Edible Schoolyard- A Book Review

Alice Waters’ book Edible Schoolyard is about the Edible Schoolyard project, founded over ten years ago by Waters with the help of a small group of teachers, volunteers and a school principle. The project is housed by an urban middle school in Berkeley, California. An important thing about the Edible Schoolyard is that it has become the incubator for Waters’ notion of an ‘Edible Education’, the integration of academic subjects with traditional food skills including growing and cooking healthy food.

Edible Schoolyard is more like a photo essay than a conventional text. At least half of the book’s pages are images of the garden, kitchen and their child/youth caretakers. All photos are taken by National Geographic photographer, David Liitschwager.

Waters begins the book with a brief autobiographical sketch. I was surprised to find out that Waters was actually a teacher before becoming the owner of her famous restaurant, Chez Panisse. In her early twenties she taught for four years until her visit to Paris where she describes being hit by a thunderbolt: “French food and the way it anchored French family life to an agriculture community and even to the seasons was a revelation to me” (5). Upon returning from her trip she began teaching herself to cook French food. It was not long until she left teaching and opened Chez Panisse. Eventually she returned to education not as a teacher but as the founder of the Edible Schoolyard project and as an advocate of the concept of “Edible Education”- a “hopeful and delicious way of revitalizing public education” (6).

 The book chronicles the development of the Edible Schoolyard from its early planning stages to its present state. Built on an abandoned acre at the far uphill edge of a school near Waters’ restaurant, the garden annually produces over 1100 pounds of vegetables alone including carrots, chard, beets, broccoli, bok choi, tatsoi, potatoes, onions, green beans, spinach, cucumbers, basil, thyme, scallions, lemons, radishes, fennel, cilantro, cabbage and twelve varieties of apples. Chickens are also raised and a nursery for seedling start, a complex composting structure and a large new kitchen have been added to the project.

The garden is a central component of the “Edible Education” concept. The key principles of an “Edible Education” are as follows:

Food is an Academic Subject

A school garden, kitchen and cafeteria are integral to the core academic mission of the school, so that ecology and gastronomy help bring alive every subject, from reading and writing to science and art.

*Waters notes that humanities teachers have grown to love incorporating lessons about traditional food skills to enrich their classes. For example, while teaching about social hierarchy in Medieval Europe, children will divide into groups representing Lords and serfs. The children who are the lords get the best fruits and vegetables and other richer food while the children acting as serfs receive only roots and grains. Another example, for a unit on Neolithic times, the children are taken to the kitchen to learn about hand-grinding grain berries in a stone and mortar and then make fresh bread.

School Provides Lunch for Every Child

From preschool through high school, every child is served a wholesome delicious meal, every day. Good food is a right not a privilege. Providing it every day brings children into a positive relationship with their health, their community, and the environment.

Schools Support Farms

School cafeterias buy seasonally fresh food from local sustainable farms and ranches, not only for reasons of health and education, but as a way of strengthening local food economies.

Children Learn by Doing

Hands-on education, in which the children themselves do the work in the vegetable beds and beds and on the cutting boards, awakens their senses and opens their minds, both to their core academic subjects and to the world around them.

Beauty is Language

A beautifully prepared environment, where deliberate thought has gone into everything from the garden paths to the plates on the tables, communicates to children that we care about them. 

(Taken directly from the book, 43).

Waters highlights some key benefits of an “Edible Education” to children and society at large. First, Waters talks about the need to teach children to slow down and eat mindfully. She writes about the mainstream school lunch system where children often only have access to fast food and no designated eating area. This leads children to eat quickly and in isolation.

Second, Waters notes the important health benefits of an “Edible Education”. Diabetes, heart disease and other diet-related health problems are on the rise. Studies have shown that people are more likely to eat a range of fruits and vegetables if they have participated in producing them. Waters includes a story of normally picky children happily eating kale that they grew themselves.

Third, providing children with the opportunity to grow food will allow them to learn for themselves why saving open space for farming is vitally important for human health and happiness, the wellbeing of our communities and the environment. As we know in BC, the loss of farmland to development is a significant problem. Creating a generation of children who are connected to the land and strong believers in the value of local food production may lead to policies that strengthen the Agricultural Land Reserve, or its equivalent in other Canadian provinces.

Finally, Waters argues that children really love to learn how to grow and cook food.

“All you have to do to be convinced is come see them for yourself- come watch children from all walks of life making salads with ten different kinds of lettuce, or patting together Indian samosas from potatoes and onions and garlic they’ve dug with their own fingers. All it takes is the kind of walks I make a few times a year, from my restaurant down to the Edible Schoolyard for yet another look at kids covered in red raspberry juice, foraging among the vines, or elbow-deep in the dirt, planting amaranth seedlings, or laughing and talking around a kitchen table while they shell peas for their friends” (41).

The amazing photos Waters includes in the book help to support this notion that children are very happy to learn traditional food skills. Please see a selection of these images below.

Waters, Alice. Edible Schoolyard. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 2008.