows two eleven-year-old urban students as they explore food production and their place in the food chain.  Another friend who joined us for the movie told me about Jamie Oliver's Food Revolution.  He's not off the mark when he talks about what's happened to our relationship with food. 

For many of us, our food is purchased in grocery stores after being trucked across the country (or flown around the world), processed, and wrapped in plastic.  Mostly, we don't ever see where our food comes from and we don't meet the people who grow it and prepare it.  The connection between the cow in the pasture and the refrigerated, plastic-wrapped ground meat in the grocery is not obvious.  It's even less obvious in the form of a Lunchable.  For some who live in our poorest inner-city neighborhoods, there is no access to grocery stores.  Instead, families are forced to buy their "meals" at convenience stores and fast food restaurants.  

It's not all bad news, and exciting things are happening right here in Houston.  With the same ideas about healthy eating and restoring the seed-to-table connection, Gracie Cavnar launched Houston's Recipe for Success Foundation in 2005.  Monica Pope, local chef of Tafia, hosts the Midtown Farmers Market and offers a free cooking class every Saturday to teach folks about preparing foods that are in season and grown locally.  There's another farmers market at Rice University on Tuesday evenings.  Urban Harvest helps initiate school and community gardens and organizes farmers markets on Saturdays at Eastside and on Sundays at Discovery Green.  Check out what's growing now, and cook up some locally grown food!  Or better yet, start your own garden at home!  Not only are cooking and growing food great practical life activities for children, gardening is another great way for children to get children outside and rekindle an appreciation for relationships between plants and animals in the natural world.


Resources:
Come to the Table inspirational video by former middle school student Zoë Salnave
Edible Schoolyard: A Universal Idea by Alice Waters (now chef and former Montessori teacher!)
The Garden Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom
The Kitchen Companion: Inside the Edible Schoolyard Classroom
Recipe for Success
Walking the World in Wonder: A Children's Herbal by Ellen Evert Hopman
"An Interview with Alice Waters" in Montessori Life
Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver