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Takeaways from the Chicago Non-Profit's Recent Event
I am a longtime admirer of Pilot Light, the Chicago-based food education non-profit.
Started by well-known Chicago chefs Matthias Merges, Paul Kahan and Jason Hammel, the program started small, working to integrate food studies into the curriculum of one public school. Under the leadership of Executive Director Alexandra (Alex) DeSorbo-Quinn over the past decade, Pilot Light now works directly with school systems across the nation and provides guidance to many others through its Food Education Standards.
On July 22, Pilot Light held an event at the Chicago High School for Agricultural Sciences. It featured a panel, moderated by Alex, of three experts on food education, followed by a presentation about results of an evaluation of the organization’s agricultural education and advocacy program funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute for Food and Agriculture (NIFA).
The following are takeaways from the event’s two segments. There will be a postscript published soon.
The Panel
The panelists provided widely individual perspectives about food education:
Marissa Dake, vice president of brand and partnership at DNO Produce, a Columbus, Ohio-based company that provides vegetables and fruit for Pilot Light’s SnackTime Explorers program that functions in many schools across America.
Nick Davis, managing director of communication and engagement at Community Food Navigator, a Chicago non-profit that works to connect and organize for Black, Brown and Indigenous food producers in under-resourced neighborhoods.
Matthias Merges, chef-owner of restaurants in Chicago and North Carolina and a co-founder of Pilot Light.
The following quotes provide a taste of the discussion.
Alexandra Desorbo-Quinn
We have over 10 years of experience in partnering directly with teachers to support them in integrating food into subjects like math and reading. using food as a tool to teach. You can imagine that when students are engaged, there's a lot of joy in the classroom. But they're coming away with food, developing connections to the world around them, developing knowledge and skills to make informed choices for themselves, for their families and their communities.
Marissa Dake
I'm a farm kid. My parents have a diversified small farm in northeast Kansas... Also, my parents are retired high school teachers... After college, I worked in food and ag policy in Washington, D.C. for several years, working in legislative affairs. I've also worked in food banking on the distribution side. And now I'm getting experience on the food systems and infrastructure side...
I’ve worked in food access my whole career, trying to get more produce specifically onto people's plates and into cafeterias. It doesn't actually create the demand, though, it doesn't make kids fall in love with broccoli. If I just get more broccoli into the lunchroom, it needs to have an education component and experience to it. A memory, a social component, everybody thinks broccoli, it's broccoli club, something like that. Right? Where it becomes adopted as part of their identity, that this is ‘Why broccoli?’ that that creates that demand, which allows the production of that good to be more sustainable.
We were in a second-grade classroom in March of this year, covering the Fresh Fruit and Vegetable Program, which is an elementary school fruit and vegetable snack program that is served in the classroom... The teacher was serving sugar snap peas that day and the kids went wild because they could pop the pods together in unison, the whole class popping the sugar snap peapods together, and it was like this satisfying crunch... Just the joy and the connection of that classroom around sugar snap peas is exactly what I'd love to see across our country across our schools.
Nick Davis
Community Food Navigator is an organization that is primarily focused on local and small-scale Black, Brown and Indigenous farms and figuring out how we can build power and coordinate our food system to better serve these growers and how neighborhoods and communities within Chicago and in the region can define food sovereignty for themselves. Prior to that, I ran the agriculture policy platform for lieutenant governor Juilana Stratton in Illinois as well as her food insecurity platform, so I'm very familiar with the policy side and the government affairs side. But my heart is really in actually getting my hands in the food, in the soil...
I'm from Los Angeles originally. And as you all know, there's tons of farms in the north of LA and in the Central Valley. We once went on a field trip up there and we did kind of one of those pick your own type activities. And I just remember, I was the kid that the teachers had to go hunt down with the buses fully loaded, because I still grabbing pumpkins and squash and all. I kind of fell in love from that point.
When you taste food actually grown by people who see themselves as stewards of the land and who see themselves as in relation to the land, as opposed to somebody who's just trying to pull as much as they possibly can from it to feed as many people as possible, then you really start to understand that there's something that's worth investing in, in the place that you're in. There's a reason to remediate the soil, there's a reason to hold down that corner of the block. And I think when it comes to our young people and what they are eating and how they think about food preparation and nutrition, what their bodies deserve, and how their bodies feel differently after eating this food over this food, you're bringing them more into their own bodies, and you're bringing them more into relationship with the land.
Matthias Merges
My mom, when I was a kid, was a terrible cook, terrible. Now she's a great cook. But then we would go on these trips once a summer, we’d go camping and things like that. And I remember that we'd stop at these farms. and we would have, like, house cured bacon. That was the first thing my brothers and I would be, like, ‘Oh my God, this food tastes awesome." That was the start of my journey. ... It's important for us to make sure that cooks understand, you got to get dairy, this is where it comes from.
We realized that we really wanted to make sure that children had the toolbox to make healthy decisions in their lives, and have the advocacy to take it home to their families and communities. And we just felt we're compelled, we have to do this. We're in the food business. We're restaurateurs, we’re chefs, we're seeing the breakdown in the food systems within schools.
You have to embed our program within the classroom, every single day where they can use our lesson plans that use food, nutrition, health, and well being is a language to study all of the core curriculum disciplines that they needed to teach. I think that they remember these things, and the outcome is they are eating healthier, they're making healthier decisions, or exercising, whatever it may be.
The Study
Eileen Torpy, Pilot Light’s director of school and district partnerships, followed with a review of the NIFA-funded study, officially titled Disseminating Research-Based Agriculture Education in Classrooms. The program worked with a total of 14 teachers and 306 students over its two-year span. Here are takeaways from her talk.
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Our goals for this study were first and foremost to increase teacher capacity to deliver food, nutrition and agricultural education. We wanted to increase student food knowledge and their preparation skills and behaviors around food. We wanted to form student-run advocacy groups and identify food-related issues impacting their own communities...
Building trust and support for student voice was a priority... When people say they want student voice, a lot of time what they mean is they want to hear adult thoughts coming out of students’ mouths... We also had that moment each year working with our teachers to say truly, even if you think a student’s idea is a little off the wall, Pilot Light is not going to be upset if you come back and say we tried to start this crazy project. We really wanted to put students at the center of these advocacy projects and have them define what success looks like for them, and to define what advocacy is...
[Eileen quoted some students’ response to the program.]
“I loved it and now I want a degree in agriculture.”
“I can help. Our community can help.”
“I learned that I am not that interested in agriculture...I was interested in this to an extent.... I learned a lot from this, so I guess ag is pretty cool."
“Advocacy means speaking out about things that are wrong. If no one speaks out, nothing will happen. Food won’t be as healthy and maybe we will ruin the earth.”
“Advocacy means spreading awareness, showing people something and why it’s essential. It’s important because if one person is an advocate, they may convince someone to help the world.”
Young people are what create change in our society. You can see that from every social movement that ever happened. When you start those ideas, when you build that capacity, when you support teachers and create those safe spaces where young people can test their ideas and try things out and can learn and can fail and can try again, that’s when you can see the needle shift.
[She concluded with a story about a participant, a middle schooler with a withdrawn personality, who blossomed during and after the program.]
We had an 8th grade teacher. At the beginning of the year, the parents of this student came in and said, we’re a little bit worried about our son. He really doesn’t talk a ton, he really keeps to himself both at home and at school. He hasn’t made a ton of friends, and we’re just a little concerned about whether he’s making these kinds of connections.
This was a student who was then selected to come to the Ag Ed Training when we were doing a peer day at The Farm on Ogden [an urban farming facility, run by Chicago Botanic Garden’s Windy City Harvest program, that is located in an under-resourced Chicago neighborhood]. He shows up with a composition notebook, and the kid is taking exquisite notes throughout the thing. He really keyed in on hydroponics, aquaponics...
The parents reached back out to the teacher to say, “He won’t stop talking about agriculture.” They really couldn’t get him to discuss anything at the dinner table before, but now day and night and night and day, it’s aquaponics, hydroponics,
agriculture, all of this.
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