Phyllis Grant chronicles cooking with children, pictured with son Dash. Photo: Matt Ross

So-called mommy bloggers, who pontificate on all manner of parenting matters, have proliferated like randy rabbits on the internet. Ditto food bloggers who fetishize everything edible. And mommy food bloggers: they permeate the worldwide web by the thousands

So to stand out from the pack, a food blog with a parenting focus has to look gorgeous, offer recipes that seduce a home cook, and showcase a unique voice.

Dash and Bella fits that brief. And Berkeley’s Phyllis Grant, a former New York City pastry chef “who tired quickly of sugar and burning her forearms and never sleeping,” is behind the blog, recently named one of the top 100 food mom blogs by Babble.

Grant slow cooks with her kids and blog namesakes Dash, 4, and Bella, 9, and isn’t afraid to throw in an f-bomb or two in posts on everything from whole beast cooking to making popcorn ice cream. Her witty and insightful musings about cooking while mothering — no chicken nuggets or plain pasta in sight  — have caught the attention of The New York Times, food52, and Real Simple.

Grant, 41, lives in the Elmwood with her husband, filmmaker Matt Ross. Just back from the Sundance Film Festival where Ross’s “Twenty-Eight Hotel Rooms” was screened, she answered questions between tending to a sick daughter, a teary son, and a senile dog.

What prompted you to start your food blog?

Two and a half years ago, I was hanging full time with my kids, taking a lot of photographs, and cooking like crazy. I was also writing a lot about parenting (just to friends). It was the summer the “Julie & Julia” movie came out, and my mother forwarded me an email about a “Be like Julie/Cook like Julia” blogging contest. I spent a crazy day cooking with my kids out of Mastering the Art of French Cooking (leg of lamb and crème caramel) and then I wrote about it. I won the contest (and every Julia Child cookbook and an enormous Le Creuset Dutch oven). I also “won” an instant readership. So I kept posting.

What’s your philosophy on feeding children?

I’m brave and relaxed when it comes to kids and food. I really despise food deemed kid-friendly. I think the dumbing down of anything for kids is a mistake. I’m very passionate about cooking, but I’m also very practical and I never stress about what my kids are eating (or not eating). I cook almost every day with my kids. I’m a big fan of putting food in front of my kids, even if they hated it the week before, even if it brings on tears.

My son eats everything. I’ll give him unusual foods just to see if he’ll eat them (snail, sardines, anchovies, and frogs, to name a few). Lately, my daughter is subsisting on pizza, pasta, and bagels.

I gleefully put a chef’s knife in my four-year old’s hand, I let my nine-year old daughter use the oven when I’m out of the house (don’t tell my husband). I’ve gotten a lot of grateful emails from (mostly) women saying that, thanks to my blog, they now believe they can cook with their kids, whereas before it just felt impossible. That’s so gratifying.

Kids in the kitchen: Dash and Bella, accomplished home cooks and recipe testers. Photos: Phyllis Grant

What do you think you bring to blogging that is different?

Many food blogs have a similar structure post after post, and sometimes I really crave that consistency. But the truth is, I never know what kind of story I’m going to tell until I sit down and sift through my photos and notes. I like the element of surprise. With the cow butchery post, for example, I assumed I would just talk about the class, introduce the other students, and teach my readers a thing or two. Instead it became an emotional post about a dream, the death of the cow, and the beautiful balance of strength and subtlety required in butchery.

Savory galette featured on Dash and Bella. Photo: Phyllis Grant

How does being a former pastry chef impact how you cook with your kids?

I know how to be meticulous. But usually I’m not: my daughter cleans up after me. I’m very confident with the techniques of baking; my kids now know how to fold egg whites into a chocolate batter, make caramel, and measure like scientists.

How does Berkeley inform your cooking?

The way my parents raised me impacts my cooking choices more than Berkeley does, though I grew up here. We sat down to dinner together every night. My parents made some kick-ass beautiful food. They just kept the food coming. And that’s what I’m doing with my kids. Over and over again. Consistency seems like the best parenting tool in the world. It really works.

What’s good (and bad) about the Berkeley food scene?

You can’t get a good bagel here and that frustrates me daily. But you really can get everything else.

You’re a “mommy” blogger who swears like a trooper. Discuss.

I do anguish about the f-bombs on my blog. But for anyone who knows me (or is friends with me on Facebook), it’s how I talk, it’s how I write, and I think part of my blog’s appeal is the fact that my writing is very conversational. And parenting is so bleeping hard. I have a lot to swear about.

Is your blog a hobby, a passion, a way to make money, a chance to create community, a place to document life, all of the above or something else entirely?

All of the above. And it helps me stay sane. Writing about parenting gives me some perspective. There’s drama, stress, anxiety, and intensity. Writing about it brings about some much needed lightness — and a sense of purpose.

Where do you see yourself in five years?

I don’t even know what I’m doing next week. Hopefully washing my hair and shaving my legs (those tasks never make it to the top of my list). In five years, I hope I’m still cooking, photographing, and writing every single day.

The cooking, like the prose, is sometimes spicy, sometimes sweet. Photo: Phyllis Grant

Do you have a couple of favorite blog posts that you care to share?

I usually write about something that has just happened in my kitchen, but in September I wrote a post about concord grapes, living in New York City on 9/11, watching the World Trade Centers fall, and working with pastry chef Heather Ho, who was killed in the attack. I have never written a blog post so quickly. I was so grateful to have a built-in audience for that.

And just a few weeks ago, I posted about parenting in a new way. I needed a break so badly; I was completely overwhelmed by my children and my life. It was scary to post it. I didn’t want to come off as too crazy and hormonal and impatient (all of which I can be). But it really resonated with so many people, many of them men.

Are you part of a food blogging community?

I’m not. I guess I feel more and more like a parenting blogger. And maybe someday someone will say: “Phyllis Grant is a writer. She tells stories about cooking, kids, and parenting.” I like the sound of that.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside. You might also like:

So You Want to be a Successful Food Blogger? Here’s How.
Photographer Sara Remington on Shooting Food
Gabrielle Hamilton: Blood, Bones & Bombshells

Images: Courtesy of Great Schools

What parent who packs school lunch for his child couldn’t use a little help?

Indeed, for many a mom and dad, making school lunch is the bane of their back-to-school existence. The thought of getting the offspring out the door on time with a healthy and affordable lunch in tow — that doesn’t just come back home — is enough to send even the most together adult into a tizzy.

It need not be so. In two posts for the site Great Schools this week, I offer up some solutions to the lunch box blues.

The first piece provides seven strategies for school lunch success. J.M. Hirsch, food editor for The Associated Press, who blogs about making lunch for his son at Lunch Box Blues, walks parents through simple steps that can take the stress out of making school lunch.

In the second story, School Lunches From Around the World, find global inspiration and recipe links to help spice up what winds up in your child’s lunch.

Happy Packing.

You might also like:

Lunch Box Picks for People (Big and Small) and the Planet
Beating the Brown Bag Blues
New Guide Aims to Improve School Food
Seven Steps to Starting Your Own School Food Revolution
School Food: Japanese Style

Oyster farmer and educator Luc Chamberland in Tomales Bay. Photo: Gwendolyn Meyer

Luc Chamberland thinks oyster farming is often misunderstood. That’s why the aquaculturist wants to educate the public about the benefits of cultivating bivalves in Tomales Bay, a pristine estuary in West Marin, Calif.

A recent, high-profile controversy surrounding a commercial oyster farm in the area has focused on the potentially negative environmental impacts of cultivating oysters (namely disruption to native species).

But Chamberland sees oyster farming as a sustainable practice that does more good than harm.

That’s why, a few years ago, he conceived of Pickleweed Point Community Oyster Farm– a kind of CSA for the briny bivalve — so that the public can, quite literally, grow their own oysters, and in the process better understand the critical role oysters play in maintaining a healthy ecosystem.

Chamberland has about 25 participants — some as young as 6 and some as old as 80 — who pay $100 for the privilege of hands-on oyster farming lessons. Each spends an average of 8-12 hours a year maintaining their oyster plot. “If the water is healthy then our oysters are healthy,” he says. “The health department requires frequent water quality testing with oysters, so they’re a great water quality indicator.”

Members are shown how to load Pacific oyster “seeds” (young oysters about the size of a penny) into wire-like mesh bags, which are then numbered, tied to a line, and released into the intertidal region of the bay, where waves, wind, and filter feeding are routine.

This oyster farmer was inspired to launch Pickleweed after learning about a similar community farm in Washington. It is a labor of love Chamberland tends to on nights and weekends; he has a day job as a project manager for an oceanographic and wetland restoration company.

Chamberland talks oyster culture with a school group. Photo: Christopher Lim

Chamberland also hosts school field trips to the farm for local middle and high school students, organized through the community farm’s fiscal sponsor, The Watershed Project. Chamberland began working with The Watershed Project as a volunteer and was impressed by their native oyster restoration work in the Bay Area. He approached the project for support, as he thought they’d make a good fit for his idea.

The feeling was mutual. “Other farms may give a tour of their facility, but Luc actually wants students to be an oyster farmer for the day,” says Christopher Lim, the Living Shoreline program manager for The Watershed Project. “So he has students take on the tasks an oyster farmer would perform,” Lim says. “He also emphasizes the connection between good water quality and healthy, delicious oysters. And he explains the different methods of oyster farming in the area.”

Chamberland named his latest underwater endeavor for its proximity to vast beds of pickleweed, an intertidal vegetation whose color can change from a deep olive to a radiant purple, depending on the time of day and the season.

The 50-year-old French Canadian has been in the oyster business for some time; he was one of the first abalone farmers in the area, and he helped launch Hog Island Oyster Company’s Bar in the San Francisco Ferry Building.

As you might expect from an oyster farmer with a restaurant background, Chamberland is as concerned about the taste of his product as he is about water quality. “Just as the grapes that make wine reflect the soil they’re grown in, the same is true for oysters and water,” he says. “Different waters have different flavors. I call this aqua-terroir.”

Typically, Tomales Bay oysters have a mild cucumber flavor, firm texture, and a briny finish, says Chamberland, who notes that the bay — surrounded as it is by the Point Reyes National Seashore, a state park, and protected land — makes it an ideal location for oyster cultivation.

Oysters act as a natural, aquatic filtration system: They remove suspended materials in the water, allowing more light to reach submerged aquatic plants such as sea grasses. In turn, these sea grasses provide nursery habitat for a diverse population of fish and invertebrates, Lim explains. Oysters are what’s known as a keystone species; bringing up oyster populations can increase eelgrass and critters that live in eelgrass, such as crabs, worms, and amphipods, which in turn become food for salmon, herring, and birds.

"Pickleweed Point is a natural fit for an area known for its emphasis on community, organic food, and collaborative efforts." - Oyster Culture by Gwendolyn Meyer and Doreen Schmid. Photo: Gwendolyn Meyer

In her book Oyster Culture, Gwendolyn Meyer explores the history of bivalve farming in West Marin and its impact on the social and physical landscape of this timeless, pastoral setting. From her perspective, Pickleweed Point fits in well in an area dotted with mid-sized ranches, dairies, and farms that are popular with local eaters. “This is another opportunity for people who want to get more familiar with their food source,” she says.

Individual members can eat the oysters they grow, but Chamberland doesn’t expect the first substantial community Pickleweed Point harvest until the spring of next year. (He’s in the process of getting certified to handle and sell oysters to the public.) At that point, he estimates around 5-10,000 oysters will be ready, for those who enjoy an icy, sweet-salty hit on the half-shell.

He’s also working with The Watershed Project to bring youth from the nearby, under-resourced city of Richmond out to the wilds of West Marin to learn about oysters. “I find youth are fascinated by this kind of water-based farming,” says Chamberland. “I want to give students the opportunity to learn how to be stewards of the environment; the fact that you get to eat the fruits of your labor is a bonus.”

To learn more about Pickleweed Point Community Oyster Farm, including a fundraising event for the farm this Sunday in Sebastapol, visit their Facebook page.

This post originally appeared on Grist and was republished by Civil Eats.

You might also like:
Sustainable Seafood: New and Noteworthy Resources
Something Fishy on Your Phone
The Pleasures of a Country Dinner

One of CANFIT's programs is the MO Project which uses media and technology to encourage youth to advocate for nutrition and physical activity issues in their schools and community. Photo: CANFIT

Arnell Hinkle, the founding executive director of CANFIT (which stands for Communities, Adolescents, Nutrition, and Fitness) may be based in downtown Berkeley, but her work to improve the lives of low-income youth of color takes her across the country and around the globe.

She has been involved in development projects in India, Ecuador and Scotland, and spent last year on a Fullbright public policy fellowship in Wellington, New Zealand working with Maori and Pacific Island groups.

A kind of community food coach for young folk, the registered dietician who holds a masters in public health has worked as a restaurant chef, organic farmer, and as a project coordinator of the Hunger and Chronic Disease Prevention Program at the Contra Costa County Health Services Department.

CANFIT was founded in 1993 as the result of a class-action suit that charged the company General Foods with fraudulent, misleading, and deceptive advertising in marketing sugary cereals to children. Initially the small nonprofit addressed concerns of teens only in California, working on policy matters such as after-school physical activity and snack guidelines for the Department of Education. Berkeley Youth Alternatives was one of the first local groups assisted by the health promotion program.

Now, CANFIT offers training and technical assistance to help communities across the nation. Its goal: preventing obesity and other chronic lifestyle diseases by improving access to safe, affordable, culturally appropriate, and healthy food. It also focuses on physical activity after school for low-income adolescent youth in urban or rural settings, and ethnic-specific organizations.

Hinkle, who jokingly describes herself as ageless, lives in South Berkeley with her husband. She has received numerous awards for her work, including from the Rockefeller and Robert Wood Johnson foundations and the American Public Health Association. In 2009-2010 she was an IATP Food and Community Fellow.

How do you relate to youth?

I come from a similar background, so I can talk from my experience, growing up poor in St. Louis, eating overcooked vegetables and meat at every meal — a very Midwestern diet.  And then I talk about learning about health and how I came to be doing what I’m doing and why I do it.

I also talk about how your food is a part of who you are but it doesn’t have to define you. Sometimes people will say I won’t eat that because that’s “white people” food — say, something like the sprouts in this sandwich — and you have to kind of tear that apart: why is it that you have that perception?

We work on getting youth to understand that if they eat a more nutrient-rich diet they’ll feel more satisfied. At the same time we recognize real concerns, like that fast food places may be the safest place in a community for youth to hang out.

How did you get into this line of work?

As a teen, I was part of an after-school program, where I met other kids from around the city, and one of my friends was a vegetarian. I must have been about 14, and I remember thinking: okay, there are other ways of eating.

My mom worked so I often had to start the family meal. I did a lot of experimenting with cooking, baking, trying different foods. I liked to cook. I ended up getting a scholarship to Princeton and so I went away to school and as  a way to earn money I started catering events. And when I got out of school I realized I needed a skill. I had a great education but no skill.

So I applied to a culinary school in Boston but, in the meantime, a friend took me to Martha’s Vineyard and I fell in love with the place and ended up getting a summer job at this old hotel that had a European-trained chef and he took me on as an apprentice. I figured I’d learn more from this chef than I would at culinary school so I stayed through the winter and then for another three years after that working at different places.

I worked cheffing for about seven years, catering, restaurants, and at a retreat center. It was when I started growing things — and working with the soil — that I realized a lot of what I was serving people, cream, butter, and meat, wasn’t very good for them. That’s when my interest in nutrition began.

A CANFIT after-school wellness learning community program in Oakland in May this year. Photo: CANFIT

What’s the most rewarding aspect of your work and the biggest challenge?

That’s easy: the best part is going into communities, making relationships, and seeing the light bulb go on around change and how it can improve individual and community health. The toughest part: funding. Now, we get smaller amounts of money for shorter amounts of times with a lot more guidelines attached to it.

Does being in Berkeley help or hinder what you do?

Well personally, it’s great because I live a mile from my job, so I get to walk to work. And it’s a great place to live. But we haven’t worked on a project here in years. Sometimes coming from here is a detriment because so often when people hear Berkeley they think: you have it all made and you have no issues as far as food is concerned.

Any projects of note you’d like to mention?

We work with an American Indian reservation community in Arizona who are trying to return to their traditional foods, both growing them and having them served in their schools and senior centers, foods like corn, beans, desert plants. They even opened their own cafe.

Our Mo Project, a contest for youth who shoot their own 90 second PSAs on bringing about healthy change in their communities, is pretty inspiring.

Now that we have adolescents’ attention and have made progress getting them plugged into food and community health, we’re working on how we can get youth to become the next generation of leaders on these issues. We’re developing a guide on food-system careers for low-income youth of color.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and republished on Civil Eats.

You might also like:

Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow
Joy Moore: Community Food Reformer
Urban Youth on Growing and Selling Good Food
Ten Teens Rocking the Food Revolution Scene
Berkeley Bites: Tanya Henderson

The panoramic alpine views draw outdoor lovers to the Berkeley-run Echo Lake Camp

As we head into the final long weekend of the season, the proverbial last hurrah of summer, it’s time for reflection on summer vacation (mis)adventures before fall sets in and school gets going in earnest.

Which brings to mind bad camp food. Specifically, the truly awful eats served at the Berkeley-run Echo Lake Camp. It’s shocking, really, that a city known for fine food and charming cheap chow can’t seem to dish up anything vaguely edible not-so-far from home.

The dining hall at Echo Lake Camp

The really woeful food on offer was a source of bonding among the 50 or so campers on the weekend we attended Echo Lake Camp in early August. We’re talking mystery meat, industrial, processed glop, and pathetic produce. Meals as misery.

Here’s the back story: on a whim, this reporter opted for a getaway with a friend and our kids to the lovely Echo Lake, gateway to the vast Desolation Wilderness, in the southern end of the Tahoe Basin region. A cursory check drew rave reviews for the location and family-friendly fun. No one mentioned the food.

During the week, local kids head to this camp for adventures in the wild without parents. On the weekends, the camp is open to families and others drawn to the area’s outdoor activities, including access to stellar Sierra mountain range hiking along the Pacific Crest Trail and Tahoe Rim Trail.

Working up an appetite canoeing at Echo Lake Camp

It’s the low-key alternative to the better-known family camps, Berkeley’s Tuolumne Family Camp and San Francisco’s Camp Mather – both closed to campers at times this year due to outbreaks of gastroenteritis, known as the “Tuolumne trots.”

(More on this, alas, later. Oh, hell, let’s get it over with now: I got sick, acutely ill, in fact, on Day Two at Echo Lake, despite bringing enough hand sanitizer to serve the Armed Forces.)

Back to the matter at hand: Five of us — including a birthday boy — piled into a car on a Friday afternoon in August (hello traffic jam) for a weekend of swimming, canoeing, and hiking.

With work obligations and day camp schedules, an earlier departure wasn’t possible, so we knew we’d encounter some congestion on the road.

No worries. As savvy Berkeley parents we’d packed accordingly: Summer Kitchen marinara pizza, Kirala vegetarian sushi and Love at First Bite mini cupcakes, in honor of said birthday boy. Unfortunately, both moms hadn’t had time for lunch, the kids were ravenous from running around all day, and the freeway looked like a parking lot for long stretches of the trip. Needless to say, hunger and boredom got the better of us all and pretty much everything was scarfed up before we’d seen a pine tree.

We made it to camp before dark. Dumped our bags in the as-advertised but perfectly acceptable rustic accommodations, and headed to the dining hall in search of food. In fairness, we’d missed the dinner hour, so we were forced to make do with stale garlic bread and chunks of unknown animal matter in a scary-looking sauce. We divided up what we had left over from the car ride — seaweed salad and a couple of cupcakes — got the kids some milk, and called it a night.

On the way to breakfast the next morning this one-time investigative reporter noted the presence of bear boxes (we were under the erroneous impression none existed and there’s no mention of them on the camp website). Bear boxes meant that a bag of groceries and a small cooler of home-cooked food could have come on our travels and saved us some grief. Note to self: don’t make that mistake again.

Nothing this appealing was dished up when we attended Echo Lake Camp

Breakfast consisted of commercial cereal, sugar-laden yogurt, serviceable eggs, and French toast. The kids consumed the toast, but its odd texture and color put this eater off. We were invited to make our own sandwiches for lunch, and the ingredients included processed meats and cheese, condiments loaded with additives, and ordinary sliced bread — along with bruised apples and out-of-season oranges that were disappointingly dry when peeled by thirsty hikers along the trail.

Everyone tried to make the best of the slim pickings, but hunger really set in by dinner time. Maybe at this meal things would look up? Not likely. The vegetarian enchiladas were simply inedible. This camper was actually forced to discreetly deposit the only mouthful she tried into a napkin bound for the compost bin. The nine-year-old who picked the same dish just wrinkled her nose and didn’t touch a bite. I opted for the frozen vegetable medley, which seemed the safest bet at the time.

Oh dear. By now there was plenty of grumbling among the unhappy campers, not just our crew — and not just my stomach. One dad confessed his vegetarian family of four was having a hard time finding enough to eat. He said earnestly: “My kids are pretty committed to never coming back.” Somehow this wording struck me as funny at the time.

A seasoned hiker, part of a group of seniors taking wildflower walks that weekend, lamented the lousy food while mentioning that Camp Tuolumne, where she’d been earlier in the summer, served tastier meals. It’s been a few years, but if memory serves me correctly, I’d have to agree.

Regardless, since I caught a bug, I spent the last day subsisting on Cheerios.

Photos courtesy of (unofficial) Echo Lake Camp site: If only the food looked this good

Here’s what we all decided: it wouldn’t take a lot of tweaking to make the camp food more palatable: homemade granola with plain yogurt for breakfast, served with in-season, local fruit. Hummus and pesto instead of processed cold cuts and industrial relish for lunch. Rice and beans or pasta with made-from-scratch tomato sauce, in a nod to summer’s bounty, for dinner. Fresh corn. Salad greens instead of iceberg lettuce. Nothing fancy, minimal cooking, filling and nourishing nonetheless.

Presumably it’s challenging to find trained kitchen staff for such seasonal work and managing a program from afar, as the city does, may impact campers’ on-site dining experiences. And, of course, cost may be a factor. The camp is as cheap as chips: $50 a night for adults and $30-$42 for kids. But this writer would be willing to wager that Berkeley folks would pay a little extra to get some decent grub. After all, there’s nothing like the great outdoors to work up a hearty appetite.

Come Sunday afternoon we loaded the ravenous brood into the automobile and set out in search of food. Everyone ate an astounding amount at the River Grill in Tahoe City; you could sense the shift in mood as each person got stuck into some satisfying real food.

We devoured vine-ripened tomatoes, basil, and mozzarella with micro-greens and green chard raviolis stuffed with goat cheese and portabello mushrooms. And, as we ate, we adults debated whether or not we were just, you know, Berkeley food snobs raising kids who will have a tough time finding chow to rival what’s on offer in this town, flush as it is with farmers’ markets, global groceries, and organic, unprocessed foods.

What say you readers?

Hat tip: Margaret P, who endured two days of unappetizing eats with this writer and a trio of hungry children. 

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

Images here come from the unofficial Echo Lake Camp site by Bayard Geis.

Happy campers at Sprouts Cooking Club. Photo: Anna Dmitruk

The long foggy days of summer in Berkeley mean summer camp for many kids. In such a food-focused town it’s not surprising to learn that camps designed to encourage edible adventures are popular among the next generation of home cooks and potential professional chefs.

What may surprise you is the skills the young students master, like making pasta from scratch, using a culinary blowtorch, and preparing a four-course family meal. And the lessons the children learn: following a recipe is mostly a good thing, sometimes a dish missing many of its ingredients doesn’t taste so great, and working as a team means sitting down sooner to eat the culinary creations.

For young ones in town there are several cooking camps to choose from; we spotlight three here where children learn kitchen techniques such as knife skills, measuring and mixing, and reading a recipe, along with cleaning up and the pleasure of enjoying a meal together.

Spun Sugar: Sweetie Camp

In the kitchen with this week's campers at Spun Sugar. Photo: Sarah Henry

Location: 1611 University Avenue at California Street

Logistics: 9:00 a.m to 1:00 p.m., ages 7 to 12, max. group size 12. Cost: $300. CITS: typically 14 and older. Teens 13-17 can sign up for “Teen Daze,” where they can take regular adult baking and cake-decorating classes.

Instructors: Owner Linda Moreno and executive pastry chef Mitchell Hughes

Spun Sugar campers make pizza dough as instructor Mitchell Hughes looks on. Photo: Sarah Henry

Point of Difference: Despite the name, and the retail store’s rep as a cake decorator-baker-candy maker-sweet artist’s frosting fantasy, the campers make a multi-course meal which they eat together before class ends. Recipe book comes home. Family members invited to eat on one day.

On the menu: Split pea soup, roast chicken, mac & cheese, sauteed vegetable medley and apple tart.

What the instructor says: “I’ve taught kids who are now in their 20s that still use the recipes they learned here,” said Moreno. “Children in Berkeley are not afraid to try different foods and they’re open to exploring layering ingredients to create different flavors.”

Sam Siegel with the hamburger cupcakes he made. Photo: Traci Siegel

What the campers say: “As a camper, you learn lots of cool techniques and you get to make everything from scratch from start to finish,” said Sam Siegel, 12, who has attended the camp four times and worked as a C.I.T. (counselor-in-training), the past two weeks. “As a CIT you move around more and help different kids, making sure they’re not messing up the recipe or using knives unsafely.” Siegel, an accomplished home cook, is making intricately decorated cup cakes for his own birthday celebration today, based on skills he picked up at classes he’s taken at Spun Sugar. He also caters bar mitzvahs with his cake pops, cookies and brownies.

“It was fun, but we couldn’t taste what we made along the way, so I was hungry by the time we sat down to eat,” said former camper Mayumi Rubin-Saika, 12. “But we got really great goodie bags.”

“I like that we get to work in teams and make everything from appetizers to deserts,” said Eva Collins, 12, who wants to be a baker. “As a vegetarian, I’m glad that we mostly cook things I can eat,” added her twin, Jane.

Monkey Business Camp: Outdoor Cooking

Making tofu-veggie skewers for Outdoor Cooking at Monkey Business Camp.

Location: Tilden Park

Logistics: 8:30-3:30, ages 5-6.5, 6.5-7, and 8-10. Group size: 30-40 for 5-7s, 20 for 8-10s. CITs 11-15, JCs 14+. Cost: $325

Point of difference: Cooking and eating mostly organic, vegetarian offerings, surrounded by trees.

On the menu: Pad Thai, barbecued vegetable skewers, wontons, solar oven berry crisp.

Instructors: Camp counselors including Ari Stachel, Gabe Damast, Gabe Vergez, and Laura Barry. Cheese tasting by founder-director Heather Mitchell.

Monkey Business campers cut fruit for salsa.

What the instructor says: “We encourage campers to consider what we can create outdoors without electricity and just our own inventiveness,” said Monkey Business summer program director Amber Potter. “Berkeley kids are adventurous eaters who have experienced a wide range of international cuisine.”

What the campers say: “There’s nothing like eating in nature; food just tastes better,” said Gabe Henry Woody, 12, a CIT this week and, full disclosure, the offspring of this writer. “It was a bummer when the pedal-powered bike blender malfunctioned but the strawberry salsa still tasted good.”

“I knew we’d get to make ice cream, because I’ve been here before, which is one reason I came back,” said Miles DeRosa, 10. “The pad Thai was missing some of the liquid ingredients, so it was really just peanut noodles but it’s good to experiment when you cook.”

“I learned that when cheese ages it doesn’t mean it’s old and that the mold on blue cheese is good for you and doesn’t mean it’s gone bad,” said Laila Diaz, 8. “I still didn’t like it — it tasted too strong.”

Sprouts Cooking Club

In the kitchen with Sprouts Cooking Club campers. Photo: Anna Dmitruk

Location: Moveable feast: Drop off at either Whole Foods Berkeley or Downtown Berkeley BART for transit to San Francisco Ferry Plaza Farmers’ Market.

Logistics: 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., ages 7-13, CITs ages 14-17. Group size: 10-14, $450.

Point of difference: A non-profit that works with professional chefs from local restaurants, including in Berkeley: Revival, La Mediterranee, Phoenix Pastificio, Oakland: Pizzaiolo, Bakesale Betty and Camino, and San Francisco: Locanda, Flour + Water, and Tartine Bakery.

Instructors: Leah Brooks for Sprouts, in addition to professional guest chefs.

On the menu: Tortellini and gnocchi from scratch, hummus and baklava, freshly-pulled mozzarella, gluten-free beet cupcakes with cashew frosting, salted caramel mousse.

What the instructor says: “Kids are excited by food and their take on food and nutrition is without bias or prior expectation,” said Sprouts Cooking Club founder Karen Rogers. “They are motivated to touch, try and taste on their own. They ask honest questions and their reactions are raw and real.”

What the campers say: “I really liked that we got to make different stuff every day,” said recent camper Anna Goodman, 12. “This camp is for kids who like to experiment with food.” Fellow camper Mayumi Rubin-Saika agreed. The only downside in Rubin-Saika’s mind: “It sometimes took a lot of time for the counselors to set up for the cooking activities.”

“I wanted to learn how to flambe and they taught us how to use a culinary blowtorch, which was way cool,” said Julia Sweeney, 13, a CIT who has taken Sprouts classes and camps for three years and who went with the club on a culinary trip to France this spring. “I make the chicken masala I learned at Sprouts all the time. I like the camp because it’s real chefs working in their own real kitchens.”

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside.

You might also like:

Sprouts Cooking Club: Growing the Next Generation of Chefs
Sam Siegel, 10, Seasoned Chef
Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education

FLOTUS, also known as First Lady Michelle Obama, is scheduled to have breakfast at a political fundraiser tomorrow in Berkeley, where slow food legend Alice Waters and friends will whip up something seasonal, sustainable, local, organic, and, let’s hope, delicious — since supporters are forking out $1,000-$25,000 a piece to break bread (an Acme garlic loaf, the first from the Edible Schoolyard no less) with the Commander-in-Chief’s wife.

Waters is a fan of Obama’s efforts to get folks to eat well and move more. “Her dedication to children’s healthy eating has been an inspiration to all of us here at Chez Panisse,” said an email from Alice herself. “The menu will be a celebration of these ideals, featuring organic ingredients from local farmers and purveyors around the Bay Area.” Obama, of course, values Waters’ impressive work to improve school lunch around the country and champion school cooking and gardening programs through her Chez Panisse Foundation.

The woman who recently unveiled the fed’s new food icon My Plate and strives to combat childhood obesity through her Let’s Move campaign is in the Bay Area to raise money for hubbie’s 2012 re-election campaign and the Democratic National Committee. The event will be held at the toney Claremont Hotel, Club, and Spa on the Berkeley-Oakland border, a local landmark, known for its regal white facade, killer views, and expensive club membership.

The hotel has been spiffing itself up in anticipation of Obama’s visit, wrote Berkeleyside, which noted the recent appearance of two raised planting beds near one Claremont entrance. The post prompted one resident to write: “Will the Claremont also be hiring cute, chubby children to conspicuously exercise in areas Michelle Obama might pass through?”

The Claremont Hotel's modest attempt at growing greens./Photo: Sarah Henry

Lettuce Eat Kale swung by the hotel yesterday and can report that one bed boasts new tomato plants, another starters, including radish, carrot, and parsley. But who among us hasn’t tidied up a bit before important guests come over? And when I interviewed executive chef Josh Thomsen a few months ago he mentioned plans for a veggie patch in close proximity to the hotel’s fine-dining Meritage restaurant. Fair enough.

No doubt the hotel is a flurry of activity today, as an army of folks clean and polish in anticipation of the event. There’s something else they might want to pay attention to. The wording on the sign outside the hotel, which doesn’t, ah, seem in keeping with the First Lady’s or Water’s message of (mostly) eating home-cooked meals made from scratch:

And, while we’re on the subject of staying on message: What happened to plans for another fundraising breakfast event the same morning at the Golden State Warriors’ practice center in downtown Oakland? Both breakfast events, keep in mind, are being hosted by Oakland politicians Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Mayor Jean Quan.

The basketball facility is in the heart of a city where food deserts and hunger are a significant problem, and children struggle with alarming rates of early-onset diabetes and other dietary health problems. And Oakland doesn’t have an Alice Waters in the schools or Berkeley’s enviable cooking and garden program. School food advocates there face an uphill battle to bring quality fresh food to children.

Maybe the event got cancelled due to logistical or security reasons. Regardless, local residents, like James Berk, the young owner-member of the Mandela Foods Cooperative, might have welcomed knowing that Michelle was in town, fighting the good food fight on their behalf, let alone being offered a place at the table.

Over in Berkeley most folks will likely grumble about traffic delays due to her security detail. And club members at the Claremont? They’ll probably just want to make sure they get their early morning swim, tennis game, or gym workout in before the First Lady swoops in for, perhaps, free-range eggs with artisan goat cheese and freshly foraged greens.

You might also enjoy:

The First Lady of Food
Fed Up With School Lunch: The Fed’s Join the Fray
White House Farmers’ Market: An Idea Whose Time Has Come?
What’s Cooking in the First Family’s Kitchen?
Alice Waters’ 40 Year Campaign for Good Food
New School Food Study: Victory for Alice Waters
Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education
Surgeon General Swings by Edible Schoolyard
Josh Thomsen Gathers Local Talent for Berkeley Wine Festival
Oakland’s Farm Fresh Approach to School Food
James Berk of Mandela Foods Brings Produce to His People

As food justice advocate Joy Moore pointed out to a room full of mostly white folks in food and farming: When you hear “urban” and youth” in the same headline it’s never good news. It’s usually something negative associated with drugs, violence, and crime, right?

But at the annual EcoFarm Conference at Asilomar in Pacific Grove on Friday Moore, who teaches cooking and gardening to Berkeley youth, moderated a panel where young city dwellers received top billing to showcase some of the positive programs they’re helping to run in their communities.

Kim Allen (L) and Tenise Murphy (R) of Rooted in Community. Photo: Sarah Henry

So we meet Tenise Murphy, a farmers’ market coordinator for Farm Fresh Choice, a program of Berkeley’s Ecology Center, begun by Moore and other food activists, to get fresh, organic, sustainable, and affordable food to low-income residents.

We meet Jamila Chandler who shows us a slideshow of the work done by Urban ReLeaf, a non-profit that has planted and maintains 8,500 trees along median strips and public sidewalks in otherwise barren neighborhoods in Oakland and Richmond.

Chandler gives a shout out to fellow panelist (and her mom) Kemba Shakur, a former corrections officer, who started Urban ReLeaf because she wanted to find ways to both beautify and improve the health and environment in blighted urban enclaves surrounded by freeways and pollution — as well as employ black youth after witnessing so many of them in her former job.

Jason Harvey (L) and Paul Walker (R) of Oakland Food Connection. Photo: Anne Hamersky

And we meet Paul Walker, the self-appointed smoothie maker who helps run the Purple Lawn Cafe in East Oakland. Heads up: it’s not purple or a cafe but it is a mobile food booth offering hot, healthy, affordable eats in an an area not known for such offerings.

Walker works with ex-Air Force man Jason Harvey‘s non-profit organization Oakland Food Connection, which builds school and community gardens in East Oakland and runs a farmers’ market every Saturday on MacArthur Boulevard in the Laurel District.

Harvey provides a recent historical perspective on African Americans’ roots in both farming and food production. Harvey was raised among elders who knew how to grow food and canned and preserved. And he notes that the Black Panther Party of the mid-1960s and early ’70s introduced a free breakfast program for children, which helped spawn the federal government’s school breakfast program that continues to this day.

Fast forward a couple of decades and many urban, low-income communities of color are riddled with corner stores selling mostly junk food or liquor — and their residents are struggling with obesity, diabetes, and heart disease, while also dealing with hunger and malnutrition.

Oakland Food Connection, working in collaboration with like-minded groups such as People’s Grocery, Mandela Marketplace, and City Slicker Farms, is part of a growing movement to bring good grub to so-called food deserts in East and West Oakland.

Murphy is also a part of an umbrella organization known as Rooted in Community, a national grassroots network and project of the Earth Island Institute, that seeks to encourage youth to take up leadership positions in food and farming in their neighborhoods.

Kim Allen, the garden program manager for Berkeley Youth Alternatives, (previously profiled here) was on hand to spread the word about the worthy work of Rooted in Community.

There’s nothing like the enthusiasm, optimism, and idealism of the young to make a room full of adult conference attendees sit up and pay attention.

This is the second conference I’ve attended in the past few months where urban youth wowed the crowd.

In October last year the Community Food Security Coalition Food, Culture, Justice Conference held in New Orleans highlighted the food and farming work of youth in the town devastated by Hurricane Katrina. We took a tour of school gardens in various stages of development, including a local Edible Schoolyard affiliate where gumbo is on the menu and a line on the kitchen classroom wall marks how high the water rose during the storm.

At a panel discussion we met poised and articulate students from The Rethinkers, who pushed to improve lunch in cafeterias at several schools. And we also heard about a novel education experiment from youth living in the impoverished Lower Ninth Ward who are part of an inspired garden program run out of a former corner store known as Our School at Blair Grocery.

There, Nat Turner and his small team of staff work with youth in an alternative school setting to grow micro-greens that are snapped up by the town’s leading chefs, including John Besh, who owns culinary hot spots Luke, August, Domenica, and La Provence.

It’s not just Oakland, Berkeley, and New Orleans: Across the country — as the national membership of Rooted in Community reveals — innovative food and agriculture projects created for and run by the next generation of farmers are sprouting up all over.

And collectively they have a simple message they want to convey about what we eat:  Everybody has a right to good food.

[This post originally appeared on KQED's Bay Area Bites.]

You might also like:

Garden Teacher Kim Allen Offers Youth Space to Grow
Ten Teens Rocking the Food Revolution Scene
School Produce Stand Feeds Hungry in Oakland

For four years Kim Allen has served as garden program manager for Berkeley Youth Alternatives (BYA), which provides a minimum-wage, internship program for socio-economically challenged adolescents ages 14 to 18. Some come to the garden through word-of-mouth from family or friends, others as part of mandated community service.

During the school year Allen’s youth garden crew, typically a group of six to eight, work and learn alongside her in two community garden plots in West Berkeley. There’s the half-acre Bancroft Community Garden, which the BYA shares with two dozen community gardeners on Bancroft Way, and the smaller Community Orchard garden on land the nonprofit owns on Bonar Street. The fruit tree garden includes many heirloom varieties, donated by Trees of Antiquity – among them citrus, apples, and pluots. The Bancroft Garden boasts typical farmers’ market fare.

In the summer, BYA offers an eight-week program for a dozen youth, who put in about 20 hours a week. The organization runs a small Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) during peak harvest season. It sells flowers and whatever is in abundance in the garden to Bill Briscoe, who owns The Bread Workshop. Briscoe puts surplus fava beans, sunchokes, garlic, and other vegetables to good use in his in-house soups. BYA youth harvest about two to four boxes of produce a week for The Ecology Center’s Farm Fresh Choice program, which serves low-income residents. Every other week the garden provides perishables for a local food bank pick-up point.

Allen, 33, lives in a semi-cooperative house with a garden (that her roommates tend) in walking distance of her job. She hails from a horticulture and outdoor education background and will represent the national grassroots network Rooted in Community at next week’s EcoFarm Conference, where she’ll speak about working with youth in urban farming settings. We talked in the garden earlier this week.

What do you enjoy about your job?

I love working outside and witnessing things grow — both the gardens and the youth. Everything in life is always changing and evolving. There are always new challenges and things to learn. A garden is a good metaphor for life.

What do you like about working with youth in a garden setting?

I like the confidence it gives them; they leave knowing how to create their own garden. They also learn about the life cycle, the value of growing food and the interconnectedness of plants and garden species. Some of our youth come in scared of insects but they leave with an understanding and respect for their role in nature.

Maybe more than anything else the garden is a safe, peaceful place where these adolescents can come and forget about other things — whether it’s personal struggles, academic issues, family problems, or concerns about violence in their communities — and just work together doing physical labor in a social setting.

Are there any misperceptions people have about what you do?

When I tell people that I run a garden program for youth in Berkeley they always assume it’s the Edible Schoolyard, because they’ve heard about that garden. Many people don’t realize that there are school gardens in every public school in Berkeley. And of course that particular garden is beautiful. It’s nice to see what’s possible if you have resources like they do.

We’d like to be able to hire more youth and give step raises or incentives to our crew as they move into leadership roles. In terms of equipment: our wheelbarrow is about to fall apart and we can always use tools. We don’t have a truck so it’s a big help if someone with a truck can pick up soil. We can always find jobs for people who can repair things. It’s good to have more money to do the things we want to do, but finding people willing to do physical labor is key.

Growing greens for the community./Photo: Courtesy BYA.

Are there any wrong assumptions that people make about food in Berkeley?

A lot of people don’t realize that hunger is a real issue in this city. Because Berkeley has a reputation as a food town people forget that there are a lot of poor people here who don’t have access to good food.

Who are your local food heroes?

The people who have the passion and dedication to nourish our under-served communities. I’m thinking of Farm Fresh Choice, run by Gerardo Marin (who just left) and Hunia Bradley. School food reformer and food justice advocate Joy Moore has tremendous positive energy and teaches youth about growing and cooking healthy food. Daniel Miller at Spiral Gardens is another food security activist in our area doing good work. And Willow Rosenthal, who lives in Berkeley now and started City Slicker Farms in Oakland, which builds produce gardens in people’s backyards and sells locally grown produce through its food security program. She’ a role model and a colleague and I admire that she knew when it was time to move on, she worked her arse off doing hard, physical labor at that non-profit and recognized she needed to find balance in her life.

What plans do you have for the garden?

If we could find both the funding and someone to manage it, I would love to put a chicken coop in the garden.

I’d like to move the front fence and open up the entrance so that more people in the neighborhood can come and visit. I’d like to make it a place where people can sit and enjoy the peace we have here.

I’d also like to create a memorial garden space. A lot of youth in our program have dealt with family or friends dying. Violence is a constant in some communities. I’d like the memorial space to evolve, with new and different plants, just as life evolves, but the space would be a permanent refuge and a safe haven in nature.

View a student video of the Berkeley Youth Alternatives garden program.

This post originally appeared on Berkeleyside and was republished on Civil Eats and The Bay Citizen.

You might also like:

Berkeley Bites: The Bread Workshop’s Bill Briscoe
Spiral Garden Helps Needy Feed Themselves
Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education
Dig It: Growing Greens, Creating Community and Feeding Families
Farm Together Now

Take that Caitlin Flanagan. Finally, some academic research to support what people like Edible Schoolyard founder Alice Waters, who have watched kids pick spinach, cook kale, and chew on chard, have known all along: Children who grow their own food (and prepare it and eat it too) make healthier food choices.

Read all about the recently-released data on the success of the School Lunch Initiative in the Berkeley Unified School District in my story for The Atlantic.

You might also like:

Cultivating Controversy: In Defense of an Edible Education

Five Reasons for Optimism on the School Food Front

Seven Reasons Why the Time is Ripe for School Lunch Reform

10 Questions for Mrs. Q of Fed Up with Lunch

Inside Berkeley’s School Kitchen

Inside Berkeley’s School Kitchen: Part Two

Fed Up with School Lunch: The Feds Join the Fray

Jamie Olivier: School Food Revolution or Reality TV Rubbish?

[Photos: Edible Schoolyard]