A couple of months ago we were approached to team up on a fundraiser for a high school garden. A high school what? Oh, I needed to hear more, so much more. It turns out that this school in Pasadena, John Muir High, not only educated David Lee Roth (class of ’72) and Rodney King (Class of ’87) but it currently has an operating edible garden that supports it’s lunch program and a CSA. Get this, kids work the land here, creating a local food system and receive credit for PE. What?! I LOVE it, all of it! We scheduled a site visit and were blown away by how expansive the garden was so we knew we needed to go big and bring our Food Truck and invite as many people as possible to help raise money for this important program.
We brought in our most esteemed captain, Duane, to direct students who were assigned the task of serving guests during dinner service. They were all so excited and took a lot of pride in what they were doing.
One of the kids, Malik, had a lot of fun helping Matt and Migs cook the dinner’s 5 courses off our truck. All these students loved vegetables, a testament of what the experience of working in an urban garden has given them.
 |
| Photos: Tara Maxey |
Wouldn’t it be wonderful if more schools adopted a program like this? I think so too, but with fundamental aspects of our public school system being aggressively slashed, money for an urban garden is not going to emerge from our government. Programs like this depend on volunteers and the charitable donations of the community. The future of our food system relies on our youth valuing where it inherently comes from and understanding why organic farming is so critical to the health of our land. When you are asked to support a program like this, please do, not just for the kid who is asking but for our entire society as a whole.
