by Virginia B. Wood
Local elementary
school
teacher Carla Marshall and well-known California restaurateur Alice Waters are
both women with a desire to reconnect Americans to the earth. And the best way
to do this, they think, is through the education of our children. Over the past
few years — within their own respective spheres of influence — each of these
passionate, creative women has been quietly fomenting a revolution in this
direction. Last year, when Waters’ executive chef Catherine Brandel visited
Austin as a celebrity chef at the Texas Hill Country Wine and Food Festival and
returned to California with photos and stories of Carla Marshall’s garden
classroom, Waters knew she had found a kindred spirit.
So, when Waters herself visited Austin in the late spring on a book tour (see
sidebar), a meeting with Carla Marshall was an important item on her agenda.
The soft-spoken radicals finally met last month at Austin’s premiere urban
organic farm, Boggy Creek Farm. It was fitting that these two visionaries
should meet and discuss the common ground they share surrounded by fertile
acreage that has sustained families for more than 150 years.
Carla Marshall created an organic gardening curriculum for young children and has been teaching it in the
Green Classroom at South Austin’s Becker Elementary for the past six years.
With an eye on future expansion, AISD had purchased a small house across the
street from the school in South Austin’s Bouldin Creek neighborhood. Carla
persuaded the school district and the Becker principal to make the empty house
and fenced-in yard available for the Green Classroom. She scavenged for soil,
gardening tools and materials, set out to rehabilitate the yard, and turned the
house into a learning center. Most of the work (and her initial salary) was
paid by small grants that she wrote herself.
Though the AISD curriculum office lists the Green Classroom as an
Environmental Science project, Marshall’s concept provides students with a
totally integrated learning situation. The Green Classroom certainly teaches
environmental science and health, but the program also bolsters learning in all
disciplines and provides opportunities to develop communication skills and
achieve self-esteem. The children reinforce their math skills in measuring
raised beds, setting prices for their produce, and figuring crop yields. When
they are studying American Indians in social studies, they use a digging stick
to plant corn with a fish head, in the native tradition. Their language arts
skills receive excellent practice through programs such as “Lettuce Be
Different” where they tasted four types of lettuce and were required to use a
variety of descriptive words and metaphors to describe the diverse flavors and
textures. After years of watching students reap the benefits of working with
Carla Marshall, even the most skeptical teachers are now enthusiastic
supporters of the Green Classroom and the program was awarded an unprecedented
second President’s Environmental Youth Award by the Clinton administration in
1995.
This year, the very first group of pre-K students who began in the Green
Classroom are proud fifth graders, seasoned veterans who enjoy sharing their
gardening experience with younger children. Several times over the past two
years, students have been invited to sell organic vegetables from their garden
at a local Whole Foods Market. During the sales outings, Marshall observed
dynamic changes in some of her students. “Some of them had trouble
understanding decimal points in the abstract,” she relates, “but the minute
that money crossed their palm and they had to figure out where to put the
decimal point to record a sale of $1.25, decimals made sense for the first
time.” Carla also noticed that shy children who rarely made eye contact with
strange adults were more comfortable discussing their produce with potential
customers.
This spring, Becker elementary students made a deal with students at Gilette
elementary in North Austin where the children are raising some farm animals.
The Green Classroom provided lettuce to feed the animals at Gilette in return
for manure to add to the Becker compost pile. “The children themselves actually
made the trade,” Carla Marshall explains, adding that both teachers and
students felt a real sense of community and realized the value of strengthening
ties between the schools. The swap will probably become a regular part of both
programs.
Another successful experiment that will definitely be repeated is inviting
local chefs to present cooking demonstrations from time to time, regardless of
the program’s lack of a functional kitchen with sinks, stove, and refrigerator.
“I had to rent a stove for a month the last time we had chefs here,” recalls
Marshall, “and the refrigerator leaks all over the floor.” Luckily for
Marshall, Zoot chef Stewart Scruggs is looking into the possibility of getting
some commercial kitchen equipment donated to the program. The kitchen lessons
give the students an idea of what can be done with their crops. However the
kids are not always eager to try new foods, and changing their eating habits
may be the biggest hurdle of all. According to Marshall, “once one kid says
something is yucky, the peer pressure is hard to overcome.”
It would be nice if the students could see the produce being prepared in their
own school cafeteria, but bureaucracy prevents cafeteria food from coming from
small growers, even it originates in the schools’ own backyard. The food
service program at AISD is what is called a “self-operated district” and its
funding comes from federal lunch program payments and revenues generated by
a-la-carte food sales in district cafeterias. Cafeteria meals are prepared
according to federal nutritional guidelines with all the bulk purchasing done
by a bid process. There is no system currently in place to allow vegetables
grown by Carla Marshall’s students to be purchased by the school district. But
the dedicated educator may find things are changing, especially if her West
Coast counterpart has anything to do with it.
Alice Waters was pleased to hear about the Austin Green Classroom’s organic gardening curriculum because
she is in the midst of creating a somewhat similar program at a Berkeley,
California middle school near her landmark restaurant. The Chez Panisse revolution began 25 years ago when Waters and some friends decided to open a
restaurant that served simply-prepared food made with the freshest seasonal
ingredients they could purchase. Over the years, Waters cultivated a wealth of
small growers and food producers to supply her operation. The resulting
restaurant influenced an entire generation of chefs (Jeremiah Tower, Joyce
Goldstein, Mark Miller, and Catherine Brandel are some alumni), and the
purchasing philosophy had a watershed effect on small growers and food
producers all over California. Chez Panisse and subsequent restaurants
influenced by it, helped to establish and support a market for fresh, locally
grown organic produce, stimulating a long threatened small farm economy.
Through dedication to her idea, Waters became aware of the changes that one
person and one business could make.
On her way to work every day, Alice passed the crumbling inner-city asphalt
school yard at King Junior High. She began to imagine the site with a garden
maintained by students, and envisioned landscaping the entire school ground
with edible plants. The seeds of what has come to be called the Edible
Schoolyard came from yet another garden. “A few years ago, a woman called to
ask if Chez Panisse would purchase organic radishes grown in the
horticultural program at the County Jail,” recalls Waters. Alice learned about
the positive transformation jail officials observed in inmates participating in
the project, such as willingness to work together and lower incidents of
violence. “They’d never been nurtured or nurtured anything themselves,” Waters
states,” and the garden made such a difference in their lives.” She began to
think about incorporating an organic garden into a school curriculum and the
idea for the Edible Schoolyard began to take shape.
Waters approached King principal Neil Smith with the Edible Schoolyard idea
and together they’ve enlisted support for an organic garden that will be
integrated into both the school’s curriculum and food service program.
Eventually, students will be responsible for planting, maintaining and
harvesting the garden. Within the next five years, the program will expand to
the point that students will also prepare and serve meals for their classmates
with the harvested produce in a restored demonstration kitchen attached to the
old school cafeteria.
Because Waters wants the Edible Schoolyard to be a successful pilot program
that can be duplicated all over the country, she and the committee of parents
and teachers have proceeded slowly. Along the way, they’ve enlisted the aid of
the California superintendent of schools and sympathetic U.S. Department of
Agriculture (USDA) officials who administer the national Team Nutrition program
to improve school lunches. In support of her program, Waters has also
corresponded with President Clinton and Vice President Gore, suggesting that
organic gardens be planted on the grounds of the White House and Blair House,
and encourages them to support the spread of farmers’ markets around the
country. She reminded the chief executives that “to do these things would be in
the spirit of Thomas Jefferson, who believed that we had to be a nation of
farmers in order to preserve our values of freedom and community.”
As a mother concerned about her own and every child’s nutrition, Waters is disheartened by how
disconnected American children are from the sources and production of the food
supply, a problem of which Austin’s Marshall was very much aware when she
began planning the Green Classroom. Both women share a concern that a culture
dominated by television has lost the civilizing effect of gardening, preparing,
and sharing meals together. “Television advertising teaches us to consume and
that consumption will bring satisfaction,” asserts Waters, “I want children to
experience the pleasure that comes in actually doing the work.” Both the
Green Classroom and the Edible Schoolyard are programs where children will
learn stewardship of the land where food is grown and achieve self-esteem from
growing and sharing food with one another. Here in Austin, the overwhelming
success of Carla Marshall’s Green Classroom validates Alice Waters’ hopes for
the future of the Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley.
Carla Marshall and Alice Waters sat on the breezy porch at Boggy Creek Farm in
the waning daylight, discussing business details such as grant sources and
potential allies within the USDA. More importantly, they shared their visions
for the future. Marshall hopes that the national awards her program has
garnered will generate interest in other school districts and she has some
grant money for the coming year to train other teachers within AISD to use the
curriculum she has developed for the Green Classroom. Waters freely admits that
she has undertaken her first book promotion tour because it provides a platform
for her to preach the “gospel according to Alice Waters” regarding organic
produce, sustainable agriculture and “bringing the children of America back
around the table.” n
This article appears in June 28 • 1996 and June 28 • 1996 (Cover).