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The Edible Schoolyard

Also known as: Edible Schoolyard Berkeley, ESY, Edible Schoolyard Project

A 1-acre garden and kitchen-classroom program at Martin Luther King Jr. Middle School in Berkeley, California — established 1995 by chef and Slow Food USA founder Alice Waters. Students participate in planting, harvesting, and preparing fresh food as integrated curriculum across mathematics, science, history, and culture. The flagship Berkeley site supports the Edible Schoolyard Project — a national nonprofit network that as of 2019 included 5,800+ kitchen/garden programs across the country.

What they do

A working garden-and-kitchen-classroom on the grounds of MLK Jr. Middle School. Sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-grade students rotate through [[the-garden|the garden]] and kitchen as part of their regular curriculum — planting, harvesting, cooking, and [[commensality|eating together]] — with garden and kitchen lessons designed to reinforce core academic instruction. Beyond the Berkeley site, the Edible Schoolyard Project supports a national network of 5,800+ affiliated kitchen/garden programs (as of 2019).

Why it’s listed

Three structural reasons:

  1. The model that re-shaped U.S. school food education. Before 1995 there was no widely-replicated model for integrating a working garden and kitchen into a U.S. middle school curriculum. The Edible Schoolyard built one, sustained it for 30 years, and trained the field around it.

  2. Alice Waters’s institutional commitment. Waters opened Chez Panisse in [[berkeley]] in 1971 and founded [[slow-food|Slow Food]] USA’s national chapter; the Edible Schoolyard is her durable educational expression. The Berkeley locality cluster — Chez Panisse + Berkeley Bowl + Edible Schoolyard + the broader Slow Food network — is one of the densest food-knowledge-care nodes in the country.

  3. The 5,800+ replications nationwide make [[berkeley|Berkeley]] the seed-site. A directory listing here is recognizing the field-anchor function the original site continues to play.

Bioregional fit

Anchors the food-education tier in the [[san-francisco-bay-area]] bioregion’s directory. Pairs with [[berkeley-bowl]] (the East Bay’s principal independent grocery, also in [[berkeley]]) and with [[urban-tilth]] (Richmond) for the bioregion’s three-anchor food-system cluster.

See also

Auto-generated from this entry’s typed relations: frontmatter, grouped by relation type so the editorial signal isn’t flattened.

  • Member of: [[organization]]
  • Contained by: [[berkeley]] · [[san-francisco-bay-area]]

Sources

A listing in the 0mn1.one [[directory]]. Filed under [[san-francisco-bay-area]] in [[directory|the directory]].

What links here, and how

Inbound connections from across the wiki, grouped by lens and by relationship. These appear automatically — every entity page declares what it links to, and that data populates here on the targets.

Practical

shares approach with

1 inbound link · 3 outbound