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Isiaiah throwing vegetable scraps into the compost pile.
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There are few, if any, gourmet restaurants in Ward 8. But there is a place where you can find cucumbers stuffed with black and gold hummus, Moroccan carrot salad, snow peas with miso-almond dip, lemon curd, rosemary cheddar bread and mint-ginger tea to wash it all down. This food is just a sampling of the scrumptious items on the menu. But you can only partake of this fine cuisine if you are a member of a special group, affectionately known as the Garden Club.
The Harvest for Health Department of the Capital Area Food Bank (CAFB) has developed From the Ground Up in the Community, a community-based, educational program working with low-income youth at Children of Mine Center Inc. (CMC), called the Garden Club. All of the cooks for the exotic edibles are the children serviced by CMC, some of whom have never used a blender or a whisk. The goal of the program is to encourage children to eat fresh, seasonal produce through a hands-on urban gardening experience. The children are introduced to fresh produce and learn basic gardening skills and basic cooking.
Susan Toppings, program director, and Juliet Harris, garden intern, run the program and plant the garden, which is filled with edible flowers, winter wheat, herbs, beans, sweet peppers, string beans, cherry tomatoes, mixed salad greens, lettuce, chard, Gherkin cucumbers and American cucumbers, sugar snap peas, fennel and an assortment of herbs used for cooking and making herb teas.
Toppings says that Hannah Hawkins, the director of Children of Mine, is an angel in the community and the reason the program exists. CMC is a member agency of the CAFB and receives food donations for feeding the homeless and providing meals for community children seven days a week. “From those conversations at those pick-ups, she would say, ‘Hey the kids at our center would really benefit from nutrition education, and they would really benefit from a garden. They need to know that food is important and that it is good for them,’” says Toppings. Toppings and Harris created the curriculum and recipes, which are now compiled in a cookbook, used in the program.
Mondays begin with an introduction to the veggie of week. Children visit the vegetable in the garden and then try three recipes made with the vegetable. Recipes are eliminated using a voting process. Modeled after American Idol, children get to vote, using newly acquired vocabulary, such as “no, thanks, too spicy, or too sour.” Children are not allowed to describe food as “nasty,” though Harris says that a peanut sauce, chutney dish was described as looking like “diarrhea,” and the salad topped with Asian pears, pecans and feta cheese received a unanimous thumbs-down because the children said, “It stinks.”
Tuesdays are garden days, which focus on planting, watering, weeding and harvesting the garden. Art is incorporated through activities which beautify the garden, such as creating signage for the tomato garden and creating tiles for the garden sink. Thursdays, the most popular day for the children, are cook-and-eat day. Visitors and volunteers to the garden are surprised by the complexity of the recipes that the children prepare, including salads with strawberry vinaigrette, red cabbage slaw, carrot-corn salad, sesame noodles with snow peas, and spicy cilantro chutney.
Harris says that through these culinary adventures the children have become more confident. “I’ve seen that they have become more confident, and many have come back to me saying that they cooked new things at home, like cucumber salads.”
The children are also developing a discriminating palate. “They remember the flavors,” says Harris. “We made a noodle dish with snow peas, and we put cilantro in it. So next week when we had gazpacho, when it was cucumber week, Roneyce could identify the flavor. She could remember the taste and how it smelled. I feel that this is taking it from one thing to the next.”
Cooking isn’t the only lesson the children learn, according to Toppings. In order to work together, the children must learn the importance of teamwork and showing up on time. If the children arrive one minute past the starting time of 4 p.m., they don’t get in. “We have to be strict. That is one of the life lessons you have to learn. You’re either on time or you are out of the game,” says Toppings. “So often in low-income communities, people are depicted as never being able to keep an appointment on time or never being able to show up for an interview on time. This is a life-long lesson. So if we waiver on something as simple as showing up at 4 o’clock, we are not doing them a service, we’re doing them a disservice.”
Though still a pilot program, Garden Club is a success. There are just as many boys as girls, and the children often line up well before starting time to make sure they get one of the 10 slots available for the class. |
