by Lorie Hammond, PhD, Academic Director
The fall festival is underway. Children are playing everywhere amongst lights twinkling on grapevines, a children’s art fair, musical storytelling by That Dirt Feelin’, and our centerpiece: a three-hundred-pound pumpkin. The food table is laden harvest-style with a local, seasonal meal that even the fussiest child can’t pass up. Apple-glazed chicken, roasted butternut squash, cheese ravioli, spinach salad with goat cheese and pecans, and a sweet potato salad are all home made by school chef Julie House. Also available are her pomegranate spritzer (check the School News column for recipe!) and the standard hot apple cider.
Daily, Peregrine School feeds a delicious local and seasonal meal to fifty children and ten teachers and staff. Weekly, Chef Julie shops at the farmers’ market to buy produce and looks for the freshest, tastiest food available. If the schoolyard garden tended by the students and teachers has a harvest, she incorporates that first. School families also contribute, as do the organic farms at UC Davis, where some of our parents work. "Kids will eat fresh fruits and vegetables if they taste good," says Chef Julie. "Produce out of season sets kids up for sour oranges. And local food not only tastes better but supports small, local farmers and saves transportation energy."
But the Peregrine focus on food goes beyond lunch alone. Each classroom has a garden of seasonal foods; these gardens contribute to the lunch and snack program, show kids where their food comes from, and teach life cycles and other science concepts. Kids compost their lunch each day, and watch their compost ―cooking‖ as a regular part of the gardening program. Peregrine teacher Susan Maxwell, a former state park naturalist, has led a unit on pollinators that allowed kids to think about beneficial and harmful insects, and to plant a mini-garden of native plants to attract pollinator friends. Our Escuelita class adopted a praying mantis found in the garden, and have been feeding their new pet with cabbage moth caterpillars from the garden’s broccoli.
Kids made scarecrows to fend off the numerous crows in our area, and then whimsically created tiny scarecrows in the hopes of alarming the cabbage worms! Now the students have started to worry about the crows themselves. "What will they eat if they don’t eat our gardens?" they ask. Through growing the garden and protecting it from pests, kids begin to see the complexity of the food chain, to see the needs of the birds and insects as well as the needs of the plants they want to eat.
In this manner, an understanding of ecology is developed on a daily basis through real experience with plants and animals. In addition to our work with the school gardens, Peregrine classes make regular trips to the gardens at Village Homes and the university’s agricultural fields across the street, as well as to the Center for Land-Based Learning in Winters, where they can transfer their knowledge of gardening to larger farming endeavors, and also feed the chickens! At Peregrine School, place-based and agricultural education is the center of the curriculum, not an add-on.
Julie, our chef, likes working at Peregrine because it is "very interactive. I get feedback right away." She creates many "taster" foods, like spaghetti squash. "I don’t take it personally if kids don’t like it, but a few kids always like it who didn’t expect to." Our goal is to broaden the kids’ diets, one food at a time. And it is working. Since Julie came on as cook, there have been few leftovers.
Julie has the right background for leading this combination of cooking and science education. She began with an undergraduate chemistry degree, and worked for three years as a chemist before going to the California Culinary Academy in San Francisco. After cooking corporate lunches and catering events, she worked at Revolution Foods, a centralized producer of healthy school lunches sent to Bay Area schools. At Peregrine, Julie can make the farm-to- table connection complete, working with the children on the whole process of planting, cooking, eating, and composting.
Julie is willing to share her recipe for pomegranate spritzer! Check the School News column to learn how to make it at home.
