The Whole Plate: A Real Food Curriculum

When your children leave home, move away from the VFC, which foods will they choose to eat? How do young people form healthy food habits in a world where they are constantly bombarded with slick advertising for fast foods? How can we as a nation turn around the epidemics of childhood obesity and diabetes?

The future of the foods movement – local, sustainable, organic, cooperative – depends on the bellies and minds of today’s youth. Knowing where foods come from, which foods are good for you, and how to prepare them from scratch empowers young people to make healthy decisions for themselves and the planet. For the last 14 years, Jane Siemon has taught a class which covers these crucial topics at the Youth Initiative High School in Viroqua. And now the class has been turned into a curriculum that schools around the country are beginning to adopt.

The Whole Plate: A Return to Real Foods is a 4-Unit course in nutrition, cooking and food systems. Using lectures, exercises, discussions, readings, and, of course, recipes, the curriculum integrates hands-on experiences like preparing and preserving food – canning is covered in Unit 1 – with critical analysis of nutrition topics and food systems. Not only do students learn how to make spring rolls and chocolate birthday cake, they also read Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma and Rachel Carlson’s Silent Spring. Not only do they learn the difference between Omega-3’s and Omega-6’s, they also learn how to prepare fresh trout and make vinaigrettes.

“My goal is that students understand where and how their food is produced and learn to prepare it in a delicious and healthy way,” says Jane Siemon, a founding farmer of CROPP–Organic Valley and a trained dietitian. Through her class, and now through The Whole Plate curriculum, “Students come to understand their role in a complex system of food production and consumption. The relationship they develop with food is not only practical but also nourishes their mind, body and soul.”

The curriculum covers the state nutrition education standards and goes further, discussing the differences between conventional and organic food production, the medicinal qualities of herbs and spices, and more. Plus, the recipes, which develop in complexity of skill and palette through the 4 Units, cover a rich spectrum of cuisine, from comfort standards like mac-and-cheese and pesto pizza to more gourmet offerings like baklava and soto ayam. By the end of each Unit, students can make a complete meal for their parents – in fact, they have to: it’s a course assignment!

Our hope in selling The Whole Plate is not only to raise money for the school but also to spark an educational movement to get kids eating better foods. After our first marketing push this summer, public schools, charter schools, homeschoolers, and even co-ops have decided to purchase and use the curriculum. Beyond the initial sales, the curriculum has caught the eye of several prominent voices in the food movement and is currently being reviewed by Ann Cooper (the Renegade Lunch Lady) and Anna Lappé as well as the Wisconsin DPI and a farm to school consultant in Minnesota. What we’ve found is that there are no comparable curricula available, and that people are hungry for innovative ways to bring foods into the classroom.

At one of the several conferences we’ve attended, the National Farm to School Conference in Detroit, MI, Dawn Hundt and I spoke to hundreds of people about The Whole Plate. The conference was an inspirational gathering of educators, farmers, cafeteria staff, and policy makers, all trying to bring more fresh and local foods into school lunches. There was an abundance of resources and energy being placed in school garden projects. In school gardens kids experience growing fresh foods and form a vital connection to the source of their lunch. Stories abound of the child tasting a raw beet for the first time, smiling, and asking for more. In the “Wild Foods” mini-Unit of The Whole Plate, students have this same experience with uncultivated super-foods like nettle and dandelion greens. These primary encounters with foods are essential to shaping our food consciousness. But what happens after the garden?

In our view, schools (and co-ops!) need to build on those primary encounters in the garden and confront food anew in the kitchen and the classroom. Learning how to cook and learning about the history and politics of the food system are empowering – yes, empowering – to students. With this perspective on the food system, students can align their food choices with their deepest values – and make dinner on their own!

On our way back from Detroit, we stopped in at the Catherine Ferguson Academy, a high school for pregnant teens and teenaged mothers in Detroit. Behind their dark brick school building, which houses both the high school and day care, was a 4-acre school farm, complete with a horse pasture, bee hives, bunnies, goats, a duck pond, an orchard, compost heap and numerous raised beds in full bloom. Being in their garden, surrounded by scores of abandoned overgrown lots, reminded me more of Vernon County than Motown, and gave me a strange sense of hope in the future: Even when things break down, people can still feed themselves...if they learn how.

Read more about the curriculum on the website:
www.thewholeplate.org