Nutrition and food education has been integrated into BUSD’s curriculum for decades through the Berkeley Public School Gardening and Cooking Program. Founded in 2014, the program aims to engage students with hands-on learning in the school communal gardens and kitchen. Through this effort, they hope to teach students about health and nutrition, and help them gain life skills like networking, communicating effectively, and collaborating well with peers. Some lesson plans from this program include seed planting/sorting, identifying what plants are edible/inedibble, weighing harvests, sprouting seeds, and specific decomposers for soil like worms. Currently, the program serves over 6,000 students within BUSD, according to their website.
Middle schoolers at Willard and Longfellow are offered Career Technical Education (CTE) courses in gardening, cooking and a year-long Growing Leaders elective. Students at Berkeley High School and Berkeley Technology Academy (BTA) are offered CTE courses in Public Health. BTA also has been partnering with Growing Leaders since 2008 to offer a paid internship for students enrolled in BTA. Students run the bi-weekly food pantry and grow food for the pantry in the BTA and Growing Leaders gardens.
King Middle School partners with the Edible Schoolyard Project to offer cooking and gardening classes to students. Around once a month, during their science class, students go to the garden to harvest plants or cook with the plants grown. Both the King and Willard gardens have chickens. For a time, King had rabbits as well.
Some students have found that the nutrition classes have primarily helped them reinforce prior knowledge rather than learning fully novel concepts. “My family (has) always been big on nutrition and stuff. It reinforced nutrition (for me),” Luna Gonzalez, a BHS junior who attended King and participated in the program, said. “I liked cooking sometimes, if the recipes were good, and gardening, if the weather was good. It was nice.”
Berkeley Independent Study (BIS), a BUSD school that provides an alternative to the classic classroom environment, also has a gardening program that emphasizes nutrition and the science of growing, cooking, and consuming nutritious foods, according to the BHS course catalog. The program provides classes specific to high school students, as well as classes for K-8 grade students. High schoolers can also participate in internships with the biweekly food pantry run at BHS by Benjamin Goff. The weeks that the students don’t have the food pantry is when they attend a cooking class also run by Goff. “I'm hoping to give them sort of a glimpse into all things related to food systems in terms of potential careers and building their skill sets around food,” Goff said.
However, there is a substantial gap between the prevalence and quality of food education between BUSD middle schools and BHS. BHS itself, while offering Public Health in the course catalog, does not offer cooking or gardening in the same ways that elementary and middle schools in BUSD do. This year, Tasha Jackson, an AMPS teacher, started a new one-semester course on Nutrition and Wellness. Last year, Jackson became a certified nutritionist to prepare to teach the course. The class has three units, focused on nutrition, sleep, and stress. “I made it very clear, this class is not designed to tell people what to eat. It’s to educate them on what nutrition is,” Jackson said. “The class is grounded in something called bioindividuality. We all need different things, so let’s learn the things that are available and what it does for us, individually. We all have different goals,” Jackson said.
The cooking class and food pantry was started in 2020; Goff became the program supervisor in March of 2023 after working as a garden teacher at Sylvia Mendez Elementary School for 23 years. “I would love, as a program, to be able to place a staff member at BHS to run more regular garden cooking and nutrition classes and I'm working on that, but it's mostly a matter of funding,” Goff said.
“I really want to work with [Farmer Ben] and get kids to, after they learn about macronutrients, to start cooking and preparing with macronutrients. So they can have these skills…With this knowledge, how can we take this information and translate it into how we eat, how we support our community, and how they eat,” Jackson said.