My first experience in Berkeley was a tour of the Edible Schoolyard, an amazing educational garden founded by pioneering foodie Alice Waters and funded through her foundation, the Chez Panisse Foundation. The project started twelve years ago as a collaboration between Alice and the Martin Luther King Junior Middle School (6th, 7th, and 8th grades). The goal was to transform a 1-acre parking lot into a learning garden and kitchen for children (and make it look better– Alice was a neighborhood resident).

Now well-established, the Edible Schoolyard currently teaches 300 students a year from the middle school, and has provided the catalyst for the school district to change its procurement practices for school lunches. The district now purchases local, seasonal, and even organic produce to feed to kids thanks to another program funded by the Chez Panisse Foundation, the School Lunch Initiative.

The Edible Schoolyard is an integral part of the school day and its curriculum. Teachers always accompany their students in the garden, the kitchen– it’s not a drop off program. Every student in the school comes through the program. Kyle Cornforth, the program’s Administrative Coordinator, was our guide for the tour (I’m not sure how they managed it but everyone has great foodie names– the kitchen teacher is named Miss Cook!).

Once a week during Science class, students garden in dozens of beds, growing everything including potatoes, wheat, lavender, kiwis, apples, squash, kale, peas, etc., etc., etc.. Tools are color-coded and the garden is run on a very organized schedule (pictured below). The class opens in the kiwi-covered meeting circle (pictured below), where they discuss the 5 projects for the day. The students then break up into groups, each with 5-7 children and at least one adult. They have about 45-50 minutes to work, then they clean up and return to the circle before the end of class. The class lasts 1 1/2 hours.

The kitchen is adjacent to the garden in a stand alone building that was renovated from an old cafeteria. The warm, bright room now includes multiple cooking and prep stations and several racks of very professional equipment and kitchen accessories. Children visit the kitchen as part of their Humanities classes and learn basic recipes that are related to the places and cultures they are learning and reading about. Each class period, they prepare, cook, eat and clean up a meal or recipe. Like in the garden classes, they are split up into small groups for the majority of the class, working together at a single work station.

There is a pretty good explanation of how they make all of this work– from class scheduling to equipment lists– on their website.

The garden also has some very cool features like this masonry pizza oven, and small scale chicken tractor (yes they also have chickens for eggs).