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https://www.berkeleyside.com/2020/02/04/alice-waters-edible-schoolyard-projectchanged
how-berkeley-students-eat-its-next-goal-to-fight-climate-change
Alice Waters’ Edible Schoolyard Project Changed How Berkeley
Students Eat. Its Next Goal: To Fight Climate Change by Kathryn Bowen
Sitting in the sun-drenched
dining room of her famed Berkeley
restaurant, Chez Panisse,
Alice Waters explained the philosophical
principle guiding much
of her life since 1944, the year she
was born:
“Our senses are our pathways into
our minds.”
Waters lingered over the point,
which, like her food, is deceptively
simple.
“So,” Waters continued, resolute,
“we need to be educating those
senses that have been dulled by
fast-food culture, indoctrination.
We need to touch, we need to
taste, we need to listen.”
And that education, an edible education,
is what the chef, author,
and activist has attempted to provide
not just to guests at Chez
Panisse, but to a much wider, perhaps
even pickier, swath of the
dining public—children—since
1995, when she launched the
Edible Schoolyard (ESY) Project,
a garden, kitchen, and cafeteria
curriculum at Martin Luther
King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley.
Two-and-a-half decades on,
the organization has partnered
with more than 5,600 schools
around the world.
Now, as ESY launches into its
25th year, Waters and the organization’s
staff talked lessons
learned, challenges and their
most ambitious pledge yet—to
help Americans eat their way out
of climate change.
How It All Began
It’s hard to say exactly where and
when Waters began contemplating
edible education. One
thread traces to 1967, the year
Edible Schoolyard chef teacher Taís Reis leads students in the kitchen classroom at King Middle School.
Photo: Melati Citrawireja
that Waters graduated from UC
Berkeley. Soon after, she learned
about the Montessori pedagogy
from a family friend, according to
her memoir, Coming to My Senses.
Waters was immediately captivated
by the aesthetically conscious,
experiential approach to learning.
“I could never learn in the abstract,
and Montessori was all
about learning through your
senses, learning by doing,” she
wrote.
Waters’ fascination led her to an
internship at a Montessori school
in Berkeley, followed by a training
program in London, and ultimately
back to Berkeley for a
teaching position.
But, as history would have it,
Waters proved to be a far more
effective chef than school teacher,
and she was eventually let go from
her Montessori position. Still, the
experience gave her a guiding
framework that she applied when
Chez Panisse opened in 1971.
“I’ve used my Montessori
principles in running this restaurant,”
Waters said. “There’s flowers.
There’s lights. There’s soft
music. We want people to smell
what’s happening in the kitchen,
so it’s engaging people in almost
an unconscious way.”
As Chez Panisse got its sea legs,
life for Waters proceeded, and,
in 1983, she had a child. Waters
pondered: Where would she go
to school? What were the schools
like in Berkeley? These questions
sparked an extension of the revolution
that Waters began in the
kitchen.
“I was going by King school,
and I noticed how run down
it looked. I thought it was
abandoned. Truly I did. And
I thought: How in this city,
in Berkeley, could this be
happening when we have a great
University of California?’”
Waters voiced her view publicly
to a reporter at the time. Not
long after the story broke, her
phone rang. It was Neil Smith,
then the principal at King
Middle School. “We immediately
had a meeting of the minds,”
Waters recalled. “He said, ‘I
want to do something here. Can
you help me?’”
By then, King Middle School
had, according to Waters, outgrown
its facilities on Rose
Street, which are located just a
half-mile from Chez Panisse.
The buildings, Waters said, were
built to accommodate roughly
500 children; in 1995, though,
the school had a student population
of 1,000 (a number it retains
to this day). Still, King had
an asset—room to grow. “It was
built on 21 acres of land, which
is kind of amazing,” Waters said.
So, while on a visit to the school,
Waters had an epiphany.
“I looked around with Neil
Smith, and I just had this complete
vision, I guess, a kind of
Montessori vision. I thought,
let’s make a garden classroom.”
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