Whether we call it “nature deficit disorder,” as writer Richard Louv termed the condition in his excellent Last Child in the Woods, or merely view it as a lost aspect of childhood, today’s youth suffer a disconnect from the natural world. Many kids lack an awareness of the natural forces that bring us asparagus in May and apples in fall. Divorced from the food cycles that have shaped human existence for millennia, children expect to eat whatever they want, whenever they want.
Reclaiming our natural heritage will take time. It will also take ingenuity since children’s worlds are largely shaped by computer devices, as well as parental and institutional fears of the outside. In the long run, though, when children grow up understanding how food comes to their tables, they will become the next generation of aware parents, working diligently to provide their children with healthy, local food.
As evidenced by these three stories, kids will, in fact, return to nature and locally-grown, organic food given the right incentives. Teachers, farmers, local food advocates and everyone else can begin projects to bring nature and healthy agriculture back into young lives.
Robert Pierce's Sprouts
On a muggy Tuesday morning in early July, Khadjiah and Carlos oversee a group of high-school kids weeding and watering their onions and cabbage. The quiet work of hose and hoes is interrupted by tiny skirmishes between gardeners. Overall, though, the group remains focused on their labor.
In their second year in the program, Khadjiah and Carlos learn supervisory skills with the “Sprouts,” Robert Pierce’s teen urban agriculture team. While their peers sleep in or work typical teen jobs, the Sprouts arrive at the south Madison acreage ready to nurse their crops into health, with a goal of selling their produce at local markets and a senior center, learning real world skills under Robert’s tutelage.
Young people in Madison rarely find agriculture their calling. While some of the Sprouts sought Robert out, others had earned community service time. Some Sprouts enter the program with limited interpersonal skills; some have no idea how to count money or make change. Very few know how to plant and care for vegetables.
Robert, a lifelong Madisonian, identifies one of his life missions as giving the least advantaged youth—particularly African-American males—a chance to build constructive, rewarding lives. Perhaps a backyard garden to feed their family will result from this training; others might choose careers in agriculture.With 35 years of experience growing organically, Pierce’s knowledge base is broad and deep, and he wants to pass it on.
Robert measures the Sprouts’ success in many ways. Certainly agricultural skills matter, along with sales and marketing. In fact, this year’s group takes classes to build business skills in classroom space donated by the Madison Media Institute. But Robert places more importance on the life skills the kids develop. Youth enter the program with poor work habits, low self-esteem and miserable eating habits. Over time, they find inner strength as they build work ethics and see the results of their labors. And they start to question the factory food that permeates their lives. The food they take home and the snacks Robert provides— watermelon and the juiciest of peaches the morning I visited— introduce the kids to vivid flavors and the differences that freshness makes. Khadjiah reads the labels of the food she eats now, recognizing that some of the chemical flavorings make her feel yucky.
Khadjiah’s success almost died on the vine this year as Robert found himself battling with Common Wealth Development (CWD), the nonprofit overseeing the grant paying the kids’ wages, to determine who would join the 2010 Sprouts. CWD said that to increase their statistics, Robert should have a completely new group of kids; Robert insisted that Carlos and Khadjiah return, arguing that a single summer will not turn a life around. At Milwaukee’s Growing Power, run by Robert’s mentor, Will Allen, kids often start working at age nine and stay through college, earning scholarships to make higher education affordable. Robert, now directing Madison’s arm of Growing Power, wants his Sprouts to earn similar benefits.
Robert convinced CWD to bring back Khadjiah and Carlos as student leaders. Both demonstrate maturity and attitudes of successful workers, leading their peers in the field through example. Unfortunately, the grants supporting this program may dry up in the next few years, making Robert wonder how he can keep his group going if he cannot pay guaranteed wages. He may resort to direct market sales for their incomes, though he can only guess how many teen farmers that money might support.
The Harvest Challenge:
Laurel High School Takes Local Food to the Nation
In Vernon County, the Farm to School initiative brought to life the Harvest Challenge, a menu planning and cooking contest for high school students highlighting the many delicious benefits of including fresh, nutritious and locally-produced foods in school lunch programs.
Competing lunch menus must meet all National School Lunch Program regulations, utilize both USDA commodity products and local products, show culinary and aesthetic sophistication and taste delicious—and all for under $1.00 food cost! Adults find this incredibly challenging, so these rural teens decided to find out for themselves just how difficult it really is and hopefully prove that a great school lunch is indeed possible.
In its first year, four high school cooking teams (Westby, Viroqua, Laurel, Youth Initiative) spent weeks preparing their menus, conducting nutritional analysis and going “back to the drawing board” with chef mentors before finally serving a panel of eight judges, approximately 200 attendees and their own student peers at the Harvest Challenge Gala. These three categories also describe the three voting bodies and the three awards to be given out that evening. Every menu was incredible and delicious, students presented themselves professionally and judges labored over nuances.What happened was not expected—Laurel High School, a 30-student charter of the Viroqua school district, won all three awards!
Then—just for fun—the Laurel Harvest Challenge team entered the first Cooking Up Change healthy school competition, sponsored by the Healthy Schools Campaign in conjunction with the National Farm to Cafeteria Conference. Another round of surprise and jubilation ensued when the team was notified they had been selected as one of only three teams (chosen from 13) to compete at the Cooking Up Change event in Detroit for a distinguished panel of 21 judges, including Christie Vilsack, wife of the current Secretary of Agriculture, and Karen Duncan, wife of the Secretary of Education.
Although the Laurel team did not take first place, all of the competing students were winners. They spent two days at a national conference, fed over 600 people from their winning menus, spoke in front of that huge crowd, and received a standing ovation for providing leadership in their community. But the greatest outcome was the instant connections between the competing youth—urban and rural, culturally, ethnically.
No one had to tell these young folks they were in this together. Currently, Laurel students are planning their first visit to see new friends on the Tohono O’odham reservation, the winning team, to learn about local food from the perspective of the O’odham people in the Southwestern U.S. landscape.
“It was an incredible experience to be in front of everyone at the conference,” said team member Anders Lewis. “But it was also a great chance to thank them for caring about what kids across this country eat everyday. Kids are learning to care too, and that is the most important aspect to change.”
Ironworks Cafe: Youth Getting Down to Business
“I don’t know another café-type restaurant in Madison that serves as much local food as we do,” claims Lee Davenport, baking and catering coordinator for the Ironworks Café. In its second year, the café— housed in and a key provider to the Goodman Community Center— helps local youth develop skills in the culinary arts. Eight to ten teens work any given week, learning to prepare and serve food while managing the business. During the school year, Vocationally Integrated Pathway (VIP), one of the Madison school district’s alternative programs for high schoolers, helps staff the café during school hours.
Lee, a 14-year veteran of culinary arts, laughs as she tells about a recent tomato transplanting session. The café workers oversee two plots in the community garden across the street. Out of touch with nature, the kids, afraid to touch the plants, demanded gloves and met insect whines with whines of their own. These kids had to step outside their comfort zones as they became acquainted with the realities of food production.
So far this season, workers have raided the gardens for broccoli, basil, radishes, kale, peas, collards, herbs and tomatoes. One diner warned me that the Café has a highly unpredictable menu, a quality she’s eventually found charming. That’s the way local food works, though. Madison gardens don’t pump out much asparagus in August, no matter how badly we might crave it.
The folks running the Café work to build bridges with area restaurants, hoping to place their volunteers in paid positions once they can demonstrate strong skills. In a greatly depressed market where teen unemployment rates have never been higher, volunteer experiences can help them get hired.
The first culinary training “graduate” at Ironworks, Raine Streicher, has begun her career with the Underground Food Collective, a hip start-up catering business in Madison, and plans to attend Madison Area Technical College’s culinary arts program this fall.
Planting the Seeds
These three programs show that youth are taking strong steps to reconnect with nature and agriculture when given the opportunities to do so, some needing a little prodding, others chomping at the bit.
Robert Pierce keenly points out to his Sprouts that African culture has always been focused on food; food celebrations abound in the oldest of traditions, indeed centering on the growing season’s bountiful harvest, and continue to this day. Given the opportunity, some young people— likely the leaders of future food celebrations—will take up the shovel and spatula, proud to partake in a most human of traditions, the tradition of feeding ourselves well.
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