Veggie Tasting at Oak View Elementary and More!!!

As kindergarten classes at Oak View Elementary began filing into the cafeteria at 10:30am last Monday morning, they were greeted by a peculiar sight clear across the room: three big people and several little people in hair nets, aprons, and gloves, in a flurry of activity around a table filled with fresh carrots, avocados, lemons, and… some strange leafy-green vegetable. An illustrated poster of “KALE” hung behind the table, and right before those kindergarteners’ eyes, Dixie cups filled with that same bright green veggie began to appear on a rolling cart and make its way around their lunchroom. What was going on? Why, thank you for asking! A school-wide tasting of raw kale salad, that’s what! Oak View Elementary was the January site of FoodCorps’ most recent “Harvest of the Month” tasting event in Guilford County.

I should introduce myself: I’m Eliza Hudson, the other FoodCorps service member serving in 9 of the title-I High Point elementary schools this year alongside Leah Klaproth. This year, Leah and I have been coordinating monthly local food tasting events just like this one at Oak View, which we’ve deemed “Harvest of the Month” because they always highlight an in-season, locally grown fruit or vegetable. Beginning in October with apple cider and cinnamon applesauce donated by Greensboro’s Whole Foods at Parkview Elementary, the tastings we’ve done have evolved a bit each month. On January 28^th, in our most recent event at Oak View, we were fortunate enough to have nearly 35 pounds of fresh Vates Blue-Curled kale donated by Mike Faucette of Faucette Farms in Browns Summit, to make enough raw kale salad for the entire Oak View Elementary student body: just under 500 students.

In December, we also featured a Faucette Farm crop for our “Harvest of the Month” at Northwood Elementary: cabbage, in apple-cabbage coleslaw we made for Northwood Elementary, and as Leah mentioned in a previous post, November’s “Harvest of the Month” was raw sweet potato sticks with tzatziki sauce at Oak Hill Elementary, with the sweet potatoes we used donated by Troxler Farms.

Oak View’s event last week was particularly inspiring for me. I’m at the school three days a week, not only teaching in 3^rd grade, but also with their ACES program on Friday afternoons. The Oak View 3^rdgrade teachers I’ve been working with this year, Lori Lee, Shari Sawyer, Peggy Stuart, and Melissa Wirth, are using the Oak View school garden and my skill set as a FoodCorps service member to conduct their required grade-level service-learning project this year.

 The morning of the “Harvest of the Month” event, they sent me a schedule with names of students from each of their classes (a total of 12) who would be helping Leah and I. Doing everything from making the raw kale salad and passing out samples, to making sure their peers voted for how they liked it on the sticker board by the lunchroom exit, these twelve 3^rdgraders were engaged in the most inspiring, hands-on service-learning experience I’ve witnessed yet in this position. They were an integral part of delivering a delicious raw kale salad to over 450 students ages 4-12. How inspiring is that?