Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week students watched a video from Place-Based Learning Communities at Humboldt State University called History of Native California, which features Hupa, Yurok, Karuk, Payómkawichum, Kumeyaay, Cupeño, Tolowa Dee-Ni', Wiyot, Nor Rel Muk Wintu, and Chumash people telling their stories.

In class, we enjoyed our own Pacific Ocean version of chips and dip and ate nori chips with a sesame seaweed guacamole garnished with a Japanese rice seasoning called furikake. All in all we tried three types of seaweed: nori, wakame, and dulse.

My biggest takeaway from this unit has been the call from Indigenous people for the rest of us to learn with and from the Indigenous community and not just about it. It’s a principle I’d like to apply more intentionally as we continue to grow our program. Another theme that has come up a lot in our discussions around Native communities is the work of cultural preservation, particularly around language preservation. With all this in mind, in class we took a few minutes to learn to count to ten in the Hupa language from Hupa elders. After teaching three classes, I’ve retained a few numbers, but definitely need to keep practicing!

This week’s kit included a cleaned clam shell, and in breakout rooms students tried to come up with as many uses as they could think of for the shells in everyday life. Some of the ideas they came up with were spoon, cup, shovel, knife, necklace, treasure box, eye patch, paint, pottery patch, and money. We learned that tribes including the Hupa traded clam shell beads for other natural resources like obsidian, use them as fish hooks, and are known for their clam shell necklaces.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

This week we talked about agriculture, as opposed to foods that are hunted and gathered, and focused specifically on a companion planting technique invented and perfected by Indigenous peoples in present-day Mexico who then shared it with other Native peoples throughout North America. Students first watched a short film, An Oneida Elder Speaks About the Three Sisters Garden, where an Indigenous leader describes the deep relationship people have had with corn, squash, and beans for centuries.

Most of the fourth and fifth graders have had exposure to the Three Sisters in a garden class at Harvey Milk before and we had fun reviewing the concepts together. The eldest sister, the corn, is the tallest and provides structural support for the middle sister, the beans. The beans climb up the corn stalk and pull nitrogen, a major component of chlorophyll, from the air and fix it back into the soil, providing the plants with important nutrients to survive and thrive. The youngest sister, the squash, grows along the ground. Its broad, round leaves help the soil retain moisture and prickles on its stem help to ward off pests.

In what is now Southern California, the Mohave and Quechan are two tribes that farm corn. We talked about the difference between gathering acorns beneath native oak trees and the forces, perhaps both accidental or intentional, that led humans to domesticate a wild grass and slowly increase its nutritional content, help it to become easier to store, and turn it into the juicy sweet corn we know today - a true technological marvel as impressive as the iPhone!

Together, we ate a bowl of Three Sisters stew, made from a recipe from the Chickasaw Nation. Students garnished the soup with fresh parsley, and many delighted in showing their empty bowls to each other on the Zoom. Our breakout room prompt for the week, inspired by the Oneida Kanehelatúksla, or Thanksgiving address, was to share something we are thankful for.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week we returned to the desert and learned about the Indigenous peoples of the Colorado River Basin, including the Mohave and the Southern Pauite. Students watched two films, the first featuring Mohave elders discussing their long history with the mesquite tree and the second featuring rangers from the Desert National Wildlife Refuge discussing the mesquite’s cultural and ecological importance to the area.

We tasted organic mesquite meal (also called mesquite flour or mesquite flour) by itself and remarked on its surprising sweetness. Students compared the flavor to cinnamon, coconut, and chocolate! We then each made our own mesquite butter by mixing 1/2 ounce of unsalted grass-fed butter with 1/2 teaspoon of mesquite meal. We slathered the mesquite butter on a slice of mesquite cornbread. The mesquite gave the butter and the bread a beautiful dark golden hue and added an unexpected richness and slight smokiness to the food.

In our breakout rooms, students discussed the complexities involved when one food culture comes into conflict with another and offered their ideas as future leaders and ancestors-in-training for how to better share natural resources between different groups of peoples in the future.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 3

This week we talked about the Wintun (Wintu, Nomlaki, and Patwin) people and made a salad with two plants native to North America (sunflowers and blueberries) and the cultivated descendant of the kind of wild leafy greens that supplemented an Indigenous diet that also included acorn and King salmon. We incorporated three parts of the sunflower plant: the tuber (similar to the root, but with the added ability to reproduce), the sprouts, and the seeds. The seeds were toasted and the salad dressing was made with a particularly delicious extra-virgin olive oil sold under the label Séka Hills, which is produced by the Yoche Dehe Wintun Nation in Yolo County. It was special to honor Indigenous food traditions both old and new in the same meal!

We watched a video called Seeds of Our Ancestors: Native Youth Awakening to Foodways, which showcases young Native people learning about their cultural heritage through food. Inspired by their curiosity and pride, in breakout rooms during our class everyone shared a recipe they would like to learn how to make.

Students compared the taste of the raw sunchoke to water chestnut, jicama, artichoke, and apple. Some asked where they could find sunchokes in the store, so I’m hopeful more families will give them a try. The most popular item in this week’s kit was surprisingly the dressing. It was a simple vinaigrette made with garlic, shallots, apple cider vinegar, Meyer lemon juice, stone-ground mustard, the Séka Hills olive oil, salt, pepper, and thyme from my balcony planter garden. Perhaps that is the greatest secret to the best tasting food revealed - that it was made with ingredients grown by someone you know who cares about you.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 2

When one of our second grade teachers at Harvey Milk contacted me to ask if I could use a LOT of prickly pears for a lesson, I was thrilled that there was such a strong connection with our fourth and fifth grade unit on Indigenous food cultures and the native edible plants of California.

I was able to harvest nearly a hundred prickly pears off of the giant cactus pictured below, and there were easily hundreds of fruits left after I had filled my bags. After burning off the spines over an open flame, the pears were gently washed and placed into students’ home kits with a small jar of prickly pear nectar and a can of club soda.

In class this week, students watched a short film called Birdsong Guides a Tribe Home about the Cahuilla people (who live in and around what is now called Palm Springs in Southern California). We cut our prickly pears in half and tasted the fruit fresh. Some noticed its vibrant color, some commented on the fruit’s many seeds, and some made comparisons to strawberry, banana, watermelon, and flowers. Some students who don’t like mushy textures disliked the soft, watery quality of the prickly pear - an idea that aided our conversation about how for desert people, water is life.

We learned that prickly pears were eaten fresh, but also dried for storage to be eaten in the winter. Indigenous peoples made chewing gum from prickly pear. The seeds were dried and ground into flour. The spines were used for tattooing, and anthropologists have discovered tattoo instruments made from prickly pear spines that are 2,000 years old!

We then made our own prickly pear sodas. As I was planning for the lesson, I thought it would be better for students to be able to eat the prickly pears fresh and then also have some prickly pear nectar to mix with the club soda. I’m not equipped to juice enough prickly pears for 78 participants, so I purchased prickly pear nectar from a cactus farm in Arizona. The color of the nectar is certainly very dramatic and enticing, but I was dismayed to find that due to the addition of malic acid as a preservative, the resulting product smelled and tasted nothing like the bright, fruity flavor prickly pears are known for. The nectar tasted almost like tomato juice and many students said it smelled like pickles. There’s nothing wrong with pickles, of course, but it certainly was not what we were going for with our homemade sodas.

Ah well, I hope we were able to model for everyone how things don’t always turn out the way you plan, and we used the snafu as an opportunity to discuss the difference between a whole food like the fresh prickly pear grown in a backyard near our school and an industrialized version like the farmed and mass-produced nectar from out of state. Most students chose to make their soda using the fresh scooped-out fruit mixed with the club soda, which made for a very refreshing drink. If we teach this lesson again, I will have students add agave syrup to taste. It’s made from the agave plant, another staple of the Cahuilla diet.

Grades 4/5 Edible Social Studies: Week 1

Our exploration of Indigenous food cultures started with the acorn, a source of sustenance for a majority of the native peoples who have lived off the land we now call California for thousands of years. Before our first Zoom class, the fourth and fifth graders watched two short films with their homeroom teacher: How This Native American Elder Reclaimed Sacred Land in the Bay Area and Tending the Wild: Decolonizing the Diet. The first Edible Social Studies kits this week contained a handful of (mostly Live Oak) acorns gathered in the East Bay and the Peninsula, a reusable tea bag, loose leaf yerba buena tea, and an acorn brownie.

In class, we used all of our senses to make a cup of tea together from the wild mint that grew so abundantly around what is now San Francisco that the Spanish colonizers named the land Yerba Buena (“good herb”) after it. We then enjoyed the refreshing drink with the acorn brownie while discussing both the opportunities and challenges we have when studying Indigenous food cultures. Many Indigenous food staples are not commercially available and centuries of intentional cultural erasure has resulted in few Indigenous voices being celebrated and amplified even at a time when so much attention is being paid to chefs, restaurants, and cookbooks.

One student remarked on a phrase used by Ann-Marie Sayers, the Ohlone woman featured in the film about Indian Canyon, about the impact of our actions on our descendants seven generations from now. We tied this idea to our other fourth/fifth grade Edible Social Studies unit on the intersection of climate change and the food system, which we taught last year and will bring back next year. Especially during a year of unprecedented wildfires, I could really feel everyone drawing a connection from the past to our present, lived experiences.

The acorn was a staple of many Indigenous diets. In breakout rooms, students shared a few of their family’s food staples with each other. Rice and beans, cheese, salad, fruit, broccoli, and meat were a just a few of the foods students designated as important to them and their loved ones.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 7

For our final week of third grade Edible Social Studies, students recreated the iconic rainbow flag, which Gilbert Baker first created in San Francisco, as an iconic dessert, the parfait. Each home kit included red pomegranate seeds (representing life), orange mangoes (representing healing), yellow persimmons (representing sun), green kiwi compote (representing nature), blueberries (representing harmony), violet blackberry compote (representing spirit), brown chocolate chips and Black Mission figs to highlight the specific experiences of LGBTQ+ communities of color and one of the inclusive pride flags that debuted in 2018, and vanilla yogurt.

Before class in their homeroom, students watched a video, The Gay Betsy Ross, that includes footage of Gilbert Baker talking about what was happening in San Francisco in the 1970s and telling the story of how the flag came to be. In our live Zoom, we discussed the unique role our school’s namesake, Harvey Milk, and our school’s neighborhood, the Castro, played and continue to play in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights. Not every elementary school has rainbow stairs leading up to the library and students who walk across rainbow crosswalks on their way to school each day!

In our breakout rooms, while enjoying the parfaits together, the third graders each shared something that makes them proud. The responses ranged from “I’m proud I made this parfait!” to “I’m proud when I work on something really hard all by myself.” I’m really going to miss these incredible young learners, but look forward to working with them again next year.

My deepest gratitude to our third grade classroom teachers Mr. Swick and Ms. Grace, who always go above and beyond, and to all the adults in our school community who helped deliver kits to other families, picked up kits at school every week, and who are supporting student distance learning every day in a myriad of ways.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 6

This week we focused on the Second Great Migration, a time from the 1940s through 1970s when millions of African Americans left the South and moved to urban areas in the Northeast, Midwest, and West, including to the San Francisco Bay Area. From African people braiding seeds into their hair before being forced to board ships to growing their own food as an act of sovereignty in Colonial America and reserving the nutritious pot likker from greens they served to White slaveowners for their own children, food has represented resistance, rebellion, and revolution for Black people in America for hundreds of years.

When we eat collard greens in their juices, we honor the ingenuity of African-American cooks who took recipes from home and created a truly American cuisine with the mix of transplanted and native ingredients they found in a new land.

Normally when we teach this lesson at school, we don’t have enough time or the proper equipment to bake, but our distance learning kit model this semester allowed us to send home a slice of homemade cornbread to each third grader to help mop up that delicious pot likker during class! In breakout rooms on our Zoom, they shared what foods they would bring if they had to go to a faraway place. A sample of their responses: mac and cheese, wontons, mango, dragonfruit, and strawberry shortcake. Ms. Grace shared that instead of ready-to-eat food, she would bring a cow and wheat so she could survive for longer. We hope that our program can play a small part in all of our students growing up to be more self sufficient, food literate, and nourished.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 5

Our class ran over this week, mostly because it involved more hands-on working with ingredients than the last few. It’s a hard balance to strike, but I could see how engaged all the students were on the Zoom, because who doesn’t like to work with their hands?! I want to keep trying to provide opportunities for all kids in our community to engage in learning with all their senses, but I’m not going to lie - it’s a challenge to design recipes that can be assembled in such a short amount of time, that taste good, and that are accessible for students who don’t have an adult nearby able to assist in real time. Thank you to all our third graders for their perseverance every week, it is truly inspiring!

This week students watched a short video from the Smithsonian sharing a Japanese American’s reflection on what it was like to be interned by the US Government during World War II. This is the first year we’ve used the voice of someone who was a child at that time, and I think it helped the third graders connect to what the experience must have been like. We weren’t able to go into more detail in class, but the story of how the Presidio of San Francisco specifically played a part is fascinating and worth looking into for those who’d like to continue the conversation at home.

We were excited to incorporate fresh produce for the first time in the home kits, and even though plastic knives are not ideal kitchen tools, everyone found a way to make it work. Rolling temaki in a group is a lovely way to celebrate Japanese food culture. I was pleasantly surprised by how we managed to connect, even via a screen, and applaud all the students who were brave enough to share in our breakout room discussions about times when others may have made assumptions about them based on their appearance. It was a good reminder that we are not alone, and that together we can effect change in our community.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 4

This week our chefs watched two videos in preparation for our live class: Remembering Chinese Railroad Workers, which highlights the contributions Chinese laborers made to the completion of the transcontinental railroad during the 1860s, and Chinese Egg Noodles, which showcases a Chinese food invention that certainly changed the international culinary landscape for the better.

I tried out a new food preservation technique this week by vacuum sealing bags of lo mein that were then distributed to the third graders at home for safekeeping in the fridge. We warmed the noodles up by submerging the bags in hot water before cutting them open and eating together during class. It worked better than expected and we will definitely be doing more vacuum sealing for certain items as long as we need to send home kits this year!

I am struck by how different cohorts of students respond to the material in different ways, classroom to classroom and year to year. This semester, what resonated with the third graders in our discussion about Chinese railroad workers and the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 was the fact that the workers were paid less than their Irish counterparts, even when they often performed work that was more dangerous. One chef compared the situation to NBA players earning more than WNBA players because of the erroneous idea that some people are superior to other people.

In breakout rooms on Zoom, students brainstormed ways we can make others feel included. This is a topic everyone can relate to, and responses included extending an invitation to someone when no one else does, offering a wider range of options to accommodate different preferences within a group setting, and being an upstander when you observe bullying. Edible Social Studies is at its best when the kids are happily eating together and connecting important moments in our community’s history with the ongoing fight for civil rights in our society today. Thank you, third graders, for bringing your empathy, passion, and creativity to class this week.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 3

We had a great discussion this week in class - it feels like we’re getting the hang of modifying this project for interacting over Zoom (though that’s not to say I don’t wish every minute the kids could be interacting with all the tools we have at school, fresh ingredients, and cooking and eating at the table together)! Studying corn and its importance to Mesoamerican culture, how Europeans brought it back home without the process of nixtamalization and got sick as a result, and how byproducts from this one plant are now everywhere in modern life is a ripe topic that could easily be the focus of every one of our lessons over the course of an entire school year.

In 45 minutes, the third graders learned about the Mexican War of Independence, ate locally made tortilla chips with salsa together, and brainstormed all the foods we could think of that contain corn. Many didn’t realize that foods like a Snickers bar or a can of Coke also contain corn, and we talked briefly about how to eat corn with intention. The more closely corn as an ingredient in a certain food resembles the actual corn plant, the better it is for our health.

For a succinct and highly provocative overview of the period under discussion, check out these two videos from Eater that the third graders watched this week: Why Corn is the Most Sacred Crop and The Dark and Terrible History of Corn. (Spoiler alert: beware of vampires!)

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 2

We started this week’s class with two videos from KQED: Cultivating an Abundant San Francisco Bay and Discovering San Francisco Bay: The Portolá Expedition. It was fun to see how many names we could recognize from the stories - Shellmound, Portola, Sausalito, San Francisco - and to see how a people’s food culture (in this case the Indigenous diet of shellfish) actually influenced the topography of the land.

What I hope students take away from this lesson is that Ohlone land was rich with resources and that the arrival of the Europeans in the 1700s dramatically changed everything, including food. The Spanish brought new crops like wheat, sugar, and grapes, as well as animal husbandry practices, all of which dramatically altered the land.

At home together on the Zoom, we assembled our own shelter-in-place version of a classic Spanish dish, pan con tomate. The introduction of wheat and sugar had profound consequences on the local diet that continue to influence what we eat today. I can think of no better shelf-stable representation of this than the delicious flatbread bites made by Rustic Bakery in Marin. Wheat is a miracle! And sugar makes everything taste good! And now they’re everywhere and we’ve forgotten how to eat minimally processed plants! (I digress.)

Because we needed to distribute the tomatoes a week in advance, I made a jam from some beautiful tomatoes donated by our friends at Oak Hill Farm in Sonoma so that students could experience them at their peak flavor and so the jars could hang out in the fridge until class time. Eating tomatoes, native to the Americas, as part of a Spanish dish is a great way to bring the history of Spanish colonization to life. We had a few issues with kit items going missing or accidentally being eaten before class, so I’ll be experimenting with some new labeling for our second round of home kits next week. Stay tuned.

Grade 3 Edible Social Studies: Week 1

We’re back. I’m so grateful our partnership with Harvey Milk Civil Rights Academy will continue during this strange school year but also anxious about how to execute our program via distance learning. For now, I’m excited to collaborate with our incredible third grade teaching team and know together we’ll be able to offer something meaningful. We’ve decided to pilot Edible Social Studies home kits where we send home supplies and ingredients for two weeks’ worth of classes in advance. Our hope is this will ensure every student has access to what they need to participate in the live class sessions on Zoom, but we’ll have to try it out to see if it’s actually successful. There will likely be challenges I haven’t thought of in advance, but that’s been the case ever since we launched The Breakfast Project!

It’s sad to see so much more of our budget going towards packaging rather than to fresh, local produce. I’m still working on ways to reduce waste and will try to incorporate discussions about reusing and recycling into our classes. Kit #1 contains foods to represent the first two groups of people to live in what is now San Francisco, the Ohlone (who thrived for thousands of years pre-contact) and the Spanish (who arrived in the 18th century). We also included a jar of the homemade granola the third graders made in second grade last spring right before the school closures happened. They were meant to sell the granola as part of a student-run farmstand to culminate their unit on the local food economy, but in absence of that opportunity, I’m happy they will get to enjoy the fruits of their labor with their families at home and that the granola will foster some cross-grade connections.

For our first class, students steeped organic yerba buena leaves in their own reusable tea bags in hot water and sweetened the tea with local blackberry honey. While enjoying our tea together, we talked about the hunter gatherer lifestyle and how most of us don’t know any words from languages indigenous to this area. “Yerba Buena” was a name given to the land by the Spanish in response to the wild mint they found growing in the region, but in a video about contemporary Ohlone chefs and activists Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino, we were able to hear them use the Chochenyo word for the mint. Our breakout room question asked the third graders what they would name their city now if they had the chance. A few of their responses: Peace, Nature, and Trees.

The Road Ahead

Faced with the question of how schools can continue to serve their students in the age of COVID-19, I’m experiencing a deep, overwhelming feeling of not-knowing. When I look at these images from the past school year, I see children engaging with all their senses side by side with their peers. The magic is in the hands-on, in-person experience that they share around the table. It’s messy. It’s filled with laughter. We break bread with our neighbors and our community grows stronger. But what now? Should we just give up? Hit the pause button and come back in 2022?

We don’t know what next year will look like but it’s pretty clear it can’t look like what has come before. I realize that “knowing” has always been a fallacy and that our work may actually have replicated the very systems and structures we aim to dismantle. Instead of leading with my ideas and my agenda, I pledge to spend these next months connecting with students and families in our community whose voices rarely get heard. What does it mean to tell the truth when teaching social studies? What can The Breakfast Project do to better support Indigenous, Black, and Brown students at our school? How can we best show up for our community during this time? Where are our resources needed the most and how can we distribute them most equitably? The answers may look nothing like what I thought I knew. The work involved will be uncomfortable, but we must do it. We are committed to doing it.

I hope the summer brings you what you need, and we look forward to being back with you again soon. May you stay safe and be fed.

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 9

We started our circle this week talking about food advertising and the role marketing plays in a consumer economy like the one we have in the United States. Many students were able to recall jingles or mascots they’ve seen representing everything from the importance of daily servings of fruit and vegetables to Coca-Cola products. (Ads for Airheads Candy also seemed to make a strong impression.) We then watched a video from Vox called The Quest for the Perfect Apple about the rise of trademarked apples developed for their taste and texture and the consumer response to them (spoiler alert: the apples have been popular).

In the kitchen, everyone got busy chopping apples. We used a mix of Granny Smith, Pink Lady, Fuji, Jazz, and Pacific Rose varieties so that our final dish, applesauce, would have depth of flavor and showcase both the tart and sweet qualities that make apples so tasty. We love this recipe because it’s most fun when made in a group, employs the nutritious apple skins, doesn’t need any added sugar, and is so simple. We’re grateful we had a sweet last class before the school closures. Stay safe, everyone, and we will see you back in the kitchen soon!

Breakfast Around the World: Week 9

We enjoyed making Egyptian falafel so much last semester that we made another North African/Middle Eastern breakfast this week featuring fava beans called ful medames. The fava beans are cooked with onions, garlic, and cumin, then served mashed with flatbread and an array of sides such as hard-boiled eggs, onion, parsley, lemons, tomatoes, and yogurt.

This recipe requires some advanced preparation to cook the beans, but otherwise comes together very quickly. We had more time than usual to share the meal at the table. Many students took the opportunity to tell jokes and make each other laugh. During this difficult time when we must stay far apart, we look forward to being able to connect again in person over food in the near future.

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 8

In the garden this week, Ms. Stuti started class by reading the book Oh Say Can You Seed? by Bonnie Worth and illustrated by Aristides Ruiz. The first graders then divided into three groups and got to explore a collection of seeds of all different sizes, colors, and shapes. The largest seed they examined was a coconut. The smallest seeds came from the sesame plant. Students took turns making observations about the seeds, then came up with their own classification system. Some groups sorted the seeds by edibility; others sorted by color; others sorted by texture. After the sorting was done, other students got to guess how each group chose to classify their seeds.

We ended class with a seasonal snack of sliced Navel oranges and time to water the plants and explore the garden. Why do you think there is such an array of seeds found in nature?!

Grade 2 Edible Social Studies: Week 8

This week the second graders talked about how transactions make up an economy and watched a short video about how farmers markets provide a simple, joyful way for producers and consumers to connect. In the kitchen, students worked together to make a miso-ginger dressing, which they ate with Little Gem and Red Butter lettuces.

The dressing gets its tang from ginger and rice vinegar; sweetness from apples, carrots, and mirin; and umami from miso and soy sauce. We can’t wait to share the students’ hard work with friends and family on April 18. One chef remarked, “We’re going to make a bajillion dollars this is so good!”

Breakfast Around the World: Week 8

This week we made a Korean breakfast of zucchini pancakes with a tasty dipping sauce. Most of the class was spent cutting the squash into matchsticks, which were then tossed with salt to help draw out moisture. Students then squeezed as much water out of the salted zucchini as they could (similar to the process they used to make Polish potato pancakes), then made a simple batter with eggs, onion, and flour.

The best part of the class was when kids who came into the class strongly stating they did not like zucchini asked for thirds.

Grade 1 Edible Social Studies: Week 7

The first graders will spend six weeks in the garden exploring all things seeds, including rice, which they now know so much about! In the outdoor classroom, we read the book From Seed to Plant by Gail Gibbons and students began the germination process for dried fava beans. They placed a bean between the side of a clear cup and a damp paper towel and will continue to check on the seeds over the next week to make sure they have enough moisture to sprout.

Our seasonal garden snack was Kishu mandarins, and at the end of class, everyone had an opportunity to participate in garden jobs: caring for our school chickens, exploring the dig zone, or watering plants. We can’t wait to plant favas together once the beans germinate!