BACKGROUND

In 2002, we were four women, new to motherhood and engaged parents: a social worker, a grocery marketing specialist and food writer, a community organizer, and a newspaper food journalist. For a few years, we knew of each other but worked separately, with different concentrations: school lunch improvements and climate change for one of us, healing gardens and health after 9/11 for another, flavor and whole foods for yet another, and community for the fourth.

Results were uneven. When we finally explored pooling our efforts, there was a clear path forward: Who could be against a garden? Could we start there, and see where it led? We came together in 2005 as the Princeton School Gardens Cooperative, thinking that we could make a difference and improvements would compound, especially considering growing societal awareness of food and its myriad roles in wellbeing and climate. We planned to template the work so others could benefit from our research and development, and quickly work our way out of these jobs.

ACTIVITIES & PROGRAM PLANNING

EDIBLE GARDENS: As our first project, we fund-raised in our town, and hosted gardens-raisings, supported by local restaurateurs and food-based businesses and many parents. We installed collections of Edible Gardens at each of the district’s six campuses. We were nonplussed, however, to see that, other than a few early adopters, most faculty didn’t see the Edible Gardens as bountiful gifts, but rather, one more thing on a list of too many things already. We were learning.

EDIBLE GARDENS EDUCATORS: We followed the network of Edible Gardens with more fund-raising, then hired part-time Edible Gardens Educators to bring practical gardens-based knowledge of seed, soil, sun, and water to work alongside faculty in optimizing outdoor classroom labs and making explicit curricular and cultural connections. This work gathered more converts and earned the support of the district, which agreed to take on the part-time salaries as a line item to the budget – a true measure of success. But the school meals still were a jumble of highly processed heat-‘n’-eat bread- and commodity-based items: chicken nuggets, mozzarella sticks, hamburgers, waffles & high-fructose “maple” syrup, pancakes, pizza. Carrots, when served, were straight out of the can, and were brown not from a glaze, but from oxidation. Pears, which we know are sublime at peak ripeness, were served hard and green; you could hear the thump-thump of them hitting the garbage can as elementary students scraped their trays. Unsurprisingly, the National School Lunch Program was poorly subscribed, and shockingly, lunch aides made regular appeals to children to buy frozen desserts, if they had the money in their accounts. Which led to…

GARDEN STATE ON YOUR PLATE: In 2010, we earned 501c3 status. Just a few more years, we thought. The board plumped up. One of our founders left for another nonprofit. The district hired a new superintendent, one more interested in food systems literacy. We fund-raised for a farm-to-school palate education program, Garden State on Your Plate, with a focus on produce items grown in New Jersey and under-consumed by school-age children, according to the Dietary Guidelines for Americans (mostly nutrient-dense red-orange-yellow vegetables, leafy dark green vegetables, beans, legumes, and aromatics with high flavoring potential). We provided a sturdy foundation for the tastings (and buy-in) by working with each school’s Parent-Teacher Association/Organization to coordinate a team of volunteers to portion and serve samples of very simply prepared local, seasonal produce during lunchtime in the school cafeterias. Students cheered the appearances of chefs in whites and farmers in muck boots. In this program, students are asked to put aside their own preferences, and are empowered to examine the food as scientists for flavor, texture and appearance, and are validated by discerning and reporting the effects on their palates of adding salt, citrus, salt and citrus, or other flavorings to the food, which itself served raw, roasted, or boiled. Curriculum- and culturally connected posters, posted in hallways, in classrooms, and in cafeterias, reiterated points made by chefs and farmers and faculty. The district chose a new food service provider, one that promised better meals within the NSLP and agreed to work with our organization’s food systems literacy efforts.

COOKS+GARDENS: In the meantime, the district discontinued its Modern Living class, which was housed in the old home economics classroom at the middle school. (These are only Teaching Kitchens in the whole town, with five kitchen stations that comfortably accommodate 15 students for hands-on lessons). Let us use the classroom, we said, and…they said yes! The principal’s only requirement: “I want a truly modern living class.” We fund-raised to purchase cookware and tableware, and fund-raised to hire a practicing chef/instructor, then engaged the school’s Edible Gardens Educator/Steward as well. We experimented with various formats – cooking contests, a middle school take on “Iron Chef in the first few years, but stepped away from competition. These days, the seed-to-table, faculty-advised classes run after school, in six-week sessions, with two gardening classes bracketing four cooking classes. Students grow it forward, planting the 10 crops featured in the Garden State on Your Plate program, along with others, in spring and in fall for the next cohort to harvest and cook the following season. And they learn to tend to themselves, making simple foods with safe kitchen skills that build confidence and self-reliance. The runaway success of this after-school program convinced the district to return a food-based class to the school-day mix, and hired a part-time teacher with double certifications required for the job. The class was immediately and consistently oversubscribed: “the most popular elective, ever,” said the principal. We thought our job was done there, so we put our after-school program on hold, but the district asked that we restart it after the faculty member resigned to take a job closer to home in fall 2019, just months before the covid-related school closures. The district, recalibrating after some bumps, is hiring a new, full-time science faculty member who will be based in the Teaching Kitchens beginning in the fall semester of 2024.

GARDEN STATE ON YOUR PLATE – AND ON YOUR SPORK: After six years of regularly scheduled Garden State on Your Plate produce tastings during lunchtime in the cafeteria, a founder delicately approached the food service company about participating in the program. They said yes! A year in to that slow partnership involving food service workers making tasting samples for students, covid struck. Overnight, school was zoomed. The engaged superintendent retired; after an interim period, a new one was hired. With her approval, we restarted and expanded the program to include weekly appearances of featured produce on the National School Lunch Program hot line, and also that produce item on another day of the week on the NSLP hot line, spotlighting a cuisine and flavors of the district’s diverse student population.

FIVE EASY PIECES: A stipulation of the food service provider contract is continuing education; one of our board members who is executive chef of a fine-dining restaurant in New Jersey has begun the process of this education. This program, however, goes further: It brings faculty, staff, and administration, along with food service workers, into the district’s Teaching Kitchens, where all prepare and then share a fast, frugal, and easy meal made with National School Lunch Program components under his supervision. Goal is to reconnect faculty to school meals as teaching tool for illustrating and amplifying curriculum, and at the same time, to have food service workers understand that they are in partnership with faculty: what they serve either illustrates and amplifies curriculum, or it doesn’t.

FOOD SYSTEMS LITERACY COORDINATOR: We fund-raised for, and launched, in partnership with the district and full endorsement by the superintendent, the Food Systems Literacy coordinator position. This part-time employee of the district eschews the limelight, working behind the scenes to optimize our existing programs, school foods, campus lands, the Teaching Kitchens, and the diversity of the students themselves, to illustrate and amplify curriculum. This program was a pilot, but as of spring 2024, has been added to the budget.

EMERALD NECKLACE FOOD FOREST: The district is taking steps toward eventual reforestation and ecosystem restoration of its six campuses. All currently sport buzz cuts, with short clipped grass, nary a weed, and regimented trees, save for the wildness of the Edible Gardens and the unruliness of mints. Benefits of reforestation that calls to mind the time of Lenape and indigenous themes of reciprocity include ready-made campus-as-lab, reduced temperature spikes in summer, reduced CO2 emissions from the district campuses, increased habitat and biodiversity, improved soil health, soil percolation and less runoff during extreme rainstorm events, food for the community grown by the students, enhanced wellbeing for all, and a living example of collective power.

HOW LOW CAN YOU GO: HOW ABOUT ZERO? A plants-rich diet and reduced food waste are the third- and fourth-most effective solutions for achieving drawdown – the point at which human-made greenhouse gas emissions stop increasing. With the Garden State on Your Plate program, we’re working on the former. How Low Can You Go is a new four-way contest beginning at the district’s four elementary schools in the 2024-’25 school year, with each cafeteria weighing daily plate scrapings in hopes of achieving zero. A traveling trophy will be displayed for the winning school each month.

TEACHING KITCHENS AS HEART OF THE DISTRICT: The middle school is home to the only Teaching Kitchens in the entire town. With a goal of keeping the lights on in there, nights and weekends, and optimizing the use of the space for high school students and even for community members, discussion is underway with the district to replace windows with doors to a courtyard that could function as three-season classroom/gathering space. Could the Teaching Kitchens become PPS Community Kitchens? Maybe.

KITCHEN CABINET: We convinced the superintendent to convene stakeholders to discuss and advise on all things related to the district’s food systems literacy and policies – from campus land stewardship and water (flow and fall) to procurement practices to school meals to curricular connections. These meetings started around 2016, stopped with covid in 2020, and returned irregularly in 2022; they resume their regular monthly schedule in June 2024. Among the ongoing subjects: UN Sustainable Development Goal No. 2, Zero Hunger; translating Garden State on Your Plate posters into all languages taught at the district, incentives for faculty to use school foods, campus lands, Teaching Kitchens, and diversity of student population as curricular tools; plants-rich diet and hockey-stick increase in participation for school meals, how to make meals free, how to remove all competitive foods from all cafeterias, building buying cooperatives with other large institutions in the town, zero food waste goals for the district. Of particular interest: Evolution from grass cutting and weed killing to pruning and tending to nature in its wild abundance.

Looking Ahead: There’s always more to do. With funding and buy-in:

FREE SCHOOL MEALS FOR ALL: Knowing what we know about health and equity and inclusion, and the success of free school meals in fighting hunger and “othering” during the first years of the pandemic, how is this not in place?

ELIMINATING COMPETITIVE FOODS FROM SCHOOL CAMPUSES: Why are there “competitive foods” aka “a la carte” items in the cafeteria, directly competing with sales of National School Lunch Program meals, available only to those with money, and creating the haves and have-nots from the first days of kindergarten and throughout the k12 public education experience? These items, sometimes fancy-ish fare to appeal to adults, but usually highly processed packaged items engineered to qualify as USDA “Smart Snacks,” whether by serving size or reduced sodium or sugars, are present because they’re not part of the subsidized, low-cost, and strictly regulated meal service. Competitive foods are priced according to what the market will bear, and they are integral to food service providers’ profits. This practice is pernicious on several levels:
• It creates and feeds the culture of haves and have-nots from the first day of kindergarten, in the cafeteria, where children are to be nurtured and nourished, no matter their circumstances. School cafeterias must provide level playing fields for children with the most basic tenets of respect: the food served to them.
• Presence of this packaged items reduces interest in what’s on the lunch tray.
• If there’s a guaranteed income from junk food and foods outside purview of NSLP, there’s less incentive for food service providers to increase participation via quality, consistency, cultural connections, or curricular connections
Eliminating “competitive foods” as a part of National School Lunch Program/School Breakfast Program food service purveyor income stream would jumpstart new thinking around school meals. Without that guaranteed profit, how would food service purveyors rethink the model? Would schools, including PPS, seriously consider returning food service to in-house? Would quality and consistency improve? Would participation increase if school foods continually and continuously illustrated and amplified curriculum and student demographics?

PREP, COOK, CONVENE AND EAT: Design, build, and install a combination Teaching Kitchen/prep kitchen/walk-in cooler with adjacent picnic benches to accept, process and store local, seasonal produce for use in school meals, as hunger-relief pickup point, and for food-centered community gatherings. This structure would share an wall with the high school football field snackbar/bathrooms, and would be accessible for deliveries via a utility driveway. The combination Teaching Kitchen/prep kitchen/walk-in cooler with adjacent picnic benches (and maybe campground-style grills(?) would create an immediate food-centered community convening spot for myriad groups, helping to transform the high-school/middle-school campus into an outdoor living space. This structure would be tucked into the periphery of food forest plantings.

RUTGERS AND DUAL CERTIFICATION: How to build this pipeline of students who graduate from NJ colleges/universities with dual certificates required to teach hands-on food courses and k12 education. These conversations with Rutgers scholars were under way before covid and have yet to be resumed.

PAVEMENT TO PLAZA AND FOOD FOREST: A one-block stretch of asphalt separates the campus of the high school from the campus of the middle school. Already, that short segment of road (Walnut Street) is closed during pickup time every weekday afternoon. What if we follow the lead of so many cities, taking the asphalt up and creating a community plaza between the two schools, reforesting what is now asphalt, and adding three-season gathering spaces between the two?

EVALUATION PROCESSES

Our nonprofit came into being for the sole purpose of embedding food systems literacy in the public school district and in our community. Questions we ask when debating whether to continue a program, or begin a new project:
What are our objectives?
Do we have adequate resources to begin/continue?
Could the program/project begin as a pilot?
Does this program work with the public school community we serve?
Have we laid sufficient groundwork for understanding with faculty, staff, administration, parents, food-based businesses, producers?
What is our path to progress?
What measures equal success?

ACCOMPLISHMENTS & MILESTONES

See above. Also:
The Edible Schoolyard, founded by Chef Alice Waters, featured the work of our group several years ago.
Additionally, we were named “Top Tomato” by the NJ Department of Agriculture a few years back.
The YMCA/YWCA honored us for our work in the community.

2025 is our 20th year.

:-)

Community Partners
Princeton Public Schools Board

Betsy Kalber Baglio: BetsyBaglio@princetonk12.org
Beth Behrend: BethBehrend@princetonk12.org
Debbie Bronfeld: DeborahBronfeld@princetonk12.org
Daniel Dart: DanielDart@princetonk12.org
Jean Durbin: JeanDurbin@princetonk12.org
Peter Katz: PeterKatz@princetonk12.org
Susan Kanter: SusanKanter@princetonk12.org
Dafna Kendal: DafnaKendal@princetonk12.org
Brian McDonald: BrianMcDonald@princetonk12.org
Matt Bouldin, business administrator: matthewbouldin@princetonk12.org

Princeton Public Schools

Community Park Elementary School
Peter Wagner, Edible Gardens Educator/Steward: peterwagner@princetonk12.org
Johnson Park Elementary School
Deb Gries, Edible Gardens Educator/Steward: deborahgries@princetonk12.org
Littlebrook Elementary School
Deb Gries, Edible Gardens Educator/Steward: deborahgries@princetonk12.org
Riverside Elementary School
Louise Senior, Edible Gardens Educator/Steward: louisesenior@princetonk12.org
Princeton Middle School
Deb Gries, Edible Gardens Educator/Steward: deborahgries@princetonk12.org
Princeton High School
Dr. Joy Barnes-Johnson, Science Supervisor: JoyBarnes-Johnson@princetonk12.org

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATIONS

Sustainable Princeton
Christine Symington christine@sustainableprinceton.org
Jenny Ludmer jenny@sustainableprinceton.org
Liz Cutler liz@sustainableprinceton.org
D&R Greenway Trust
Linda Mead, Executive Director lmead@drgreenway.org
Friends of Herrontown Woods
Steve Hiltner stevehiltner@gmail.com
Stony Brook Millstone Watershed Association
Jeff Hoagland
Friends of Princeton Open Space
Aelin Compton
NOFA-NJ (Northeast Organic Farming Association)
Devin Cornia, Executive Director devin@nofanj.org
Princeton Public Library
Susan Conlon
Kim Dorman
Garden Businesses
Belle Mead Co-op, Chris Trautwein
Mary Traub, education director, Princeton Young Achievers/YMCA. Liaison for the Garden State on Your Plate program for at-risk children.