Give peas a chance

The school garden is planted, and the year nearly done. In our third year of growing an edible veggie patch, we’re really seeing pickup on the part of the kids, parents and teachers in our community. It’s not that they didn’t respond before, but there’s something different about it this year, a feeling that the garden is part of the social, emotional and academic environment—not just the physical one. There are many kids who’ve never known the school without a garden. They feel tremendous ownership of it, reminding each other to be careful, where the peas, basil or radishes are planted, and they come out for our weekly tending and watering “party.”

There are lots of reasons for this change—the main one being the awesome teachers at the school who embed it into their work in the classroom—but one of the things that has also helped is that there are now colourful signs made by the children explaining what’s happening in the patch.

Last year, with the support of teachers and a local artist, they created collage images illustrating garden-specific concepts like A Plant’s Life, Beneficial Insects, Compost and the Three Sisters (corn, beans, squash) Plot we’ve planted. They also researched and wrote up text to accompany their images. With foundation funding, we had weather resistant signs made. Now kids can go with their teachers and discuss the material as part of an outdoor class, or just read the beautiful posters with their parents or friends.

The signs serve to beautify the playground, mark the garden as a place of kid-centred and kid-led learning and emphasize food literacy in the school.

The sign idea was inspired by a school in Oakland California that I posted about a few years ago here. I’d love to hear what you are doing in your school garden to emphasize food literacy or just make it a more fun and inviting place. Comment here and I’ll post about some of the ideas soon.

]]> http://unpackingschoollunch.wordpress.com/2013/06/06/sign-of-the-times/feed/ 1 what's for lunch? Photography by Andrea Curtis Screen Shot 2013-06-06 at 9.44.07 AM Screen Shot 2013-06-06 at 9.43.42 AM http://unpackingschoollunch.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/digging-away/ http://unpackingschoollunch.wordpress.com/2013/05/09/digging-away/#comments Thu, 09 May 2013 16:45:41 +0000 what's for lunch? http://unpackingschoollunch.wordpress.com/?p=6073 Continue reading →]]> There is something truly magical about planning and planting a garden. Riffling through seed catalogues, talking to other gardeners about plants, hashing it out on paper, even preparing the soil. In those moments, the garden is all beautiful potential.

I think it’s a bit like writing fiction—something I’m also doing right now. Most writers begin with an image or an idea, a character, a voice, a setting, or maybe a plot twist. In your head it is glorious and perfect and you can only imagine that it will be easy to write and astonish others as it has astonished you.

But then, you sit down to write and come up against your own imperfect mind and gifts, exhaustion or inexperience. It never sounds exactly as you imagined before there were words on a page. No matter how good, no matter how surprising, it never exactly captures that initial inspiration. There are lots of people who pack it in, but also many who keep going, digging away, hoping that they might come close to expressing that moment of clarity and insight.

It is the same in the garden. In imagining the vegetables and herbs and flowers I will grow, there are no cats pooping, slugs eating or tomatoes rotting. At the school garden, there are no seedlings torn by little hands, no vandals painting over the signs the children have made, no seeds that fail to emerge from the soil. Spring is a beautiful kind of reverie and I want to linger here in this moment, to revel in pure potential.

So Nick Saul and I  wrote a list of some of our favourite Canadian books that see food in this integrated way—not just as fuel for the body but a tool for building a more just and sustainable world—and 49th Shelf has it up on their blog.

Some of the books will be familiar to regular readers. I did a week long series with Jeannie Marshall a year ago here.

And the crocuses seem to be positively enjoying it.

I’m going to wait for a patch of warmer days to get out my own personal brass band about spring, but I’m feeling much more hopeful about gardening—especially school gardening—now that Ontario teachers are back and able to do extracurriculars. It’s been a demoralizing school year on that front, and I was genuinely worried the garden wouldn’t happen this year—that all the momentum we’ve been gathering would be lost. Now it looks as though our plots can be salvaged for the spring. We’re planning to focus on celebrating the multicultural heritage of the families at our school and are hoping to plant some of the plants specific to the children’s cultures, as well as gather recipes from our school community.

In other good news, The Stop hit The Globe and Mail bestseller list this past weekend, coming in at #10 for Canadian nonfiction. Not bad for a book about food banks and the politics of food!

This week, my coauthor Nick Saul and I are off on that magical mystery tour, dropping in at various literary hotspots along the way. We are so grateful for their hospitality!

First stop is Lost in a Great Book.  Jenn, who hails from the Creemore, ON, area, asked us some great questions about The Stop, the book and the future of Community Food Centres in Canada.

On day two, we meet the lovely Char from The Literary Word, who filled the book with post-it notes and called it “a highly addictive and wonderfully informative read.”

On day three, we stop in at Pickle Me This, the stomping grounds of writer,  editor and longtime blogger Kerry Clare. She said “The Stop is a fantastic story well told, compelling to read, and it will inspire readers to reconsider their relationships with both the food they eat and the people they live amidst.”

Day four is a stop at That Tall Girl Loves Books (this short one, too!).  Carrie did a Q&A with Nick and me, and asked us smart questions about Jamie Oliver, ideological versus logistical challenges and more. She called the book “a fantastic read. It was interesting, informative, and inspirational. Reading accounts of how everyday people made such profound changes and impacts certainly does make me want to get more involved.”

The last stop is Serendipitous Reading where Marci writes: “I urge everyone to go out and get this book. Not just because you have to but because you want to make change in your own communities….Get stubborn, get active and make your city or town better not worse.”

If you haven’t already, check out the fabulous animation CFCC produced to tell its story about the power of food.

Here’s a taste of the blog post. To read the whole thing, check out Crave.

When we decided to build a raised bed vegetable garden on our small downtown Toronto front yard a few years ago, we thought mostly about the delicious tomatoes, peppers and fresh herbs we’d enjoy come harvest time. We ordered fresh soil, built a simple structure using 2x6s and some brackets and shopped for seeds at farmers’ markets. But the day the soil arrived, it was clear the harvest was the least of the pleasures involved in growing food in the city.

If you can’t wait for the book itself to launch into the world on March 19th, an excerpt is coming out in Reader’s Digest next week. In the meantime, we’ve written a piece about the challenges of food banks in the April issue of The Walrus. The online version of the essay won’t be up for a bit, but you can find one of Canada’s last great magazines on newsstands everywhere great magazines are found. Nick and I will be talking about the book and the Community Food Centre (CFC) model a lot over the next few months. Watch here for details. For more on CFCs, visit the Community Food Centres Canada website or www.andreacurtis.ca

But reading the book is just the beginning. I hope families and educators will use it as a bouncing-off point for more in-depth discussions. That’s why, with the help of my publisher, Red Deer Press, I’ve created a FREE Teaching Guide for use in classrooms everywhere. The guide has questions aimed at initiating talk about what kids eat around the world, teaching ideas inspired by the book’s content, blacklines for easy printout—all downloadable here. (It’s about 5 MB.)

There are curriculum connections to health and nutrition, environmental sustainability, diversity, urban/rural connections, media education and much more. From the Pizza Pie game to Untangling the Food System to a more in-depth session we call The Lottery of Life, I hope these resources will inspire teachers to bring the ideas in What’s for Lunch? into their classroom. I’d love to hear how it goes. Email me (andrea at andreacurtis dot ca) and let me know!

I’m also doing a number of talks and presentations about the book with both children and adults over the next few months. If you want me to come to your school or community group, you can contact me about fees and my availability.

Just this week, obesity doc Yoni Freedhoff posted a review of the book on his blog Weighty Matters. He liked What’s for Lunch? quite a bit though he had some really interesting stuff to say about how obesity is framed in the text.

He argues that by connecting obesity to lack of activity (I note that in China, officials have instituted compulsory runs and folk dancing in an effort to combat rising rates of obesity) as well as unhealthy food, I run the risk of perpetuating myths about obesity. His concern, as I read it, is not that obesity doesn’t have a relationship to both of those things in some cases, but that its cause is far more complex. By not discussing said complexity in any depth, and touching on two issues that are associated with personal choices, stigma against the obese might result.

The fact is, I spent a lot of time thinking about stigma when I was writing the book—and not just related to obesity, but about poverty and cultural practices. It was a delicate balancing act trying to write about such difficult and complicated subjects in a children’s book that covers a lot of territory (both geographical and otherwise) in just 32 pages. I reported what various countries were doing in response to issues of obesity in their midst—not to condone it, but to reveal the various policies.

My intention was always to show in the book how the food system, as we’ve built it over the last 50 years or so, is inter-connected and the issues we see arising from its failures (widespread hunger on one hand, rising rates of obesity on another—among other things) do not have a single cause or cure. Still, I think prejudice against people who are overweight or obese is probably one of the most prevalent, least understood and (sadly) socially acceptable stigmas still around. Seems to me there’s room for a smart nonfiction children’s book that tackles these issues head-on.

Meanwhile, other bloggers are also writing about What’s for Lunch? Here’s Sal, at Sal’s Fiction Addiction:

“What a wonderful idea for a nonfiction book for young readers, and done in such an inventive way. I was hooked when it first arrived in my mail. And, I pored over it! It was neat to connect to previous knowledge about food from a variety of countries, but it is so much more than that.”

A retired librarian and teacher, she adds “This is a great resource worth sharing in classrooms, with parents and with the school community.”

I hope that the teaching resources I’ve created with the help of my publisher, Red Deer Press, will support teachers bringing the book into their classrooms. The Educator’s Guide will be up on their site very soon.

Jama at Jama’s Alphabet Soup  wrote about What’s for Lunch? back in the fall, but her take on the book and the issues seemed to really resonate for her readers. Here’s what she said:

“Kids will enjoy seeing the interesting variety of foods, read about how and where they’re eaten, and noting how they’re similar and different from other kids around the world. They’ll see that for some children school lunch is the only nutritious meal of the day, while others may have adequate food but it’s not especially healthy. It will definitely make them think about food in ways they never have before.”

Bull’s eye! That’s exactly what I hoped for when I embarked on this project.

As a writer (and now blogger) whose first book came out before blogs took over the world, this kind of interest from people like Yoni, Sal and Jama is both amazing and fun for me. It’s hard to remember a time when the only people commenting about books and ideas were newspaper reviewers and certain certified pundits on TV. We all know the internet—with its ever-expanding potential for people to express themselves— has its downsides (comments sections, anyone?), but this isn’t one of them. Let the blog times roll.

A chilly view from the High Line

I spent this past weekend on a mini vacation in New York City walking and exploring and eating, as well as talking about food with school lunch and food justice (super)hero, Jan Poppendieck, who wrote the brilliant Sweet Charity? about the failures of food banking, and the more recent (and equally brilliant) Free for All: Fixing School Food in America.

The weekend was a literal smorgasbord of fun, food and inspiration. One of the surprise highlights was stumbling on the new food exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. Called Our Global Kitchen, it uses multimedia, display, historical objects, diaroma and even taste tests to bring to life the complexity of our food system, the future of food (think seaweed, bugs and less meat) and the joys of eating together. There’s a chance to sit at a table with a Roman aristocrat, see an ancient Aztec marketplace and cook up various recipes on an interactive table/screen.

Curated by the Center for Biodiversity Conservation, the exhibit pulls no punches about the challenges of feeding a projected 9 billion people by 2050 or the profound problems with current industrial agricultural practices.

Considering the equivocating I seem to read in the media about this (as if it’s still sane to question climate change or the failures of the so-called green revolution to feed the world), I was delighted to see how matter of fact the exhibit is. This is science, baby.

I can’t wait to read my friend Sarah Elton’s upcoming book, Consumed: Sustainable Food for a Finite Planet for more on this subject.

(For teachers and educators who can’t make it to New York before the show closes in August, there are downloadable teaching resources for all grades that touch on issues in the food system like biodiversity, the supply chain and trade, hunger and diet-related health issues. The resources are pegged to the exhibit itself but there are lots of ideas about how to bring these topics into the classroom.)