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Educating the Classes A school cafeteria doesn’t sound like the kind of place where Slow Food reigns. Most young people eat fast food, right? They crave fats and carbs and will scarf through any pizza, no matter how processed. Vegetables? About as popular as a pair of out-of-style jeans. So you know something new is going on when a cafeteria full of high school students gives you a standing ovation for introducing them to Slow Food, including fresh vegetables. That’s what happened to Gary Giberson, executive director of dining at the Lawrenceville School in Lawrenceville, New Jersey. The private school, whose roots go back two hundred years, is known for innovative social programs such as its green campus initiative. Slow Food might seem to be a natural fit here. But it’s one thing to learn about the concept of supporting a food economy that is local, sustainable, and environmentally sound. It’s another to put that food on a teenager’s plate. That’s what Gary did, and the students’ standing ovation was how they thanked him. Gary began working at the school in 1998, when the food service company that provided Lawrenceville’s meals hired him as executive chef. But as he discovered , food service companies deal mostly with processed food. “Even though the Lawrenceville School was open to innovation, I felt like I was in a straitjacket,” Gary says. So he decided to start his own food service business, one with a very different goal: to bring only fresh, seasonal fare to hospital cafeterias, company lunchrooms, and dining halls filled with skeptical teenagers. Although Gary didn’t launch his own business until 2007, he’d already starting introducing a sustainable fare menu to those Lawrenceville teens. And far from pelting him with tomatoes, the kids were eating them up. It turned out they loved the new menu. So much for the myth of veggies as a natural kid repellent. “No, kids do like vegetables,” Gary says. “It’s just that no one has given them the opportunity to have them in the correct way!” 11  112  Education, Coast to Coast Gary says he’s a chef by trade and a business owner by necessity. Like the rest of us, once he got the Slow Food concept, he couldn’t go back. He describes his company, Sustainable Fare LLC, as an environmentally responsible food service; and in a few short years he has built a roster of clients across the country, including both public and private schools. Among his many other pursuits, Gary teaches independentstudy courses on cooking and using local, fresh, sustainable food products. His urge to educate is a vital contribution to Slow Food because our ability to inspire the next generation is what will set the future course of the movement. Today, more and more food businesses, including farms and restaurants, are making Slow Food education a key part of their public outreach. For example, school garden projects are springing up all over the place. In Brooklyn, New York, an old baseball park has become a working garden where kids are paid to farm. Innovations such as farm camps take kids into rural areas to learn directly from the pros. In the mid-1990s, Alice Waters established the Edible Schoolyard (ESY), a program of the Chez Panisse Foundation. It’s a one-acre organic garden and kitchen classroom for an urban public school near her restaurant. These middle school students may be growing up in an atmosphere of cement-bounded parks and fast-food joints, but once inside the Edible Schoolyard, they enter another world. There, they become actual participants in the growing, harvesting, and preparing of fresh, seasonal produce. Imagine how inspirational it would be for urban kids to watch their own efforts make real food happen. Now another famous restaurant is putting its educational stamp on the surroundings . Co-owned by Dan Barber and his brother David Barber, Blue Hill is one of the great eating places in New York City. The Barbers are pioneers in the farm-to-table approach to restaurant cooking; and Dan has earned many awards and recognitions, including the honor, in 2009, of being named the country’s best chef by the James Beard Foundation. His new educational venture is Blue Hill at Stone Barns, which has opened within the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York, just thirty miles north of New York City. Here the Barbers have...

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