CURATED
FROM...
A Place of Learning
by Doing
“Honestly, it could have used
more olive oil.”
“Maybe a little more crisp.”
“It was okay, but not: ‘Oh My God.’”
“You didn’t put salt in it!”
Are these the takes of discerning
guests at Chez Panisse? Or
critiques from its studied cooks,
huddled over some new dish?
No, these are the honed opinions
of seventh graders at King
Middle School, dissecting a kalepesto
bruschetta that they’d spent
roughly 90 minutes preparing
during a class in the ESY kitchen.
The students’ assembly of that
bruschetta demonstrates a similar
culinary confidence, one that
belies their age: a diminutive girl
with spiraled hair eagerly grates
Parmesan; three boys in athleisure
huddle around an oven toasting
bread. One student pounds
garlic in a mortar and pestle, while
another liberally adds olive oil
that cascades into the receptacle.
“You’re seeing this program twodecades
plus in, it wasn’t always
like this,” said senior chef teacher
and kitchen operations manager
Esther Cook with a laugh. “Early
on, it was crazy! It was so fun because
it was new. We probably
made every mistake in the book
and still managed to feel successful,
because we knew that what
we were doing was landing the
students in a really positive way.”
Cook is at once affable and earnest,
with a name that well suits
her profession. Before she began
at ESY, Cook worked for years
as a chef in the Bay Area, which
is how she heard about Market
Cooking for Kids, a program
hosted by CUESA, in which local
chefs led youth-targeted tastings
and cooking projects.
“I was doing that twice a month for
four years, and I started realizing
how much I was looking forward
to those days. And what exciting
work it felt like,” Cook said.
So when a position with ESY
opened up in 1997, Cook jumped
at the opportunity. She got the
job, and that year, Waters and
“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.”
Smith launched a kitchen classroom
at King to complement the
garden curriculum.
Now, ESY at King is a veritable operation.
“We have 10 classes a week,
roughly 30 students per class… it’s
well over 250 people a week in each
kitchen and garden class,” said
Geoff Palla, the operations manager
and senior garden teacher at
King. Which means that, all told,
King’s ESY teachers see about 500
students a week, or roughly half the
school’s population of sixth, seventh,
and eighth graders.
Like Cook, Palla radiates an educator’s
energy, and comes to ESY
with ample applied experience.
Before joining the organization
in 2008, Palla ran his own farm
for about five years, and worked
on several others. “I came into
this job identifying as a grower,
coming from a deep agricultural
background, and I would say I
blossomed into a teacher,” Palla
reflected, a transformation that
he attributes to professional development
at ESY.
“I really believe in working with
youth, and particularly this age
group—middle school —with respect
and kindness and patience,”
Palla said. It’s an approach that
takes assiduity, especially considering
the volume of students that
Cook and Palla oversee. One key
to their success, Palla observed,
is the team’s devoted staff, which
comprises three full-time chef
teachers, three full-time garden
teachers, a part-time garden specialist,
and a teaching and research
fellow. But they have other
strategies, too, that have allowed
ESY at King to flourish.
“There’s a lot of routines that
we’ve designed in order to make
classroom experiences efficient,”
Palla said. For instance, every 90-
minute kitchen class commences
with a chef ’s meeting, when
a teacher explains the dish that
students will prepare. And in the
garden, students begin by congregating
under a wooden ramada to
volunteer for positions harvesting,
cultivating, or composting that day
(the process is surprisingly democratic).
“After that flow of the class
experience is dialed in, kids know
what to expect. Then we can go
deeper,” said Palla.
These routines, Cook and Palla
explained, also facilitate a natural
progression as students move
through grade levels at King.
Sixth graders in their first semester
focus on familiarization with
systems, staff, the sequence of the
class, and the connection between
garden and kitchen.
“When they come back in the
spring, that’s when we start to
make the academic connections
to what they’re doing in the classroom,”
said Cook.
One popular ESY series, she
noted, covers the Silk Road, in
which children learn about Chinese,
Indian, and Roman influences
by making rice pudding
(the lesson plan and corresponding
recipe is available online, like
myriad ESY materials).
When students reach the eighth
grade, Palla said, “there’s much
more autonomy.” Cook added:
“By eighth grade, we’re asking and
raising a lot more questions than
we’re answering.”
Those questions are posed as
part of a series called Debate
Plate, which covers topics that
are tough, timely, and important
to consider—for individuals of
any age: How do your food choices
affect your own personal health?
How do they affect the environment?
How do they affect farm
workers? Is access to healthy, clean
food a right or a privilege?
The idea is to have students in
their final year at King “think of
themselves as consumers, and to
understand that the choices that
they make as consumers have repercussions
out in their own
lives and in the real world,” Cook
said. Debate Plate’s analytical
component brings the entire experience—
growing and preparing
and eating food—full circle.
22 TOMORROW'S CHILD © �� OCTOBER 2020 �� WWW.MONTESSORI.ORG
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