Episode 1.4 Transcript
Dinah: Welcome to Farm to School Northeast, a podcast where we explore the creative ways that local food is getting into school cafeterias and how food system education is playing out in classrooms and school gardens across the northeast. Today we have an opportunity to sit down with French teacher Brigitte Savard and high school senior Veda Gahagan from Montpelier High School to talk about ways they embed food system education into the curriculum. From “Solon Soup for the Soul” named after the school mascot, the Greek philosopher Solon, to a student run crepe truck at the local farmer’s market. Get ready to hear about some creative ways to build excitement and learning. Welcome, Bridgette and Veda. Thanks so much for making time to share with us today.
Brigitte and Veda: Thank you. Thank you.
Dinah: Before we dig into details, can you introduce yourself to the listeners and in particular share how your work and interests are connected to the topic of farm to school?
Brigitte: Sure. I can start us off. I’m Brigitte Savard. It’s my sixth year teaching French at Montpelier High School. I’ve always incorporated foods from the francophone world and the concept of local and regional foods into my curriculum. To me, it’s a part of culture that everyone can relate to and it’s also just always fun to cook and eat with students. To me, cooking is an essential skill I feel should be taught everywhere alongside with reading, writing, and math. After years of making crepes in my class, there’s a student in my class who suggested, oh, we should sell these crepes at the farmer’s market. And it seemed like kind of a far away dream at the time. But then my friend Ken Cato, who happened to have a crepe card he wasn’t using, he donated it to us because I think he was excited about the project too.
And that’s how we built what we have now, which is Le Bonne Crepe, which is a crepe cart that we run at the Capital City Farmer’s market, and we do other events. So it’s kind of a big part of our curriculum. The three pieces of the mission of the crepe cart is to learn cooking skills and build responsibility, celebrating local food and culinary traditions. So combining both the know-how of the French skills to make a crepe, but also try to include as much of the local foods as we can from the market itself and also from our own gardens. And then raise funds. All the proceeds of the crepe cart go to student scholarship travel. So it’s an exciting thing that grew out of just one idea and I’m really proud to be part of it. And Veda, I’ll let you talk a little bit about your role in it too.
Veda: I’m Veda, I’m a senior at Montpelier High School. I kind of just started off in French class, but the way Madam B teaches her class I think is really interesting. She just adds a whole aspect of the culture to it, but especially with food, I can’t tell you how many times we’ve cooked in that class, but I feel like it just adds such a cool part to it and being able to be part of the crepe cart, it is just a crazy experience. I love being at the farmer’s market and serving food to people.
Brigitte: And I would like to just add, because you’re being so modest, so Veda is also the manager of the crepe cart now, which means that she’s the person who kind of knows the whole system. And I can now, I went from feeling like I have to be next to the crepe cart at all times to being able to walk away and let students run the crepes at the farmer’s market with Veda there.
Dinah: So Veda, what are some responsibilities that you have at the crepe cart?
Veda: Well, besides making the crepes themselves, setting up, making sure we have everything we need, all the ingredients. Also going around to other vendors or just places that we get our ingredients because we do get our ingredients from other vendors. Also, if Madam B does go away, just making sure that the cashier, the person running the cashier is okay and not overwhelmed. Just making sure everyone is doing their part and not freaking out.
Dinah: Can one of you describe your school community for us to give listeners a picture? How would you describe Montpelier High School in Vermont to someone that has never been there?
Veda: So there’s about 400 kids at our school-ish. It’s not a huge school, it’s downtown Montpelier. I wouldn’t call it urban. I get the very local vibe. I mean, we’re there, but we also, our campus is full of greenhouses and gardens and very… like a lot of gardens. But yeah, I think we have a very inclusive space. It’s very community filled, just very inclusive. It is such a positive place.
Brigitte: Yeah, I think you pretty much covered it. I don’t have a lot to add to that. That’s great.
Dinah: Brigitte, can you talk a little bit about your farm to school team and the participation in the Vermont Farm to School Institute at Shelburne Farms? And maybe describe how the experience at the institute helped you to connect to others in your school and community and develop a farm to school plan.
Brigitte: Sure. It was a terrific experience. I went to the Farm to School Institute the summer before last at the invitation of Sam Bromley, who centered his role in fellowship around farm to school in Montpelier and also Matt McLane, who is a director of our Flexible Pathways here, and two rising seniors who had been invited also by Sam. And our goal as a team was to essentially just increase participation in all things farm and all things culinary at our school. And so we came at it from a lot of different angles, but ultimately we tried to center our mission to parallel our school’s mission, which is take care of yourself, take care of each other, and take care of the place. And we feel that eating well, working together and also taking care of the gardens and our chickens, that’s essentially what we’re doing during that time and we’d like to, we wanted to increase student participation in all those three aspects of our farm to school work.
All three food events are rooted in our local farm. And so the first one in the year is the fall harvest celebration, and that’s a time for us to gather around a meal to celebrate the year’s harvest. That includes a lot of corn and a lot of squash and delicious food. And the two seniors who came along to work with us at the Farm to School, they sort of dreamt up this sort of midyear culinary and food event for us to partake in and calling it Solon Soup for the Soul. And it’s just the whole idea is just to gather around in a giant kind of Hogwarts style experience in the gym, all of us at these long tables and we just have soup and crusty bread.
And that went from sort of like a doodle on a piece of paper to a 400 person event that was terrific and I think most people loved it. And our third event that we have been doing, but continue to work on improving is Pizza for the People in the spring. So that’s a time again for us to celebrate– all the tomatoes that came out of the greenhouse in the fall are then turned into tomato sauce for that event. And I think all three events do a really great job of connecting students who might not have been engaged directly with the farm, with what we do outside here and just reminding everybody how much emphasis we put on growing our own food and what it means to eat local.
Our sustainability director is Tom Sabo, and he manages these beautiful gardens we have right outside the school. So as soon as if you were to walk out of the building and go have lunch on the picnic tables right outside, you’d find that there’s some corn that’s about seven foot tall right now. So it’s really nice right across the way from that corn we have about, I think we have six or eight laying chickens, so we get a lot of eggs from those hens right now. And then a lot of what we grow in the garden, because we’re in the northeast, is going to get processed through the culinary classes and then frozen and saved for throughout the year. So we use a lot of what…there are potatoes, there’s squash, there’s all kinds of herbs and other delicious foods in the garden. So some of that we’ll use for fall harvest celebration, and then a lot of it will get processed, like the tomatoes and the basil will make it to pesto and save it for later in the year.
Veda: We also have beehives kind of farther out, but I think we get honey from those.
Brigitte: And I think this year for the first time we’ll be also getting some beeswax. We’ll have a workshop to separate the wax from the hives or from the combs.
Dinah: Does your food service department use the things that you grow in the garden for lunches or is it just for these special events that you have?
Brigitte: For a good portion of the fall and the spring, the cafeteria serves our salad, which is incredible. It’s delicious and it’s microgreens and it’s fresh and it’s daily and yeah, it’s really delicious. In the middle of the winter we source that out. We don’t grow it. We don’t keep the greenhouses warm all year round. But I would say the two months, the beginning of school and two months at the end of school, we get our greens from the garden. And there’s other vegetables too I think that come in and out, but that’s the one that has the most regularity. And Veda, I think you probably were in charge of greens at one point, right?
Veda: Yeah. So typically sophomores, usually they grow their own lettuce in that greenhouse. And yeah, those are usually the ones that are served in the cafeteria.
Dinah: And with the new school year upon us. What farm to school activities are you both excited about in this new school year?
Veda: I think for me personally, I’m honestly– I don’t know what to expect, but because in the past two years I’ve seen, honestly, all of my teachers take it to a different level with their teaching. I’ve never cooked or had as much fun learning about subjects that involve it. I’m excited to just see what else my teachers come up with.
Brigitte: And for me, it’s a year where actually, so we alternate, this food cart class is taught every other year, and this year I’m not teaching that class, but my Colleen is going to teach a class called La Cocina. So she’ll be involved in bringing in a lot of Hispanic culture through food through that class. So it’ll be a cooking class, but centered around the Hispanic traditions from all over the Spanish speaking world. So I’m excited to see how those projects can, will hopefully trickle out into the rest of the school– we’ll get to at least taste it.
Dinah: Do you have any advice for educators and students from other schools who might want to follow your lead and get creative when it comes to food system education?
Brigitte: My advice would be to do what we were provided so generously by the Farm to School Institute, which is create a team that you check in with regularly. And sometimes in that team you have some setbacks and you have some moments where it feels like it’s a passion project that’s on top of your regularly scheduled contract. And that’s true for students and teachers. But I would say having a team and having dates in the calendar that are booked for that to make that a shared priority in your group is going to go a long way to feeling optimistic and being able to get things done. Yeah, that’s my main thing. Just stick with your team, create a team and stick with them.
Veda: I don’t know if this is exactly advice, but I think for me, just remembering that I’m from Vermont, it’s such a local place for me, and I found so much community here growing up here, and that just makes me excited to make food and share food with other people.
Brigitte: I think the other thing I would just add that’s kind of like maybe the extension of the advisor encouragement, is that students are incredible allies in this work because I feel like it’s something that everybody is excited about. I mean, Veda kind of mentioned that earlier. I just feel like it’s something that we all have the common experience of eating delicious food, and to me, it’s such a community building activity in addition to being good for us, good for the planet, it’s just eating local and cooking together is just an incredible way to get to know each other. And I think I would include as much as possible. I say I feel like one thing that’s worked really well is I feel like students really have brought their voices and their visions to our projects here, and I would say that’s really made the projects viable and richer for it. And I think that they bring also just a great reality check. I feel like Veda, I can count on you to be like, yeah, sometimes I’m like, what about this idea? And Veda can be like, yeah, good or not so much. It’s good to have just a person who’s like, ah, the students are not going to like that, or The students will love this. So follow this and just having, correcting our course along the way.
Dinah: Well, thank you two so much for talking to me today and sharing this really exciting food system education work you all do. It’s exciting to learn about and I’m hoping that people who listen to this might get inspired and plan some food system education projects of their own.
Brigitte: Thank you so much.
Veda: Yeah, thank you.
Dinah: This podcast is a production of the Northeast Farm to School Collaborative. For more information about this podcast or farm to school in the northeast, go to northeast farm to school.org.
Phone: (413) 253-3844
Email: info@massfarmtoschool.org
