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$24.95
One of America's most influential chefs, Alice Waters created a revolution in 1971 when she introduced local, organic fare at Chez Panisse, her restaurant in Berkeley, California. Twenty-five years later, she and a group of teachers and volunteers turned over long-abandoned soil at an urban middle school in Berkeley and planted the Edible Schoolyard.
The schoolyard has since grown into a universal idea of Edible Education that integrates academics with growing, cooking, and sharing wholesome, delicious food. With inspiring images of the garden and kitchen—and their young caretakers—Edible Schoolyard is at once a visionary model for sustainable farming and childhood nutrition, and a call to action for schools across the country.
In the book's foreword, Alice Waters shares her motivation for starting this revolution in sustainable, edible education. This month we're pleased to feature the full excerpt of her foreword in our newsletter. You can also look inside the book on our Web site, and watch a video about the Edible Schoolyard project.
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Foreword by Alice Waters
I have had exactly two professions in my life. I spent four years teaching school, in my early twenties, and I've spent all of the intervening thirty-seven years running the one restaurant I own, in Berkeley, California. I got into teaching after college, when I moved to England and trained in Montessori education. I was a fervent student, and I loved Montessori's ideas about nourishing the whole child and encouraging children to learn by doing things with their own bodies and hands, by touching and tasting and smelling in an ongoing education of the senses. Then I found a job at the Berkeley Montessori School, a quiet little place at the corner of Shattuck Avenue and Francisco Street. Berkeley was in a period of enormous social upheaval, so it was an exciting time; every parent and teacher seemed to feel that we could bring about a more just society by working togeth
er. And yet no sooner had I settled into the job than I took a trip to Paris and felt a very different thunderbolt strike my life. French food, and the way it anchored French family life to an agricultural community and even to the seasons, was a revelation to me. Cooking dinners back in Berkeley, I began teaching myself the basics of French cuisine and dreaming of a restaurant where all my friends could come for tasty food and talk about politics—such as the right way to bring up our children and how to share this small p***t. So I left teaching; I wasn't patient enough anyway. Then, with a few friends and partners, and the exuberant naiveté of youth, I opened a restaurant in an old house, a few blocks from the school. We called it Chez Panisse in honor of a beloved character from an old French movie, and we began sniffing around the back roads in search of delicious ingredients like the ones I'd tasted in France. The search wasn't easy, but we soon found ours
elves on the doorsteps of organic farmers and ranchers and dairymen. Over the years, we built up a network of these suppliers, and that network came to define our food and our philosophy. That, in turn, led me back to education, and to the story I want to tell in this book—about a Berkeley middle school, and the creation of something called the Edible Schoolyard. It began as a way to bring that school into the local food network, so that nearby farmers might share their beautiful food with school children, and the school cafeteria, in turn, might help support local farmers. The Edible Schoolyard has been evolving for twelve long years now, and it has become the most important thing in my life. It has also served as the incubator for the universal idea that I term "Edible Education"—a hopeful and delicious way of revitalizing public education.
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