A food revolution in Berkeley: fighting malnutrition and disease, teaching ecological literacy, and giving hope to family farmers begins with kids growing their own food - Center for Ecoliteracy Food Systems Project

Michael K. Stone

In Berkeley, the Center for Ecoliteracy (CEL) is cooking up a revolution. The recipe includes food, nutrition, parents, students, organic farmers, urban gardeners, and school district and city policies. In just three years, CEL's Food Systems Project (FSP) has served as a catalyst to coalesce and organize a coalition to:

* create the nation's first districtwide school food policy;

* establish gardens on every campus;

* develop a city food policy;

* "reinvent" the school district's food service;

* inspire a curriculum integrating classrooms with hands-on gardening and cooking instruction;

* help lead a successful campaign--83 percent "yes" votes--for a bond measure that will fund school kitchen and cafeteria construction.

This revolution has generated national publicity. After passage of the school food policy, says Erica Peng, then FSP's garden coordinator, "CNN, CBS, they all descended on us. Did they know we were only one office with three people?"

CEL's achievements are noteworthy enough to be featured in Frances Moore Lappe and Anna Lappe's Hope's Edge (see page 36) as one of the good news stories they discovered in their worldwide search for projects that give hope.

What the CNN stories and the Lappes didn't describe is the years of groundwork that preceded the accomplishments, and the strategies tried and lessons learned: How can people affect complex systems like food and schools? Is the FSP an "only in Berkeley" story? Can it teach others wanting to create change in their towns and cities?

Says Zenobia Barlow, CEL's executive director, "There is a false assumption that you can just walk in and start changing systems. Instead, you need first to weave the web of relationships. You have to work from the school to the district; from the classroom teacher to the school board. The FSP's successes can be traced to the fact that we were able to build our understanding of the dynamics of living systems--the importance of time, relationships, and multiple levels of scale--into the project from the start."

CEL was founded in 1995 by physicist Fritjof Capra (The Tao of Physics, The Web of Life), Zenobia Barlow, and philanthropist and businessman Peter Buckley, as a successor to the Elmwood Institute, an ecological think tank and international network of scholars and activists applying ecological, whole-systems principles to business and education.

CEL (which focuses on K-12 education) may be unusual among foundations (1) in the degree to which its grant giving, programs, and day-to-day operations inhere in a clear set of fundamentals, all of them manifestations of whole-systems approaches. Chief among them are "solving for pattern," "ecological literacy," and what CEL calls "the Four Societies Process."

SOLVING FOR PATTERN

Farmer/poet/philosopher Wendell Berry coined "solving for pattern" to distinguish "solutions" that worsen the problems they are intended to solve from solutions that "cause a ramifying series of solutions." A bad solution solves for a single purpose. It acts destructively on the patterns that contain it. A good solution addresses the interlocking pattern in which it is embedded. "Unless the people solving parts of the problem are having conversations with each other," says Zenobia, "the work they do won't last."

Take some seemingly disparate facts: The percentage of overweight children and youth in the US has doubled in the past thirty years. The federal school lunch program provides school districts with just $2 for a free lunch for the poorest children. Diabetes rates are expected to double in the next twenty years. Food service workers are often the lowest paid and least respected on campus. Tons of uneaten school lunches are trucked to landfills every day. Ninety-one percent of children ages 6 to 11 are not eating recommended amounts of fruits and vegetables. Eighty-five percent of at-risk American farms are on the fringes of urban areas. A quarter of Americans eat at least one meal a day from a fast food joint. Heavy attention to standardized testing has not perceptibly improved children's performance in schools.

Community health ... behavioral and academic problems ... low quality school lunches ... junk food ... failing family farms ... solid waste management. Do they form a pattern that can be solved for?

ECOLOGICAL LITERACY

Says Fritjof Capra, "The first step to creating sustainable communities is understanding the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. We call that understanding `ecoliteracy,' from the title of a book by David Orr [another CEL board member]."

According to Fritjof, thinking systemically requires several shifts in thinking: from the parts to the whole; from objects to relationships; from objective knowledge to contextual knowledge; from contents to patterns; from quantity to quality; from hierarchies to networks; from structure to process.

Understanding these shifts is basic to the curriculum CEL proposes. But "curriculum" to CEL is much more than courses, facts, and concepts to grasp. It is about the totality of a student's experiences, contexts, and relationships.

People at CEL talk a lot about the "hidden curriculum," what students actually learn about the world and their place in it--including the unintended lessons the school teaches. Which offers the longer-lasting lesson--the teacher's lecture on nutrition, or the soda machine outside the classroom? The food pyramid chart on the wall, or the PTA selling junk food to fund school activities?

THE FOUR SOCIETIES

CEL calls its third fundamental "the Four Societies process." It grows out of the work of Jeannette Armstrong, an Okanagan writer, filmmaker, teacher and political activist from British Columbia. She has helped CEL adapt a process her people call En'owkin. The Okanagan people use this process to nurture voluntary cooperation when the community is faced with a decision. An elder asks each member of the group to contribute new information, without debate or attempts at resolution, then asks how people and other things might be affected.

The process challenges the group to suggest directions that are mindful of each area of concern put forward, usually in the form of questions put to the "elders," the "mothers," the "fathers," and the "youth." In CEL's formulation, "youth" translates as "the vision society," "fathers" as "the action society," "mothers" as "the relationship society," and "elders" as "the tradition society" or "the land society." CEE recognizes that any organization or process includes members of all four, even if they don't recognize themselves as such.

THE EDIBLE SCHOOLYARD

The Edible Schoolyard at Berkeley's Martin Luther King, Jr. Middle School provided the initial chance to address food in a whole-systems way. CEL had already funded isolated garden and food projects in schools, but this project offered the opportunity to immerse children in hands-on work in the natural world and to pursue the Center's ultimate goal of changing schools and school systems from the inside out.

Neil Smith, King School's principal, planted the Edible Schoolyard's first seeds in 1994 with a call to Alice Waters, the charismatic, visionary chef and founder of Berkeley's world-famed Chez Panisse restaurant. Neil had heard a radio interview in which Alice described her dismay at driving past a run-down, graffiti-marred King School on her way to and from work.

When the principal called, she says, "I imagine that he had in mind my helping to beautify the school with a garden. But as we walked around the campus, I immediately began to get ideas. There are gardens in lots of schools. There are kitchens. There are cafeterias. But there aren't gardens and kitchens and cafeterias that are of a piece.... I started to get the idea for an ecological curriculum run as a school lunch program that could transform education."

Alice and Neil represent almost classic examples of the "vision society" and the "action society." She already imagined a food-based curriculum as the first step toward programs in every school in the country. He was still trying to figure out how to overcome the obstacles just to building a garden.

Even with the inspiration of a dynamo like Alice Waters and a supportive principal, the garden idea germinated slowly--an important lesson. The following fall Beebo Turman, a parent, stepped forward. Beebo, Neil, and Alice were joined by two science teachers, Beth Sonnenberg and Phoebe Tanner. Finally, two years after Neil and Alice first talked, staff and volunteers tore up the asphalt and planted their first crop: bell beans, fenugreek, crimson clover, oats, and vetches to cleanse and improve the soil.

CEL awarded the Edible Schoolyard a grant that allowed it to hire staff, and has remained a major supporter since. Says Fritjof, "Gardens and food systems were an ideal project for CEL. We realized students can learn the facts without that affecting their lives. You need to instill a certain passion for nature. You can't do that in the classroom alone. By growing and eating vegetables, they learn to see themselves as part of natural cycles. Our health depends on the health of our food, which depends on the health of the soil. Children learn that we are embedded in the soil. They see that we are not apart from nature, but a part of it, and that therefore we must play our part."

"CEL funded aspects that I didn't even see," says Alice. "While I was focused on bringing in outside people and taking the weight off teachers, Zenobia was focused on making the teachers more involved." Says Sandy Neumann, a former principal who is CEL's program officer for education, "The teacher needs to share the students' experience."

IN THE GARDEN, WE WORK

"The garden is hands-on," says Beth Sonnenberg. "We work. There's no reason I should waste garden time on a little lecture on the beauty of compost, when they can be out turning compost themselves."

Along the way, students are encouraged to sample the garden's output. "The first place they always go is the raspberries," says Phoebe. "But then it's on to the beans or the mustard greens. One year we had purple string beans. They never got to the kitchen, because kids ate them right off the vine."

Says Peter Buckley, "One of my favorite experiences is walking through the Edible Schoolyard garden and seeing the kids munching on the food like little deer. They know, and will eat, what tastes good." Phoebe adds, "I had one African-American kid whose mother called him a `picky eater.' Over the year, that took on a new meaning, because he was picking, and eating, everything in the garden."

Students in the garden cooperate without being asked. The changed context breaks assumptions about how teachers and students relate. Phoebe tells a story: "I was working with one of my students. We noticed that the wood chips we were spreading were steaming. `Why is that?' I asked. `Because of bacteria in the wood,' he answered. Then he said, `Miss Tanner, let's have a conversation.' I had thought we were having a conversation, but for him it was still a lesson. `Who's your hero in life?' he asked. I told him, `Rachel Carson,' and asked who his was. A couple of others joined us. Everyone shared, and really listened to each other. That doesn't happen in a classroom."

IN THE KITCHEN

Most King School classes incorporate the kitchen in their schedule. Esther Cook has been the Edible Schoolyard's kitchen teacher and manager since the kitchen opened. At first, she says, teachers looked at the kitchen and garden sessions as "time away from the curriculum. Now they're seeing ways to make the lessons part of the curriculum."

A Spanish class tries Venezuelan cooking, speaking in Spanish while cooking. A math class costs out the ingredients of a meal, learning that good food can be served on a limited budget (literally, a take-home lesson). For a drama class, Esther gives groups of students the same ingredients and invites them to "improv" different recipes.

Setting the table with a tablecloth and flowers, and sitting down to eat together, even for twenty minutes, creates a different model of eating and relating for children used to inhaling meals on the run. Classes teach about fresh, nutritious food, not with "Eat this because it's good for you," but with "Try this and see if it doesn't taste better." Alice Waters talks about "seducing" people with food. It's the not-so-secret strategy of her delicious revolution.

As impressive as King School's Edible Schoolyard is, CEL believes that the minimum scale for lasting systemic change is the school district, where decisions from staffing assignments to procurement procedures to budget and facilities priorities are made. Ideally, you should work simultaneously in schools, in districts, and in the communities in which districts are nested.

CONNECTING THE DOTS

About this time, Zenobia began to read about a growing "community food security" movement reaching beyond piecemeal hunger intervention to address systems and permit communities to meet their own needs for nutritious, safe, acceptable food. She went to Alice Waters, the Berkeley Community Garden Collaborative, and other groups CEL was funding, and said, "There's enough going on here that if we put the parts together into some larger pattern, we could be eligible for funding from larger funders." Zenobia calls this network-building strategy "funding the dots, and then connecting the dots."

By 1998, CEL had funded several school gardens and a number of community food and garden organizations, and helped underwrite and design a "Vision of a Garden in Every School" conference, in which Berkeley Superintendent of Schools Jack McLaughlin participated.

About a week after the conference, Jack was visited by "a real angry parent." His specific objection was the absence of lactose-free lunch options at his son's school, but his more general message was "You're serving my kid crap." After listening to his profanity-laced tirade, Jack escorted him from his office. "But after he left," says Jack (perhaps influenced by the gardens conference), "I realized that the guy really did have a point. I invited him to come back and meet with the board president and me. He was shocked." Jack also invited Tom Bates, a friend who had served in the California State Assembly for twenty years.

One meeting led to others. Jack asked the district's food services manager to attend. More parents joined them. The "Superintendent's Group" began to meet monthly. Jack offered his conference room, and came to all the meetings, giving the group weight and credibility.

Tom Bates moderated the meetings, which began as mostly gripe sessions--venting about the food, Child Nutrition Services, waste, the menus sent home to parents (which contained advertising for movies and video games). "Another lesson," says Zenobia, "is that it's a mistake to prematurely cut off complaining. You can silence the gripers, but they'll come back later and undermine the effort." Tom allowed them to get grievances off their chests before asking, "What do you suggest we do?"

The group started solving for pattern, generating whole-system suggestions from school gardens to cafeteria food to recycling. Zenobia offered them a planning grant to pursue their ideas.

COMMUNITY FOOD PROJECTS AT THE DEPARTMENT OF AGRICULTURE

CEL soon found a larger opportunity to simultaneously address the schools, the district and the city.

Zenobia met Janet Brown, a Marin County farmer, community food security activist, and founder of the Marin Food Policy Council. Janet became a consultant to CEL, and later its program officer for food systems. She discovered a US Department of Agriculture Community Food Projects program developed under Dan Glickman, Bill Clinton's Agriculture Secretary, that drew on the same place-based, systems-based premises as CEL's work.

The USDA, though commonly assumed to be biased toward agribusiness, is a complex bureaucracy with more opportunities for experimentation than many people think. In 1996, despite cutbacks elsewhere in the Food Stamp Program, community food security champions managed to pry away funding ($2.5 million by 1998) for the Community Food Projects program.

CEL submitted a proposal as lead agency for a network of seventeen organizations and individuals, including BUSD, the Chez Panisse Foundation, Berkeley Youth Advocates, the Berkeley Community Gardens Collaborative, the Berkeley Emergency Food Project, and the schools of business and public health at UC Berkeley. Many of the network's members had already been funded by CEL for three to five years, as had many of the nearly twenty agencies that wrote letters of support. It was time to connect the dots.

USDA consultant Zy Weinberg calls the proposal "visionary ... one of the best" of the 104 proposals funded so far by the program. He was impressed by the broad community participation; the superintendent's commitment; ambitious goals for using locally grown food; big-picture systems change combined with children learning about nutrition by eating food they had grown themselves.

The USDA awarded a three-year grant that permitted hiring a coordinator and a half-time garden coordinator. CEL found funds from the Arkay Foundation and East Bay Community Foundation to hire Tom Bates as a half-time "consultant/project director," rent an office, and pay other expenses. FSP was born.

THE FOOD SYSTEMS PROJECT

FSP began with gardens, eventually establishing one in every BUSD school. CEL considers gardens to be an almost necessary first step toward a food systems curriculum. Though the best programs, such as the Edible Schoolyard, interact heavily with their schools' curricula, gardens can be introduced at levels requiring less commitment or resources. Some BUSD schools already had gardens, many supported by CEL.

On the other hand, much of the major transformation of the BUSD food service promised in the USDA proposal was slow work.

"Compared with arson at the high school, vandalism, rape, immigration issues, or the economy, food is not in the top ten," says Zenobia. "When we first started talking about fresh, nutritious food in the schools, people would say, `Oh, please.' It seemed like some kind of effete, let-them-eat-arugula Berkeley approach." In fact, school food systems reflect much bigger food trends, themselves part of even bigger economic trends toward centralization, industrialization, standardization, and globalization.

School economics only exacerbated the trend. The National School Lunch Program entitles children from poor families to free or discounted meals, but subsidies have remained largely unchanged for years. The USDA also supplies surplus commodities, giving schools considerable incentive to use products such as cheese or peanut butter, without regard to nutritional value.

Meanwhile, school food services are expected to operate in the black or even to generate a profit--one of a district's few unencumbered revenue sources. Increasingly, school districts are opting to replace labor- and facility-intensive food preparation with highly processed or frozen heat-and-serve entrees assembled at central facilities and trucked to campuses. Some districts have gotten out of food preparation altogether, contracting with megacorporations such as Marriott, Pizza Hut, or McDonald's.

On some campuses, organizations such as the PTA sell pizza and candy to help underwrite computer labs and music and art programs. Soft drink companies dangle lucrative offers. Jack McLaughlin says that he was offered, and rejected, $100,000, on top of a percentage of sales, to sign a Coca-Cola contract.

"Our tax dollars," Zenobia Barlow says, "are buying a high-fit, high-salt, high-octane caffeine, fast-food diet for the nation's school children that is, in turn, producing a multi-billion dollar public health problem."

Moreover, in spite of a near-obsession with "accountability" for students' academic performances, schools are failing to act as if they recognize a connection between what children eat and how well they do in class. It's not as if that connection is news. In 1941, the US Surgeon General, Thomas Paran, said:

   We are wasting money trying to educate children with halfstarved bodies.
   They cannot absorb teaching. They hold back classes, require extra time of
   teachers, and repeat grades. This is expensive stupidity, but its immediate
   cost to our educational system is nothing compared to the ultimate cost to
   the nation.

A FOOD POLICY FOR THE SCHOOL DISTRICT

While FSP was launching, Jack McLaughlin proposed that Tom Bates hold hearings to develop a proposal for a district food policy. "We were working to create a policy that could outlast particular individuals like Jack and myself," Tom says.

The process built on the work of the "Superintendent's Group." Controversy arose when some participants wanted to require vegetarian entrees and purchase of organic food, and to ban additives and processes such as bovine growth hormones, irradiation, and genetically modified foods. Other committee members opposed them, fearful that they might damage the policy's credibility by demanding unachievable goals. They compromised, including the goals but tempering them with qualifiers such as "to the maximum extent possible." The policy was passed unanimously by the school board in August 1999. Among its goals:

* Ensure that no student in Berkeley is hungry.

* Ensure that a healthy and nutritious breakfast, lunch and after school snack is available to every student at every school....

* Shift from food-based menu planning to nutrient-based planning.

* [Provide] nutritious, fresh, tasty, locally grown food that reflects Berkeley's cultural diversity.

* Ensure that the food served shall be organic to the maximum extent possible ....

* Maximize reduction of waste by recycling, reusing, composting and purchasing recycled products....

Twenty years in the legislature had taught Tom that policies without enforcement mechanisms are hollow. Therefore, the policy required the food service to report annually directly to the board of education. It also established a Child Nutrition Advisory Committee (CNAC) to oversee progress on the policy's goals.

FROM POLICY TO PRACTICE

Establishing CNAC completed the process of formalizing the ad hoc Superintendent's Group. "The policy gave us standing and leverage," says Beebo Turman, who became chair of the menu committee. "Principals who used to ignore me couldn't anymore." The policy also raised reformers' aspirations. "I just wanted to see menus change," Beebo remembers. "I didn't expect a revolution in food service. By passing the policy, they let us in the back door."

The Menu Committee replaced corporate advertising on menus with a nutrition message. They targeted what they considered the worst food service entrees. ("For me," says Beebo, "that's frozen chicken nuggets and tater tots, shipped frozen from Texas.")

Understanding food service operations "was like peeling an onion," says CNAC chair Eric Weaver. "We had to begin by figuring out what questions to ask," adds Janet Brown, "such as who is making procurement decisions, how much profit is being made on snack foods, and whose profit is it?" They discovered that no one--not the district's business manager, the superintendent, or the school board--had ever looked carefully at, or really understood, food service operations. The food service had no accounting software of its own, nor any formal inventory process. They discovered the food service had accumulated a nearly million-dollar surplus, at a time when there were no burners or knobs on stoves in the central kitchen.

FSP discovered substantial obstacles to purchasing directly from local farmers. The food service had devolved so far into a heat-and-serve model that it had neither facilities nor trained chefs to prepare meals from fresh ingredients. Although fruits might be bought more cheaply at the farmers' market, the food service was geared to handling "units" of fruit in standardized sizes.

Large-scale replacement of food with locally grown, healthy alternatives wasn't an immediate prospect. "So we developed a strategy of mimicking traditional items with similar but more healthful alternatives," says Jered Lawson, FSP's former program coordinator. "FSP took on research that the food service should probably have conducted itself, but wasn't prepared to." FSP staff identified Newman's Own organic nacho chips as an acceptable alternative to Doritos, negotiating chargebacks and discounts from the manufacturer and distributor in order to afford superior chips with lower cholesterol and fewer preservatives. (FSP also experimented for a time with rice cakes; the kids liked them at first, but later started using them as Frisbees).

Working through a local farmer who bottles his own apple juice, FSP obtained bottled juice for $.18 a serving, versus the $.54 being paid for individual packages. Through such substitutions, FSP radically increased the fresh fruit offered in snacks.

SALAD BARS

In 1999, FSP heard about a successful program in Santa Monica featuring salad bars with fresh produce from local farmers' markets, and organized a field trip for FSP staff and food service officials.

The first salad bar, featuring food bought at the Berkeley Farmers' Market, opened in May 2000. Even after the novelty wore off, about a third of the children eating lunch, along with teachers and others, continued to choose the salad bar. Overall meal participation increased by about 20 percent. Three BUSD schools now have salad bars.

The farmers' market connection feeds into an FSP School to Farm Field Studies Program, directed by Melanie Okamoto, that takes students to farms, community gardens, and the farmers' market. It lifts the garden lessons to a larger scale, notes Fritjof Capra, "so students can see how systems work in the adult world." Lessons take on a personal note, putting a farmer's face on the food.

"Dear Farmer Al," wrote a student after a farm visit,

      I really enjoyed the trip to your farm. The best part for me was when we
   picked the cherries. I picked them for my grandmother in the hospital and
   she loved them, she didn't share them with the rest of the family....

      At first I thought organic meant that they didn't come from a grocery
   store, but now I know it means that the farmer doesn't use pesticides on
   fruit. Instead you use owls to eat gophers, bees to pollinate the trees,
   and ladybugs to eat the aphids.

      I think it's nice that you don't throw away the bad fruit. Instead you
   use it to make your jam and tarts. Next time I go to the farmers' market I
   will buy some jam.

To fund salad bars and other food programs, FSP helped the district apply for funds from the California Nutrition Network for Healthy, Active Families (CNN). BUSD received $1.2 million between 1999 and 2001. In 2001-2002, eligibility levels were raised, and two Berkeley schools lost their funding. 2002-2003 eligibility may be further restricted; CNN coordinator Erica Peng predicts that half the Berkeley schools receiving grants may not qualify.

The movement toward centralized heat-and-eat food preparation was accelerated after the 1989 earthquake damaged kitchens and cafeterias. Tom Bates, Eric Weaver, and others helped make the case for including kitchen and cafeteria facilities in two bond measures on the November 2000 ballot. Food Policy Council members participated actively in the campaign. Both measures, totaling $116 million, were approved by 83 percent of the voters, virtually unheard-of majorities.

FOOD SERVICE AS A SMALL BUSINESS

A major goal of CEL's efforts has been changing many assumptions of food services: that the bottom line is everything; that kids will reject food that's good for them; that balancing the budget requires selling junk food; that low subsidies and dependence on surplus commodities mean "paying public funds to serve bad food to poor kids," as parents complained to Jack McLaughlin.

But, CEL's Peter Buckley asked, what if the food service were run as a small business? What if it based its strategy on attracting paying customers rather than meeting minimums for reimbursable meals? What if it used all the accounting, planning, procurement, and marketing tools of other successful businesses?

This may be the key to programs succeeding in Berkeley or migrating elsewhere without the heavy infusion of cash provided by CEL and other funders. CEL procured a grant from the California Endowment to develop a business plan during 2002 that will test the thesis that schools can serve appealing, nutritious meals, using food from local firms, and remain economically viable.

CEL has always advocated harnessing the considerable buying power of school districts into a predictable stream (or, better, a river) of income to sustain regional farmers. Berkeley now cooperates with a regional coalition of thirteen districts. Multiply that by all the districts in an area--then add hospitals, elder-care facilities, jails, and other public and private institutions--and sustaining farming as a way of life seems less a dream.

The region's capacity to fulfill that potential remains to be tested, though. When the business plan is completed, its menus, budgets, and other findings will be made available to other districts considering the similar food programs.

THE FOOD SYSTEMS PROJECT AT THREE

FSP is a work in progress. "Bringing change to schools is like a glacier," says Dave Cort, a leader in efforts to bring the project to Marin County. Three years is not long in the life of a glacier. On its own terms, the project has achieved or made substantial progress on many of its objectives. Only time can measure the ultimate accomplishments of so many programs, policies, and organizations still in their infancy.

CEL hopes that BUSD will assume increasing responsibility for food systems work. Meanwhile, it is looking to migrate its food systems work to nearby counties, beginning with Sonoma, Marin, and Yolo. It wants to test a model based not on subsidies, but on community support and establishing connections between local farms and schools. "It was never our intention," says Zenobia, "just to build a program for poor kids."

The program has experienced difficulty in meeting some of its goals. For instance, the objective of school and community gardens' providing 25 percent of the fresh produce required by Berkeley schools seems to be widely acknowledged as unrealistic.

Increasing participation in breakfast programs, another goal, has also been difficult, as it has been everywhere else in the country. With two schools often sharing the same buses, some students would not arrive in time to eat before class. Teachers resisted beginning classes later, and thus extending the school day, for the sale of accommodating breakfasts.

DOES THE PROGRAM MAKE DIFFERENCE FOR CHILDREN?

Preliminary data from a study by Michael Murphy of Massachusetts General Hospital and the Harvard Medical School suggests that Berkeley students in integrated programs are learning more about food, systems, and ecology.

Many people, including food service personnel, believe that efforts to improve nutrition are doomed because students are already acculturated, if not addicted, to high-sugar, high-fat, highly processed foods. To test this, students eating breakfast at one Berkeley school were offered a choice between their traditional breakfast (for example, pancakes and syrup) and a bowl of whole grain oatmeal with fruit. "It was one of the most amazing school breakfast things I've ever seen," says Murphy. "I have pictures of eighty kids a day eating oatmeal. Kids will substitute more natural and more nutritious foods if you put the good food out and present it well."

HOW IS THE PROGRAM A MODEL? HOW WELL CAN IT "MIGRATE"?

CEL staff feel that many lessons they have learned can be put to good use by others (see LESSONS LEARNED).

LESSONS LEARNED

Some suggestions for beginning a food systems program:

* Give yourself three years. The gardening metaphor is "double
digging," spending the first 18 months turning over the soil
before planting.

* Involve as much of your whole community as possible from the start.
Think about the Four Societies: Who are the people in the community
who represent each of those societies? Does the planning process
acknowledge, honor, and include all of them? Pull in those who aren't
normally seen, such as food service staff and custodians.

* Anticipate criticism and griping. It's part of the process, not a
diversion that must be avoided in order to get on with the process.

* When necessary, work incrementally, taking steps that don't seem like
radical departures from the familiar.

* Point to strong examples that say, "It's already been done. We can
do it here too."

* Begin with gardens. They work. They break down assumptions about
"learning." They offer tangible signs to the community that something
is happening. Being with nature, observing the path from seed to table
(or, better, the cycle from soil to soil) is the beginning of
ecological literacy.

* Free someone (it could be a volunteer) from other responsibilities to
oversee garden, scheduling, maintenance, etc. It's too much work to
expect a teacher to do on top of a full-time teaching load. Think about
who will maintain the garden during breaks when teachers and students
are gone.

* Plan to scale up. The scale of change for affecting systems is
ultimately the district, not the classroom or even the school.

* Institute a food policy, with a council or committee charged with
overseeing it.

* Make use of visible people in the community (an Alice Waters or a Tom
Bates) who can give the project visibility and credibility.

* Look to local and regional funders for financial support and
connection across a spectrum of agencies. SoLving for pattern
creates a pattern that people didn't perceive before. There aren't
funders who leap off the page of foundation directories indicating an
interest in this work; one must put together a patchwork of funders.
FSP funding has come from foundations devoted to education,
environment, health, sustainable agriculture, economic
development, and community-based philanthropy.

* Look to collaborate with as wide a spectrum of people and
organizations as possible, but don't assume that they'll give
up their own deep agendas.

* Think about a role for third parties (such as the Food Systems
Project) who aren't already immersed in maintaining the current system.

Programs also migrate in numerous ways. FSP served as a template for Lagunitas (Marin County), which adapted the wording of the BUSD food policy and is attempting to import and adapt Berkeley's garden-classroom-salad bar model. The state has asked CEL to form a network and train six other districts to use its model. Jered Lawson and Tom Bates are moving on to continue food systems work in other places. King School teacher Phoebe Tanner now works with the state Department of Education on a project to match experiential food-based curricula with the state's core testing standards.

Janet Brown calls eating "an ecological act of unparalleled significance." She says, "We want children to identify eating as a fundamental part of life. Since all life forms `eat,' this act accounts for the greatest impact of the Earth's resources of any of the life processes"--a nearly perfect vehicle, in other words, for learning and practicing ecological literacy.

RESOURCES FOR FURTHER INFORMATION

ORGANIZATIONS

THE CENTER FOR
ECOLITERACY
2522 San Pablo Avenue
Berkeley, CA 94702
510/845-4595
www.ecoliteracy.org

THE FOOD SYSTEMS
PROJECT
2530 San Pablo Avenue, Suite D
Berkeley, CA 94702
510/548-8838
www.foodsystems.org

CALIFORNIA CENTER FOR
PUBLIC HEALTH ADVOCACY
PO Box 2309
Davis, CA 95617
530/297-6000
HG@PublicHealthAdvocacy.org

CALIFORNIA NUTRITION
NETWORK FOR HEALTHY,
ACTIVE FAMILIES
California Department of
Health Services
PO Box 942732, MS-662,
Sacramento, CA 94234-7320
916/323-0594
www.ca5aday.com/programs
/nutrition/nutrition.htm

"A GARDEN IN EVERY
SCHOOL"
Nutrition Services Division,
California Department of
Education
721 Capitol Mall
PO Box 944272
Sacramento, CA 95814
916/445-0850 or
www.cde.ca.gov/nsd/nets
/g_index.htm

THE CENTER FOR
COMMERCIAL-FREE PUBLIC
EDUCATION
1714 Franklin St. #100-306
Oakland, CA 94612
510/268-1100
www.commercialfree.org

THE CENTER FOR
FOOD SAFETY
660 Pennsylvania Avenue, SE,
Suite 302 Washington DC 20003
202/547-9359, www.centerfor
foodsafety.org

COMMUNITY FOOD
SECURITY COALITION
PO Box 209
Venice, CA 90294
310/822-5410
www.foodsecurity.org
Farm to School Program:
www.foodsecurity.org/farm
_to_school.html

US DEPARTMENT OF
AGRICULTURE COMMUNITY
FOOD SECURITY INITIATIVE
Coordinator of Community Food
Security USDA, Room 536-A
14th and Independence, SW
Washington, DC, 20250
www.reeusda.gov/food
_security/foodshp.htm

AMERICAN FARMLAND
TRUST
1200 18th Street, NW, Suite 800
Washington, DC 20036
202/331-7300
www.farmland.org

PUBLICATIONS

ECOLITERACY: MAPPING
THE TERRAIN
Zenobia Barlow, editorial director;
Margo Crabtree, editor
2000; 90 pp.
Learning in the Real World
$11.95 from the Center for
Ecoliteracy (see above)

THE EDIBLE SCHOOLYARD
Zenobia Barlow, editorial director;
Margo Crabtree, editor
1999; 90 Pp.
Learning in the Real World
$11.95 from the Center for
Ecoliteracy (see above)

HOT LUNCH
A History of the School
Lunch Program
Antonia Demas
2000; 34 pp.
Food Studies Institute
$10 from Food Studies Institute,
Inc., 251 Crandon Blvd. Suite
161, Key Biscayne, FL 33149

(1) CEL is also unusual in the degree to which it both gives grants and operates programs for which it receives grants. Among the Food Systems Project's funders are the Arkay Foundation, the California Endowment, the Clarence E. Heller Charitable Foundation, the Columbia Foundation, the East Bay Community Foundation, the Fred Gellert Family Foundation, the Greenville Foundation, and the Hunt Foundation.

COPYRIGHT 2002 Point Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group