On a 100-degree day in July, nine teenagers rolled up Field Day Family Farm’s gravel road in a van coming from Neighborhood House in Portland. It was harvest day. The carrots, beets, yellow warty squash, one lingering strawberry, basil, garlic, and onions were about to attain their higher purpose as pizza toppings. The teens from the Food Literacy Project’s Entrepreneurial Youth Development program came to get their hands dirty and then doughy, to better understand how food goes from field to fork.
“I thought it’d be fun to experience what it’s like to be a farmer – the vegetables, fruits, knowing the seasons and when things grow,” said Deandrae Hughes, 16. “It is hard work, but the heat doesn’t bother me. I know I have a job to do and I’m going to complete that job.”
The EYD program meets twice a week for 8-9 weeks in the summer, to holistically explore the local food system. They plant, weed, harvest, cook, and eventually go to market with their multicolored bounty of produce. And they get paid to do it.
“In EYD, they earn wages to grow foods,” said Angelique “Asparagus” Perez, program director. “For many of these kids, it’s their first job, so they’re learning professional development skills like how to be on time. The program so gets at our mission.”
Since FLP began in 2006, it has brought its mission to schools and community centers around Louisville.
“Our mission is to inspire a new generation of people to build relationships with healthy food, farming, and the land,” reads the FLP website.
The 8-acre Field Day Family Farm, located on Oxmoor Farm in St. Matthews, hosts Experiential Education Programs for school groups in the spring and fall of each year. Every summer, the FLP Youth Learning Garden plot is mostly tended to by the EYD program of teens, who also grow food in their own neighborhood, taking turns watering five raised beds at Neighborhood House.
The learning goes from the garden to the kitchen, where teens cook from what they grow, inventing recipes like “hazelwood super salad” and “eggcellent omelet with spicy greens.”
“Cooking really resonates with them,” said Perez. “We kept thinking about how to transfer that kale from the garden into a child’s everyday life. And the outdoor teaching kitchen with cob oven made that translation.”
Last year FLP built a $10,000 open-air instructional kitchen, complete with a cob oven, which is sculpted from clay, sand, and straw. In the kitchen, the EYD teens come full circle in their field-to-fork mission, preparing and eating produce from their own garden.
Hughes said cooking was his favorite aspect of the program.
“I like to cook with fresh ingredients and try to make new stuff with what I have from the garden,” said Hughes. “Food from the garden has a whole lot more taste, more intense flavor. It’s so much better than at the grocery store.”
The group also immerses itself in the local food scene by going on field trips to Grasshoppers Distribution, a local Community Supported Agriculture company, and different farmers’ markets to learn about both the production and the business aspects of food.
According to Perez, through the course of the program kids get more adventurous with tasting veggies that are no longer foreign. “Ewww” turns into “Mmmm” as the teens taste green beans, cucumber, squash, and sorrel they planted with their own hands.
“They feel a sense of pride and accomplishment in the garden,” said Perez. “It makes them want to taste their veggies.”
Jaquaz Terrell, 14, said he had never planted anything before joining the program.
“Now I like to try new things, new cheeses, new foods,” said Terrell. “It’s easy to grow food, so you don’t have to go to the store. It’s satisfying to eat it and know where it came from and what’s in there.”
On this sweltering day, the teens sat on benches in the outdoor learning kitchen to begin making cheese. They took turns pouring milk, heavy whipping cream, and buttermilk into the pan and then squeezing a lemon over it to make it curdle.
“What does it look like? How does it smell? How does it feel?” asked program coordinator Kitty “Kale” Nowak, making them instinctively want to poke the bag and smell the cheesecloth.
“We try to focus on sensory and hands-on education…smelling, tasting, touching,” said Perez.
While waiting on the cheese, instructor Terri “Turnip” Cassel helped the teens make pizza dough.
“Yeast is a living organism, so it needs water, sugar, nutrients, and food,” explained Cassel, one of the 2012 farm-based educators at FLP.
The students took turns stirring while they learned about gluten and the difference between white and wheat flour.
“It smells like beer,” one teen said after smelling the yeast.
“Yes, beer is made out of yeast too,” said Cassel, before placing the dough in a covered bowl to rise.
“How could we trick vegetables that may like a little cooler temperatures into growing in the summer?” instructor Caroline “Cucumber” Stephens, another 2012 farm-based educator, asked the group.
After discussing seasonality – the reason they couldn’t yet have tomato sauce on their pizza – Stephens challenged the students to make shade structures in the Youth Learning Garden.
After dividing into two teams – boys vs. girls – they competed to build shade structures within a time limit using recycled bags, bamboo shoots, wooden stakes, and twine. Assessing where the sun rose and fell, and speculating that a white paper bag would reflect more sun than a dark one, they craftily built their structures before lunch.
At lunchtime, the teens unwrapped their government-subsidized, plastic-sealed lunches from the National School Lunch Program – an imported orange, milk, crackers, and chicken nuggets.
“The Food Literacy Project targets low-income youth with an increased risk of diet-related illness due to poor nutrition and inactivity,” reads the FLP brochure.
“Every student who participates is in some way subsidized by the generosity of our donors and funding from grants,” said Perez.
Kala Ardis, 15, said working on the farm made her want to eat healthier.
“My favorite are radishes,” said Ardis. “When you know where it’s coming from, it just tastes way better.”
Terrell said he has started eating differently since being in the program.
“I used to drink pop a lot, but now I mostly just drink water,” said Terrell. “And I eat vegetables I never ate before.”
Lunch was followed by a harvest for pizza toppings. The teens pulled a carrot here, a beet there. They cut herbs and plucked green beans and squash off the vine. And finally it was time to assemble their own personal pizzas. On a bed of cornmeal, they rolled out the dough, piled on the pesto, and covered it in a rainbow array of toppings. They even did their dishes while the pizzas were in the oven.
On this hot July day the season is half over, but the students are looking forward to their two culminating events: cooking a meal for their parents and their community and taking their produce to sell at the Phoenix Hill Farmers’ Market on July 24.
“Everything we do leads up to the market,” said Hughes.
As the teenagers come full circle with their food understanding, they will have professional skills, recipe repertoire, and vegetable expertise to show for their months of weeding, planting, harvesting, and cooking. The teens want to be doctors, surgeons, lawyers, or football stars – not farmers. But all of them said they want to at least have a garden when they grow up. And after three hours of sweating and stirring and baking, the teens finally sunk their teeth into what they declared “pesto pizzazz pizza or p’zone.”
-Colleen Stewart
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