Kitchen ABCs at a Madison Middle School

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On the shoulders of dedicated people, C.H.O.W. developed in the void left by a failed, traditional approach to farm-to-school. Efforts to get local produce incorporated into school lunches confronted common challenges. Money, of course, is an issue. School district budgets for fresh fruits and vegetables are miniscule—around one dollar per student per year, according to Brent Kramer, Wisconsin Homegrown Lunch’s education coordinator. And the systematic hurdles are just as significant. Madison school lunches are processed and packaged into individual portions in a large central kitchen. “They don’t do much cooking at all at the central kitchen,” Kramer said. Meals are sent from there “to the schools, where they’re just warmed up. So trying to introduce raw product or fresh fruits and vegetables into this system is a huge challenge.”

Eventually, Kramer said, it was obvious it wasn’t working. But there was substantial interest in developing educational programs around nutrition and local foods, and that’s where much of the group’s focus now lies. At the elementary level, they coordinate farm field trips, bring farmers into the classroom, and assist with fresh snack programs. But in order to get kids to make the healthy food choices you teach them about, “you need to provide the skills as well,” Kramer said.

That’s where C.H.O.W. comes in. Miller cultivates young foodies by teaching practical cooking skills and working to develop broader food literacy among students. He tries to break down resistance to new foods by incorporating ingredients often unfamiliar to kids—turnips, radishes, a “funky looking cauliflower” called romanesco, kohlrabi—into familiar dishes like fried rice, crepes, or pasta, always taking time to point out the produce’s Wisconsin origins. And when kids taste food, said Miller’s wife Lili, there are ground rules for how they talk about it. The Millers want students to learn “to form an opinion,” Lili said, “and not just say, ‘that’s yuck’ or ‘that’s yum,’ but really being able to describe what you like about something. Do you like the texture or do you not like the texture?”

With the surging popularity of the Food Network, corporate ascension of Whole Foods, and the naming of locavore as New Oxford American Dictionary’s 2007 word of the year, you might think the Millers’ efforts to make literate eaters mainstream would be easy. But in an on-the-go culture bombarded with cheap, quick and easy snack and meal options, it’s still an uphill battle.

Writing for Gastronomica, Maggie Jackson reports that “nearly half of Americans say they eat most meals away from home or on the go,” and only “47 percent of in-home meals include a ‘fresh’ item, such as a vegetable, compared with 56 percent two decades ago.”

Americans cook less than they used to, and that trend is blamed for contributing to the rise in obesity. “ People are eating more, and more often,” Barry Popkin, author of The World is Fat, recently told the New York Times. “And the food that they are consuming almost always replace meals cooked in a kitchen and eaten at a table.” That’s a problem, he said, because “almost any kind of cooking you can produce in a kitchen is healthier than fast food.”

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