Keywords

9.1 Introduction: Creating a Food-Based Curriculum

At the Dalton School in New York City (a private K-12 institution founded in 1919 by Helen Parkhurst), our curriculum is intentionally action based, asking students to engage their academic subjects both in the classroom and in the field. As the school reached its centennial, many faculty members actively sought to re-examine and reaffirm the pedagogical principles of our guiding philosophy, articulated in our founding document, Education on the Dalton Plan. In this way, we are re-engaging the practices of student-centered and project-based learning (Parkhurst 1922) and actively supporting areas of student interest as they pertain to the educational experience and beyond. Within this larger context, “food ” has emerged as a locus of active learning and direct engagement. In our food-based curricula, the interdisciplinary opportunities abound. Throughout our K-12 program, courses and student clubs are emerging that focus on food . In our First Program (K-3), students address issues of sustainability in general, visit farms, learn about the growing cycle, and create their own farmers’ market in the spring. In the middle school, a “Science Technology Engineering Arts and Math” (STEAM ) summer camp provides students with the opportunity to take a class on design and production of green walls and grow their own food . The high school welcomes students with a variety of examples including a Food Club, which oversees the work of our student-run Community-Supported Agriculture (CSA) serving 100 Dalton families, and addresses issues of food security in the New York metropolitan area, through political action and social service. From biology to history to sustainable engineering, food is increasingly a topic of intellectual discourse and student-initiated action at the Dalton School.

At the Dalton School, urban agriculture finds its clearest expression in food-based environmental education, and the overarching goals can be summed up in a few significant ways. For one, this approach to education promotes the development of personal responsibility and a heightened awareness of the sustainable stewardship of the land, food production, and eco-literacy. Furthermore, food-based education provides an entry into the complex and rich ecological history of humans’ engagement with the natural world. Following the words of Aldo Leopold from his A Sand County Almanac (1949), at the heart of this experience is an appreciation of a land ethic as a living ethic : “an ethic dealing with human’s relation to land and to the animals and plants which grow upon it.” In this way, food-based environmental education has become more and more incorporated into our students’ curricular and extracurricular life at Dalton, and will, we hope, serve as the basis for the cultivation of essential life values and the promotion of sustainable well-being. The purpose of this chapter is to highlight what has been happening at Dalton in the realm of food-based environmental education and to indicate some plans for future growth.

It is difficult to identify the exact moment in which food-based environmental education began to gain traction at the Dalton School. The learning environment at Dalton is best characterized as a dynamic one in which students and faculty actively share ideas and interests. Topical concerns play a great role in the everyday discourse, and the invitation to innovate and to express freely ideas and interests inheres in the “Dalton Plan” as codified by Dalton’s founder Helen Parkhurst in her Education on the Dalton Plan (1922). The intense interest in food emerged roughly five years ago and reflected the broader cultural concerns with food production, consumption, and preparation. As food became more of a concern within popular culture and the everyday experiences of our students, there emerged a growing curiosity to learn more about the world of food and to better understand the character and specific nature of our food pathways. A colloquium on food offered numerous opportunities to engage in food-themed issues ranging from keynote talks given by Mario Batali, Dan Barber, Eric Schlosser, and representatives from the Slow Food movement to workshops led by farmers, food purveyors, butchers, activists, and food writers. In the wake of the success of the colloquium, Kevin Slick developed a senior elective on food , entitled You Are What You Eat: A Critical Investigation Into Food , to reflect student interest and to further the understanding of food as the site of intense ecological, agricultural, cultural, political, and economic forces. The words of Wendell Berry (noted farmer, writer, and activist) provided us (and continue to do so) with a crucial and endearing point of departure: “A significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes” (Berry 2009, p. 234). Even the most cursory examination of popular media from books to blog, from television shows to the proliferation of farmers’ markets and farm-to-table restaurants would suggest we live in an age in which we have arrived at a kind of culinary enlightenment. The pleasures of eating can be profound. However, we also live in an age in which growing numbers of the population in the United States (and elsewhere in the world) can be defined as both overweight and undernourished (Claasen et al. 2016). The abundance of seemingly diverse consumer goods to be found in the average supermarket belies the centrality of corn and soy as main ingredients. Variety gives way to uniformity. “Organic” operates as a potent signifier of pastoral values and earth-friendly practices, but the reality speaks to a far less idyllic paradigm of industrial production. In this way, food production is intimately linked to environmental degradation (Ritchie 2020).

The overarching goals of the aforementioned senior elective on food are quite simple: to achieve a greater awareness of the source and character of our food in order to better understand the environmental impact of our choices. We are constantly being told what to eat and how much, but this information is often conflicting, misleading, and just plain strange. Inspired by the many writings of Wendell Berry, Michael Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007) offers one of the seminal efforts to unearth the origins of our daily sustenance; indeed, to develop a more accurate consciousness of food culture, food production, and food pathways. Using his own personal experience as the basis to support his assertion that “the way we eat represents our most profound engagement with the natural world,” Pollan (2007, p. 10) proposes to follow the food chains that sustain us. From the industrial, to the pastoral, and to contemporary efforts toward hunting and gathering, Pollan’s work explores each food pathway in equal measure and posits the radical distinctions between them. However, Pollan was quick to remind us of Berry’s elemental truth behind every practice: “eating is an agricultural act” (Pollan 2007, p. 11). To this end, we are encouraged to consider even the Twinkie: even it finds its humble origins on the farm (in the form of corn, many times removed from the actual plant).

9.2 Putting Food at the Center of Environmental Education

A critical examination of food begins with the most elemental questions. What is food ? How have we come to eat what we eat? What are the various factors influencing our choices? What informs our decision making process? If we return to Pollan’s Omnivore’s Dilemma (2007), we realize these questions have no ready and singular answer, and the difficulty of answering these questions speaks to a unique condition of our historical moment. To be certain, we are in need of guidance. In short, food-based environmental education uses food to explore the historical, ethical, scientific/ biological, cultural, aesthetic, political and economic forces shaping what we eat (Gordon and Hunt 2019). This approach to education and the experience of being on the farm afford a context in which we can understand food production, preparation, and consumption as elements of a rich and complex ecosystem. To be alive is to engage in the food system. How we engage and why we do so is a matter of consciousness and conscientiousness. When it comes to the choices we make when we eat, food-based environmental education helps us explore the convergence of the local and the global, urban and rural, and the past and the present. We can more readily highlight and explore eating as a profound engagement with (or alienation from) the natural world indicated by our food consciousness and current practices of production and consumption.

Our historical investigation into food is one of recent vintage: we live in an age of amazing food choices and consciousness. However, we examine how there is no singular shared attitude toward food : despite the attention paid to the local, organic, and artisanal, popular attitudes toward food are heterogeneous and conflicting and even polarizing. Food , something so seemingly elemental, carries mixed connotations. Melanie Rehak (2015), in a recent article summed up this conundrum very effectively:

To me, all of this signifies that we’re living in a kind of post-food world … we’re now living in an era when food , whether it’s mass-produced or carefully grown on a tiny plot, always represents a larger concept – not just something to eat. What used to be a pile of vegetables is now an emblem, and we can never go back to the time before it was so.

Furthermore, conscientious eating is paramount but must be done critically. The locavore ethos has had great success and has helped bring about a shift in consciousness, but it is also important to rethink the farm-to-table impulse to include a more expansive view of the ecological setting of food production. Dan Barber’s The Third Plate (2014) prompts a more nuanced investigation of the component parts of a truly sustainable food system which in turn is best understood as a web of relationships within an integrated whole encompassing growers and consumers, natural systems and cultural practices. In this way, we emphasize the “culture” in agriculture as a unified system of thought and memories, limits and actions.

In the same way that our emphasis on global citizenship prepares our students for an ever-evolving and exciting future, an emphasis on the “local” can also encourage and promote a deep understanding of the individual’s role in a larger community and society. Food-based learning centered on the farm or other immediate means of food production, the epitome of the local, can help support the development of a strong sense of civic identity and responsibility, as well. The concept of sustainability encourages students to think holistically and critically about the environment and their role as conscientious consumers and producers. As a result, students can then see themselves as agents of change and effective decision-makers. In short, everyone eats and the food system is complex, and the emphasis on local production is an added feature of sustainability education. The Farm-Based Education Association expresses many of these beliefs below:

We believe that farm-based education is among the most effective and promising forms of environmental, experiential, and place-based education because of the innate ability in all people to connect to farms.

We believe that farm-based experiences promote life values by relating to the social, moral, cognitive, and emotional aspects of the human experience.

We believe that hands-on learning on farms builds confidence, self-awareness, and individual and collective responsibility which leads to the sustainable stewardship of our world.

In The Pleasures of Eating, Wendell Berry (2009) provides the reader with seven principles (p. 232) (serving as guidelines) for navigating contemporary food choices which will be outlined in the remainder of the chapter. Berry inveighs against the industrial food system in this essay (and many others), but his intentions are to liberate us from what appears to be a fixed dependence on impersonal and (seemingly) monolithic systems of food production. There is great optimism in his work, and he seeks to demonstrate alternatives. Therefore, these guiding principles ground us again inescapably in the world, and our responses in turn indicate how we seek to understand and use the world by the choices we make.

  1. 1.

    “Participate in food production to the extent that you can … ”

The emphasis on food and food production is becoming increasingly popular and seen as vital to a student’s awareness of self and social and historical place. One recent study of farm-to-school programs indicated the success of these programs in terms of supporting an understanding of long-term sustainability of food systems, raising awareness of a variety of health and environmental issues, and promoting experiential learning (Joshi et al. 2008). Additionally, in a study designed to assess its program’s effectiveness, the Edible Schoolyard maintained the centrality of the kitchen, garden, and farm as the site for cultivating a better sense of how the natural world sustains us and promotes the overall environmental and social well-being of the school community. To quote Alice Waters, restaurateur and founder of the Edible Schoolyard, “our program places food at the center and has students helping to feed each other. These children learn mutual respect from sharing meals, they learn self-respect from learning how to prepare meals and they learn respect for the planet from learning how to grow food in an ecologically sound way” (Center for Ecoliteracy 2003, p. 2).

The vast majority of food we consume is produced on farms located well outside of an urban setting, and not all farms are the same. The range of agricultural practices is staggering, and our main level of participation in the food system is as consumers. With students serving as farmers, an emphasis on farm-based education allows for the greatest possible awareness into the essential features of production. At Dalton we acknowledge the inherent limits on our capacity to replicate the dominant food systems, but we still engage directly in horticultural practices as educational methods. Indeed, the constraints of urban living can provide opportunity in the form of rooftop gardens, community gardens, and home gardens, and these features serve as crucial points of entry toward the fulfillment of the larger goal of understanding food production. Dalton offers a terrace garden of about 500 square feet and students routinely and increasingly utilize this site as a learning opportunity. For one, students in the middle school have developed a “gardening club” during which they do the work of tending to the garden. These activities range from selecting and ordering seeds, weeding, planting, harvesting, and maintenance. The garden provides a great opportunity for thinking about seasonality and what is appropriate for our space and climate zone. Students in “Gardening Club” keep records and measure the progress of plant growth in relation to rainfall, temperature, and season. Moreover, the garden is evolving into an effective demonstration garden as students studying colonial America in the fourth grade have planted examples of Native American agriculture in the form of the “Three Sisters” and students in high school environmental science have dedicated beds for exploring food production by way of Dan Barber’s The Third Plate (2014). As students make use of these resources more actively and effectively, the vitality of the garden will continue to grow as an educational medium.

The design and construction of “Growing or Green Walls” has also been explored in an independent study by juniors in our Environmental History class. Dalton will now offer a student led class on green wall design and construction for middle school students in our STEAM summer camp. Faculty from the science department – in sustainable engineering and biology – are joining the history faculty in supporting our student teachers, with the goal of filling Dalton with student built green walls in the coming years.

  1. 2.

    “Prepare your own food . This means reviving in your mind and life the art of kitchen and household … ”

An awareness of food production coupled with an understanding of food preparation in its most tangible and vivid forms will broaden an understanding of natural processes. Cooking (facilitated by the attendant culinary skills) is an act of transformation. As Michael Pollan (2013) puts it so eloquently in his latest work, Cooked,

[h]andling these plants and animals, taking back the production and preparation of even just some part of our food , has the salutary effect of making visible again many of the lines of connection that the supermarket and the ‘home-meal replacement’ have succeeded in obscuring, yet of course never actually eliminated. To do so is to take back a measure of responsibility, too, to become, at the very least, a little less glib in one’s pronouncements…Especially one’s pronouncements about the ‘environment,’ which suddenly begins to seem a little less ‘out there’ and a lot closer to home. For what is the environmental crisis if not a crisis of the way we live? (p. 21)

The Dalton offers a "Pop Food " class in an effort to explore and elucidate the food consciousness suggested by authors like Pollan, Waters, and Barber. To this end, “The High School Pop Food ” curriculum is divided into a series of modules that are offered at different times throughout the year – Saturdays, afternoons, evening, and early mornings. The goal is to allow students several options to integrate the modules into their existing schedule. Each module culminates in a pop up restaurant. “Bread Module” supports a one-day bakery; “After the Harvest” results in jars of jam, pickles, and invitation-only lunches; “Coffee Module” opens a coffee shop in the school lobby every morning for a week; and the “Restaurant” accommodates about 100 people in for a sit-down dinner.

By gearing the curriculum toward a culminating event, we hope to provide something more than a knife-skills class, and more of a holistic food experience – students see where the food comes from, how to cook it, and how to offer it to those who are keen to eat. In this way, cooking becomes something not abstract, but a hands-on real-time experience, just as the performing arts curricula are connected to a performance or team sports to an actual game. It also means the students become responsible for a wide range of demands such as publicity, menu design, transformation of the cafeteria space into a restaurant, ordering rentals, securing bags or other necessary packaging, and creating an on-line ordering website.

The goal of food-based environmental education is not necessarily to create future farmers or chefs (although that may happen). Rather, this approach to learning allows for the inculcation of an enlightened food consciousness and the development of essential culinary, economic, and social skills. The corollary between a critical inquiry into food and an understanding of the scientific principles found in the study of biology, chemistry, physics, and a food-based program will assist in the promotion of this interdisciplinary approach to learning. For instance, in ninth-grade biology, the Dalton School uses a workshop on the making of sauerkraut as an opportunity to further an investigation into the principles of fermentation. These workshops both enhance and help develop an understanding of the properties of lacto-fermentation and the microbial world and provide a vivid and exciting hands-on opportunity. This is in keeping with a greater emphasis on the use of food as the basis of student-led inquiry into the physical sciences, and increased efforts are being made to incorporate food into lab practicals.

  1. 3.

    “Learn the origins of the food you buy and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence.”

This principle situates food within a broader social dimension, and thus allows us to see the local cultural spaces, landscapes, histories, collective experiences, and traditions associated with food . In many ways, this speaks to the heart of the emerging food movement characterizing our present.

However, there is a central irony at work here, as well. A focus on local production and consumption gives us insight into the growing inequities associated with the contemporary food system and its pathways. Even with greater attention placed on local production, we become keenly aware of the asymmetries of distribution and access. For instance, a 2008 study by the Department of City Planning in New York City indicated that “nearly three million residents live in ‘high need’ neighborhoods” (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010, p. 41). Furthermore, this report “utilized a supermarket index that correlated neighborhoods with the highest levels of diet-related diseases and the most limited opportunities to purchase fresh foods” (Gottlieb and Joshi 2010, p. 41). Issues of food justice, according to Gottlieb and Joshi (2010), can and should be a significant feature of a farm-based educational experience:

Issues of race, ethnicity, class, and gender are at the forefront of a social justice agenda. When viewed through the food justice lens, they are also a key part of how we talk about food . Historically, food groups have struggled to effectively address the contentious issues associated with questions of class, race, ethnicity, and gender….The language of food justice ensures that these core issues are not ignored but rather placed at the center of the discussion regarding how, by whom, and to what ends the food system is transformed. (p. 229)

In an effort to address, mitigate and/or eliminate the effects of asymmetrical food sovereignty and access, students at Dalton are taking action in the form of “Generation Citizen,” a student led class, teaching “action civics.” Students choose a local issue to address in a year-long activist campaign, reaching out to community leaders and service providers to effect needed change. The most recent campaign was to address food (in)security in New York City. Students reached out to officials with SNAP and NGOs advocating for the food insecure, to shelters to offer classes on cooking and nutritious foods to homeless children, to New York City schools to explore expanding knowledge of and access to good food , and to the private sector, both markets and produce suppliers to find creative ways to address this long term issue. The class’ work will be continued by a newly created “Food Club,” the stated mission of which is “to educate our community on issues of food security and sustainability and to promote the availability of affordable, nutritious food to all New Yorkers.”

Keeping within the realm of food justice, Dalton’s "Fair Trade Store" is an outgrowth of our school-wide Global Initiative, the History of Food elective, and another history elective on The Developing World. The latter’s curricular focus on development and the role of social entrepreneurship led students to explore the role of fair trade in global trade, and potential partnerships with producers around the world. Our first two products are chocolate produced by a Grenadian farmer cooperative – marketed to students at local events, and a “supergrain” indigenous to Senegal and currently being developed on a local level by a women’s cooperative in the south of that nation. Working closely with partner farmers and producers, students address real world business problems and use a range of skills to develop open markets to these entrepreneurs.

  1. 4.

    “Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist.”

In order to achieve the best possible impression of the season, this is an essential practice. Understanding how to do this effectively is another outcome of food-based education: the synthesis of knowledge and flavor and a direct connection between production and consumption. This point becomes particularly poignant and enduring when the students are the farmers or deal directly with farmers.

Dalton’s Community Supported Agriculture (DCSA) is a high school student initiative that contracts with local farmers (from the greater New York area) to deliver farm fresh produce to 100 Dalton families throughout the school year. Created two years ago, DCSA has become a thriving, fully student run operation, serving as a community-building program and educational opportunity. The success of the program at Dalton inspired the DCSA leaders to write a “how to” manual and engage other schools in New York City, who are now partnering with Dalton students to develop their own CSAs. Our contacts with farmers have inspired further classroom and field-work opportunities.

  1. 5.

    “Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food , what do you pay for these additions.” and

  2. 6.

    “Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening.”

Principles 5 and 6 speak to the apparent “efficiency” and “productive capacity” of the industrial food system which in turn gives the impression of progress: we are surrounded by abundance and readily accessible and relatively inexpensive food . But what are the real costs of the efficiency and abundance provided by the industrial food system? In his essay Agricultural Solutions for Agricultural Problems (1979), Wendell Berry is addressing the hidden costs of the industrial food system: “costs” that are further obfuscated (perhaps deliberately) by our detachment and disassociation from the means of production. Soil erosion, soil compaction, soil and water pollution, ecological degradation and deterioration, and the use of increasing amounts of chemical fertilizer to offset the loss of soil fertility and to combat the growing threat of pests and diseases are but a few of the negative externalities of the dominant food system.

At the heart of this consideration is an opportunity for moral clarity. The costs of the industrial food system are well documented. Our system of abundance is sustained by exploitation of workers and animals and resources (Committee on a Framework for Assessing the Health, Environmental, and Social Effects of the Food System et al. 2015), and farm-based environmental education strives to highlight the true inefficiencies of the current dominant system and introduces us to viable alternative models.

During the spring semester, Dalton’s environmental science class devotes considerable time and effort to an understanding of best practices in agriculture, defined by sustainability, diversity, and balance, leading to an understanding of the greater ecosystem of food . Students in the class read Jonathan Safran Foer’s Eating Animals (2009). An avowed vegetarian, Foer offers both a philosophical statement for vegetarianism and a critique of the modern industrial food chain. Foer’s work allows students to address the philosophical dimensions of the general desire to eat animals and the resulting systems developed to further and sustain this craving for animal flesh. Foer devotes considerable attention to the document of the horrors of the “factory farm” (emblematic of the industrial food system), but he never loses sight of the centrality of death in the carnivore’s diet. According to Foer (2009),

Rationally, factory farming is so obviously wrong, in so many ways. In all of my readings and conversations, I’ve yet to find a credible defense of it. But food is not rational. Food is culture, habit, and identity. For some, that irrationality leads to a kind of resignation. Food choices are likened to fashion choices or lifestyle preferences – they do not respond to judgments about how we should live. And I would agree that the messiness of food , the almost infinite meanings it proliferates, does make the question of eating – and eating animals especially – surprisingly fraught… Food is never simply a calculation about which diet uses the least water or causes the least suffering. And it is in this, perhaps, that our greatest hope for actually motivating ourselves to change lies. In part, the factory farm requires us to suppress conscience in favor of craving. But at another level, the ability to reject the factory farm can be exactly what we most desire. (p. 263)

Although Foer’s work can be read as a manifesto on vegetarianism, the rigor of his argument encourages a conscientious consideration of the lives of the animals to be consumed. While his work is an argument for vegetarianism, it is “also an argument for another, wiser animal agriculture and more honorable omnivory” (Foer 2009, p. 244). To achieve this honorable omnivory, to develop the accurate consciousness highlighted at the beginning of this presentation, requires a direct engagement with the realities of life and death on the farm. To do so will make us greater moral beings. The opportunity for an ensuing moral clarity works to mitigate the negative effects of the industrial food system. What is unique to food-based environmental education, perhaps, is the opportunity for an ever-present awareness of death. Our sustenance is predicated on production and destruction, and death is central to this equation. The treatment of animals and plants (and the people who tend to them) is not equal across the food system, and the spectrum runs from humane treatment to gross exploitation. Even a strictly vegan diet requires death through cultivation of land, and eradication of animal habitat. Students actively engage with these issues and encounter ethical issues in the context of a science class.

  1. 7.

    “Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species.”

This general theme has significant representation within the curriculum . As mentioned earlier, the environmental science class at Dalton includes a large unit on the study of food in its production and link to ecological effects. Dalton also offers a variation on the core eleventh-grade world history curriculum (a study of the twentieth century) in the form of a course devoted to the study of the events of the twentieth- and twenty-first centuries through an ecological lens. The foundational logic of this course includes a definition of human ecology in which we explore the complex relationship between human beings and their natural, social, and built environments. In this way, a solid evaluation and understanding of ecology and environmentalism relies on a keen perception of human behavior and the myriad relationships between the natural world and broader economic, political, social, and cultural forces. An environmental and ecological assessment of world history is really a broad frame/ lens through which we examine human activity in a larger ecological setting: action unfolds in various contexts. All human activity has an ecological impact, and all human behavior has an ecological basis, and this idea will serve as our guiding logic as we explore the events and developments of the twentieth century into the twenty-first. To this end, the course explores the role of land use, the struggle for energy, water rights and access, food shortages, deprivation, and the subsequent consequences of collectivization and rapid industrialization. Many of the environmental issues of the day have a direct antecedent in the events of the early to mid twentieth century (and often earlier), and attention to ecological developments provides the overarching narrative for our investigation.

The study of world history provides a wonderful opportunity to address environmental issues, but there is real concern on local activism and engagement throughout the Dalton curriculum . A focus on time and place provides a pathway into significant ecological developments and a history of land use – “of the ways in which human minds and hands have worked in tandem with natural opportunities and constraints” (Ryden 2011, p. 37). By engaging the landscape (through food , experience, history, and decoding traditions as markers of ecological possibility) and its history, we can discern and witness the transformation of the ‘natural’ world.

9.3 Food-Based Focus on the Natural and Applied Sciences and STEAM Subject Areas

The following list offers curricular guides for Dalton educators engaged in the incorporation of a food-based focus into STEAM subject areas:

  • Exploration of water use and conservation (with an opportunity for water quality testing)

  • Demonstration of alternative energy production from the sun and the wind

  • Demonstration of innovations in engineering

  • Demonstration of sustainable design and performance

  • Demonstration of organic growing and composting (and the role of microorganisms)

  • Data gathering on energy use and production

  • Using the site and its physical plant as educational tools

A vertically aligned curriculum provides structure and occasion for exploring issues in a sustained manner across the K-12 experience. The goal is to introduce developmentally appropriate curricula in terms of both content and practice, and to create continuity between the grade levels. Some of the most significant work being done at Dalton can be found in the youngest grades, and this sets the stage for the development of a successful environmental and ecological awareness. For instance, a year-long theme for the second grade is a focus on sustainability. Students in this grade address issues pertaining to sustainability through a variety of activities (including trips to rooftop gardens and urban farms). Each student participates in a composting workshop and learns about “nature’s recyclers” as a corollary to their own activities. Recycling and reducing waste are a major focus of the curriculum , and the second graders have taken the lead in managing and calculating the recycling efforts of their building (which house grades K-3). This helps reinforce their keen sense of place and personal responsibility, and an understanding of the sustainability features of Little and Big Dalton, the role of waste and resource management, the idea of composting, and a knowledge of best practices contributes to this awareness, as well. One activity to help further an understanding of the importance of recycling takes the form of food waste management. Students weigh their leftovers after lunch for a week or so in an effort to become conscientious eaters and reduce waste.

Activism around environmental issues starts early at the Dalton School, and every week second graders offer gentle messages of sustainability and responsibility via the public address system in an effort to promote awareness and encourage student action. The following are examples of their messages:

  • Use the blue recycling bin to recycle all kinds of plastic like yogurt containers and drinking cups. Make sure you empty the containers and rinse them out first.

  • When you or your parents go to the grocery store, remember to bring reusable bags with you. If you forget, try to reuse the paper or plastic bags from the store.

  • Remember that recycling is not just something we do at Dalton. Make sure you follow all the recycling rules at home and help out your family by teaching them the green tips you’ve learned.

This is just one of the many ways students in the First Program engage and understand environmental issues in a hands-on manner. A series of recent polls indicated that Americans on average do not routinely cite environmental concerns as one of the most pressing problems facing the country, but the energy and commitment to environmental change exhibited at the First Program is definitely not your average response to the ecological challenges facing all of us. This important work needs to be engaging and fun. This was evident in the Farmers Market run by two kindergarten classes last year as the culmination of a larger project centered on nutrition and a knowledge of food production and its impact on the environment. For one class, their market followed on the heels of a visit to the Union Square Farmers Market. For the other class, this was a further extension of two visits (one of which they were accompanied by a group of high school seniors) to Hilltop Hanover Farm in Yorktown, New York where they witnessed first-hand the dynamics of a working farm. The farm-to-Dalton connection could not be made clearer or more exciting.

9.4 Creating Spaces for Food-Based Environmental Education

In the fall of 2019, the Dalton School completed an expansion and renovation of its main building (108 East 89th, NYC) to include new floors dedicated to STEAM activities. The new space provided a home for a robotics studio, collaborative work environments, a maker space, greenhouse and hydroponic spaces, a green roof, and a state-of-the-art teaching kitchen. The teaching kitchen in particular, as it pertains to food-based environmental education, has played a key role in advancing many of the ideas mentioned above. It has also proven to be a hub for all manner of dynamic educational activities, both intentional and unexpected, and has emerged as a space for an evolving set of pedagogical practices. Curricular offerings help to ground the teaching kitchen as an educational space, and these courses offer educational experiences and more. Two course offerings include “Culinary Fundamentals: Lunch” and “Food Systems: From Seed to Bread.” In the first course, students study a different cuisine or cooking challenge oriented around cultural traditions, culinary techniques, nutrition, and environment each week. Then on Fridays, the class serves lunch to a segment of the Dalton community, “sharing both the food they’ve cooked and the social or culinary context that prompted that week’s concept.” Overall, the emphasis is on technique, nutrition, and an embrace of the way cooking employs artistic, cultural, historical and aesthetic choices to create food that reflects the particular vision of the chef. Students in “Food Systems: From Seed to Bread” become physically engaged in the precision craft of baking bread while developing a keen understanding of the relationship between cause and effect of what they are learning and bringing to practice. The course description offers the following, and it resonates clearly with the broader set of concerns and practices highlighted in food-based environmental education at Dalton and indicates a move toward a more comprehensive vision of food as the center of pedagogical concept:

Once you instigate an exploration of the science, flavor, traditions, and almost endless variations, it’s easy to make deeper connections to almost every other subject our students study. Students will live in an age of complex vertical food systems, and need to be prepared to make thoughtful, creative, informed decisions around issues of factory farming, sustainability, biodiversity, energy consumption, and food security. Bread today can be made from factory farmed grain into processed and preserved product, or through an artisanal process that involves wild wheat, active fermentation, hand crafting, and carefully baked techniques. We will look at old and new ways of making bread, and see what is to be learned from both. To that end, students will become part of a daily bread production. This will allow us to ask complex questions about the structure of this food system, to look for ways to take action towards improving our connection to it, and to ask broader questions about other culinary ecosystems.

What is immediately noticeable in the spaces in and around the teaching kitchen is the buzz of activity as students engage in a variety of tasks while seeming to erase the boundaries between the curricular and the extracurricular, the social and the academic. Although robotics, engineering, and computer science are part of the general curriculum at Dalton and adhere to our standard schedule, much of the work in these courses takes place after school hours, beyond the constraints of the traditional schedule. Food prepared by students in food-based courses is often available for students engaged in STEAM work, and the setting becomes one marked by conviviality and productivity. What seems evident here, in addition to a balance between fun and concentration, is the display of deeper learning:

In many of the high schools we visited, much of the most powerful learning seemed to occur not in core classes, but rather at the school’s ‘periphery’ – in electives, clubs, and extracurriculars. Hidden in plain sight, these peripheral spaces often had a very different ‘grammar’ than the one that usually dominated core classes. In these spaces, students had real choices, learning by doing was the norm, there was time to explore matters in depth, and students were welcomed as producers rather than receivers of knowledge. (Mehta and Fine 2019, p. 5)

With the teaching kitchen as a resource, the objective becomes leveraging the facility with the curricular opportunity in an on-going and expanded manner. The goal is to reposition a traditionally “marginal” activity like cooking at the center of the academic experience. The teaching kitchen in this sense became a laboratory for learning and exploration and cooking then becomes a formal investigative practice. The alliance between the existing senior elective, "You Are What You Eat: A Critical Investigation Into Food Production, Consumption, and Justice" and the kitchen space (and those faculty who use it strategically for educational purposes), enabled students to readily and actively explore aspects of contemporary food pathways and practices. To begin the culinary journey, students engaged in all aspects of breadmaking to learn about process and sourcing. In this hands-on class, students milled heirloom grains from Anson Mills, used a ten-year-old starter/mother, kneaded the dough, and discussed the realities of the contemporary food chain. With bread as an example, the students explored the historical, ecological, ethical, scientific/biological, cultural, aesthetic, political and economic forces shaping what and how we eat. They followed the food chain from grain to crusty bread and thought about the artisanal and local as opposed to the industrial and commercial.

Another activity in the teaching kitchen had students exploring industrial meat production and consumption. The investigation entailed a consideration of the economic and cultural factors shaping modern meat consumption and the environmental impact of such practices. Students examined the ecological impact of beef production, consider its ecological footprint, and compared it to plant-based alternatives. To further illuminate the ideas under examination, a Dalton chemistry teacher made a guest appearance in the kitchen, as well. The chemistry teacher demonstrated the science/chemistry behind Chicken McNuggets (as a way to illustrate highly processed foods) while another faculty member made chicken meatballs inspired by the well-known chef Yotam Ottolenghi. Both were hands-on activities for students.

9.5 The Pivot Toward Food-Based Environmental Education as Anti-Racist Education

Even though Dalton suspended in-person experiences in the spring of 2020, the reflection on food and its place within the broader political, ecological, social, and racial context continued to shape curricular opportunities and engagement with social justice and environmental issues. The year 2020 also brought forth an urgent need to reassess the power dynamics and legacy inherent in predominantly white institutions, and for Dalton this reappraisal takes place on the level of curriculum and interpersonal interactions. For one, the Dalton History Department is dedicated to developing students who are informed global citizens, who can identify and challenge racial bias. We ensure that our students see aspects of their own identities in the curriculum and are empowered to interrogate both historical and contemporary narratives. To be certain, a food-based curriculum provides a point of entry into these considerations and provides the basis for understanding the complex web of factors and intersectional identities at work in any scenario. We urge our students to ask big questions and wonder about the dynamics of power that inform history, and the exploitation and active marginalization of individuals and groups around the world, particularly as it pertains to the growing inequities associated with the contemporary food system and its pathways. To this end, we want students to create and sustain a community of thinkers engaged in critical investigations of food production, consumption, and justice.

As Jonathan Safran Foer says in his recent article, “The End of Meat Is Here” (Foer 2020), “[i]f you care about the working poor, about racial justice, and about climate change, you have to stop eating animals.” The incorporation of this work (and others like it) allows for an analysis of food production and consumption in the context of COVID, climate change, and the struggle for racial justice and brings home the very personal relationship we all have to these broader forces by way of the food choices we make. In this way, personal food stories and food pathways become the site of intersectional identities both historical and contemporary. What stories do the foods we eat tell us about ourselves? Why do we eat what we eat? Why are some dishes (or ingredients) important markers of our personal histories and identities? Michael Twitty’s The Cooking Gene: A Journey Through African American Culinary History in the Old South and Genie Milgrom’s Recipes of my 15 Grandmothers: Unique Recipes and Stories from the times of the Crypto- Jews during the Spanish Inquisition serve as an inspiration and framework for exploring the relationship between food and culture and identity. For Twitty, utilizing key ingredients such as rice, molasses, cornmeal, sweet potatoes, and beans and peas informed a food story that helped him recognize the culinary traditions of African enslaved people and their descendants who were often invisible in the narratives of Southern foodways and culinary culture (Twitty 2018). Gilmore writes of the Crypto-Jewish roots of her Roman Catholic family and culinary experiences growing up in Havana and Miami and the meals representative of this intersectional family identity (Milgrom 2020). Food stories in this sense are simultaneously global and local, complex and earthy, historical and contemporary. Students can use their own stories to position themselves within the curriculum as they consider family histories and traditions. And clear instances and insights into equity of access and patterns of food distribution and consumption become readily apparent.

The work of Chris Emdin proves especially valuable, germane, and urgent as we navigate the complex realities of intersectional identities and engage in anti-racist work (Emdin 2017, 2010). Emdin calls for empowering students to “step into their own voices” and calls for educators to signal a desire and commitment to cultivate an environment in which students can “show up as themselves” in class proceedings (Emdin 2017). Moreover, Emdin demands educators adopt pedagogical strategies to reach students who are not as engaged in classroom proceedings, often black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC). One pertinent strategy for doing so is by disrupting conventional narratives and deliberately engaging our students in discussion and debate around the construction of our disciplines. In this way, student agency and questioning become paramount as we all commit to equipping our students with the tools necessary to effectively interrogate their various fields of discipline and inquiry. Anti-racist work begins with calling into question and interrogating the assumptions and power dynamics that inhere in any academic discipline and its practices and practitioners. A genuine focus on student experiences becomes a pathway forward toward a more equitable and collaborative set of educational norms.

In the case of anti-racist work in environmental education, food is both ubiquitous and deeply personal and provides a meaningful and critical foundation for analysis of personal identity and broader systems. The work of William Cronon proves useful in bridging a variety of perspectives presented in this chapter and helps to synthesize and unify several strands. In The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature (Cronon 1996), Cronon declares it is time to rethink the idea of wilderness. Cronon’s overall objective is for us to (re)examine and then commit to a view of environmentalism that does not locate nature and the wild elsewhere. Rather, Cronon wants us to idealize and investigate critically the environments in which we live in an effort to produce an environmental ethic focused on the serious environmental problems we experience at home as opposed to just "over there.” For Cronon, our views on “nature” and the “wild” are social constructions conditioned by centuries of changing views on landscapes and wilderness and the accompanying activities and associations. “Wilderness” as we know it is a profoundly human creation: “the creation of very particular human cultures at very particular moments in human history.”

Cronon highlights the manner in which ideas and ideals about nature emerged in the nineteenth century that held the wilderness as the solution to modern culture. Romantic views of nature helped shaped the idea of the “wilderness experience” (especially with the emphasis on the “sublime”), and these ideas in turn influenced and were reinforced by ideas of the “Frontier.” Turner’s “Frontier Thesis” was central to the popularization of this view. The sublime and the frontier converged to remake wilderness and invest it with moral values and cultural symbols. Cronon examines a variety of Romantic writers (both American and European) for evidence of the articulation and promotion of these views on nature and the wild as sites of mystery and opportunity for rugged individualism with the attendant emphasis on white masculinity.

Throughout his piece, Cronon describes the religious antecedents of cultural notions of “nature” and the “wild” (drawing particular strength from an investigation of cultural readings of the Garden of Eden and Adam and Eve’s expulsion from it into the unknown wilderness associated with Satan), and situates this religious view at the center of a more modern quasi-religious idea of “nature” as a place of purity and restoration. Much of modern environmental thinking, according to Cronon, fosters and maintains an erroneous view of “nature” as an ideal and a place to return to while nature is in itself a highly constructed and ever-present aspect of our daily lives. A truly effective environmental ethic would encourage us to see “nature” everywhere particularly in the foods we eat, the resources we use, our modes of transportation, and the consequences of our actions both here and over there.

It is that idea of focusing on environmental issues being found here and there, at home and further afield, that unifies the ideas behind a food-based environmental education. Again, Wendell Berry asserts that a “significant part of the pleasure of eating is in one’s accurate consciousness of the lives and the world from which food comes.” Situating ourselves at the center of a complex web of historical, ecological, ethical, scientific/ biological, cultural, aesthetic, political and economic forces opens up a space for seeing the environment, various systems and their impact, and personal choice and responsibility in a new light. We all eat, but eating may represent many things to many people. By examining the convergence of the local and the global, urban and rural, and the past and the present, we begin to see differently the choices we make when we eat. Eating is a profound engagement with (or alienation from) the natural world indicated by our food consciousness and current practices of production and consumption. A food-based environmental education empowers us to follow the food chain and see where it leads us. Our engagement with food , food culture, food politics, the history of food (production, distribution, and development), food preparation, and the actual cultivation of food is then historical, theoretical, textual, and practical. It also opens a space for action and activism and anti-racist work. A critical food-based educational approach has the cultivation of an informed and participatory citizenry at its core as we engage in issues of environmental sustainability, environmental racism, food justice, social (in)equality, and beyond.

9.6 Conclusion: Food-Based Education as the Basis for a New Environmental Ethic

Food-based environmental education proves flexible and adaptive and provides the basis for more holistic approaches to environmental sustainability. Dalton actively engages students to think of themselves as stewards of the earth and their community. These efforts are nascent in many ways, but Dalton’s commitment to sustainability is genuine and evolving rapidly. Dalton is making concerted efforts toward helping students understand the impact and reason for one’s actions and helping to bring about change (both local and global) through personal empowerment. In this way, sustainability becomes the basis of a lived experience at the Dalton School and one that will guide students (and faculty) toward a clearer consideration of their actions and their individual and collective responsibilities. To educate effectively for sustainability, we need framework and opportunity, and clear links to the curriculum .

When food-based environmental education succeeds, the expression of community through an understanding of personal responsibility is achieved. Aldo Leopold’s (1949) idea of a “land ethic ” captures this sentiment perfectly as he writes, “[t]he land ethic simply enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land.” Furthermore, “a land ethic , then, reflects the existence of an ecological conscience, and this in turn reflects a conviction of individual responsibility for the health of land.” Leopold presents this synthesis of ideas at the conclusion of A Sand County Almanac, a collection of stunningly poetic descriptions of the natural world. It is this awareness of the interaction between “nature” and “culture” and our role as stewards of the earth that sustains farm-based education. The future appears uncertain, but this approach to education is one based on active intellectual and physical engagement, collaboration, personal and collective responsibility, and hope.